The Big 3-0.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about my life and am attempting some reshaping here and there where I don't like what I've found. You would think that this recent change would have been inspired by the fact that this is my last year in my 20s, but I really didn't think about that until recently. I rarely think about how old I am and I generally never feel like I'm a "real" adult anyway, so how can I possibly be turning 30? Right? No? Fine, and the wrinkles that are setting up camp on my forehead agree with you. But still, I was rather flabbergasted the other day when a friend sent me a link to this blog post that has a pretty great list of  "19 Things To Stop Doing In Your 20s" and I realized that I am almost 30. For real. Whaaaaa? My friend also mentioned making a list of things she wants to do before she turns 30 and I've decided to do the same. I know that things will be limited by the fact that I have a demanding schedule with working full time and also because going to school full time has made me rather poor as a result of the tuition and book costs. But why should a little challenge like money ever gotten in the way of finding adventure? Never. Because being creative about things can be half the fun.

Here is my list:

Read through entire Bible

Read all of the books I own

Sew a dress

Get a massage

Hike Pike's Peak

Go to karaoke and actually sing

Make eggs benedict (and make it well)

Make sushi

Have a dinner party on the rooftop

Take at least one camping trip this summer

Go to a concert

Learn how to fishtail braid

Send 1 snail-mail card, letter, or package every month (or more often)

Wear every single piece of clothing (including accessories and shoes) at least once or get rid of it by birthday.

Find an interesting 'Meet-up' group and go to at least 3 events

Use flower press

Spend a weekend at Joyce & Linda's

Go to dinner and a movie by myself

Come up with and follow through on 5 Random Acts of Kindness

Donate blood

Write on blog at least once a week

Paint bedroom

Spend a day fishing in the mountains (even if no one else can go)

Make creme brulee

Go see the sand dunes

Go to the Royal Gorge

Go somewhere (Vegas?) for a girl's weekend

Try 10 new coffee shops

Find and explore all small/independent bookstores within 20 miles of home

Write a short story

I reserve the right to change or tweak things as I get more concrete ideas on certain aspects of them, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the list.

Time for a cookie

I was SO responsible today. Here is a list of accomplishments:
-Read for linguistics class and did homework questions
-Wrote linguistics paper prospectus
-Finished 2 lit papers
-Sorted out which hoops need to be jumped through for financial aid at school
-Jumped through one of the required hoops and got as far as I can in another until I get some paperwork in the mail.
-Made a Costco trip (I love Costco but I HATE going all at the same time...illogical but true.)
-Cooked a "real" dinner (no cottage cheese and random snacks here tonight!)
-Took a bath to try to calm the crazy backache/neck-ache/headache I got after being a stubborn moron and insisting on carrying everything from the Costco adventure in one trip. Lesson: just because you can fit all of it in one of those blue reusable bags from Ikea doesn't mean you should make it fit. My shoulder is still twinging and aching.
-FILED MY TAXES! And I did it without crying. There was excessive grumbling and a curse word or two, but that is still much better than last year's experience. Which was mainly tears punctuated with despair and cursing. So I'm calling this a complete win.

That is why I deserve a cookie. But since I had a banana muffin just a few minutes ago we'll call it even and I can pass out in peace now. G'night world, it was nice kicking your ass today responsibilities!

School

Being a highly introverted, mildly insecure, and also a bit of an oddball makes for an interesting experience when going back to work on your undergrad at almost 30. (Translation: it can be rough.) Overall it has been a fantastic thing on a dozen different levels. But that is a post for another time. Today we are going to talk about the oh-so-incredibly-valuable life skill of winging something. Not just the scraping by sort of winging it that I did occasionally (ALL THE TIME) the first time in was in school (at a more normal age for pursuing an undergrad degree). Examples:

 No, this particular method of flying by the seat of your pants that I use now is a much more sophisticated version. Now it involves a certain degree of panache mixed with generally attempting to genuinely stay on top of things while knowing that it is inevitable that something will fall through the cracks and be forgotten until it is due. Example: the presentation my group was supposed to give in my lit class today. As a rule I despise having to work in groups and find it more prohibitive than helpful in learning since it is a generally accepted truth that you will get screwed over in every possible way when doing group work. This class has been the exception to that experience, there aren't any slackers or jerks in the group. Yet we still have CONSTANT issues...why? Because none of us are decisive. It can take the 4 of us a truly ridiculous amount of time to split tasks up because no one ever seems to want to be the Big Boss and tell everyone else to do. This leads to me getting annoyed about inefficiency and doing it anyway. No big, seems to work well for us. Until today. Today when our class started we had 20 minutes to compile all of the stuff we were supposed to work on individually, 10 minutes in C and I realized that the other two girls weren't coming to class. Neither one of them is prone to skipping so we assumed that they had their reasons and moved on. Turns out that L dropped the class this morning and I haven't heard from D, but I assume something important came up. The really unfortunate bit was that L was in charge of the PowerPoint and D was in charge of most of the writing...so nothing to hand in to the teacher and not a whole lot to go on visually for the presentation. C and I discussed it calmly, told the teacher what was going on, and decided to present today anyway. Thanks to the additional years experience in BS-ing we both came off as informed and confident and I can honestly say that we did not have the worst presentation in class even though all of the other groups had all of their members and resources present. One of the highlights of being 10 years older than your peers: not freaking out when things look grim and managing to pull things off anyway.