Whoops **

Somehow, this entry was written but never posted so that when I logged on today, it was sitting here waiting. So this is a few days old. I guess more then a few, maybe 5ish? Anyway, writing another one right now as well. 

I’m so totally pooped. Seriously. I started taking my vitamins yesterday again and I remember now that it seemed to correlate with times I was totallllly exhausted. Is that even possible? I take a womens one-a-day, a b12, a vitamin c, and flax oil or fish oil. I have to take the b and c because they help the body absorb iron and my dr said I totally need that with my anemia, so I’ve been trying. It just feels so weird. My dad bought some super cheap-y women’s vitamins last time he got them and I’m starting to wonder if maybe there’s something creepy about them I should be worried about. What a boring intro 🙂

I’m at work at the twins house. On Tues/Thurs I watch twin girls who just turned 9 months. I’ve been here since they were about 2.5 months old, so the changes have been amaaaazing. The smaller one learned to crawl last week, and is now racing around everywhere. The bigger one tries but can only scoot backwards and then gets insanely discouraged. It’s so exciting. I know how moms feel that huge intrinsic reward when their babies learn something. These girls just make my day every time, and when I teach them something new (like the crawling) I just want to burst!

I have a huge chemistry exam on St. Pattys day. I consider that cruel and unusual punishment seeing as how I don’t have class until 5:30 in the freaking evening. Seriously. I just want to have fun….Denver has an outrageoussss party for those things. Im determined to ace it. If I don’t, I’ll most likely have to withdraw from the class with no refund in order to not fail. I spent 3 hours in the library last night learning the first 3rd of the chapter, and there’s two chapters so I’ve got insane amounts of work to do. I’m going to spend the majority of my day here studying that and hopefully finish the chapter, then hopefully tomorrow re–do the chapter before it, and then come Saturday and Sunday I can do tutoring with my mom maybe.  My last fetal pig dissection before our big exam is on Friday. I gotta work my ass off to make sure I don’t miss any little thing. I’m really determined to get A’s in both lab and Bio II so that if I somehow can manage a C in chem, I’ll still have a good GPA. I think this is the first semester I’m really lining things up and putting a LOT more effort then usual into school, but it’s still not really enough…

To explain…I’m working more then full-time right now. Yet again, because it’s nearly unavoidable. On M/W, I work in the mornings at JJ’s house (he’ll also be referred to as my sidekick, shortstack, and jj-the-jet-plane). He’s 2 as of a few weeks ago, and he has a little sister who’s nearly 8 weeks now. Sometimes I watch one or the other or both, just depends. Then I leave there and go to Zach and Ethan’s house (Usually referred to as Z and E, or emachine) for another 4 or so hours. So….8-12, then 12:20-4:20 ish… then I race over to class in downtown traffic and have class until 7. Tuesdays and Thursday at the twins’ I work 7am-4:30, then do the same race to school, and fridays I have lab from 8-11 and then work for a rotating schedule of families that afternoon/evening. Then the usual weekend jobs for a larger variety of families. So my average is a bare minimum of 56 hours a week…usually more. Most days once I get out of class at 7 I’ll pick up another 2 or 3 hours after work before I head home. It really makes studying intensely (because you know you can’t really study with a baby in your lab) pretty difficult.

That being said…It’s pretty nice as far as the money situation. My bills are about 700 a month, and everything after that goes straight into savings. My tuition’s due next week and I’ll be able to pay it in cash. Last semester I did the same thing. In fact, it’s finally official… I paid cash for every class taken in 2009, with no new debt last year! Also, I worked 80 hours a week every week of winter break to save my goal of 2k before semester started in order to be able to work less during school. I succeeded and was so proud for about a week before I was contacted by a collection’s agency because apparently when I paid for my final semester at the CC, I owed them for one before so they applied it to the new one and didn’t tell me about the old one and it got turned over to the state. I was a wreck because I felt like I was finally ahead. But because of all that hard work I was able to pay it straight off, and just had to work a lot harder this semester then anticipated. But that means between December of last year and March of this year I save over 5k, since I’ll be able to pay off my upcoming note as well! It’s BONKERS. Most days I just don’t think the fight is worth it to live with my dad and deal with my evil stepmother…but when I write it out and look at it I think I deserve to be really freaking proud that I do put up with it. Jesus. 

There’s lots more to say but the twinys might be waking up. My best bud is shipping out in September for Japan which is really not as scary as I was anticipating. We were both expecting Afghan. Since before Thanksgiving my dad and I have been sending about 5 large care packages a month overseas. Places like Qatar, Kosovo, Bahrain, Columbia, and your usual Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s given me an insanely positive outlook on things and every time we hear back from a group of soldiers about how excited they were about snack cakes it just makes my week. I know when we were ultra-religious we learned that tithing was (in our Lutheran church) giving 10% of your earnings to God or the church in order for it to continue to help the ministry. I’ve taken this up as my own form of tithing is how I explain it to people. Shipping the boxes is about $75 a month, and that’s just for empty boxes….not counting everything that you have to buy to fill them. So this new hobby of mine is running me between $100-200 a month. I know It seems like a lot when I look at it written out now, especially since I don’t even eat meals out anymore in order to be super frugal, but I feel like it’s the best possible thing I could be doing with my money. Through a random string of events I heard last week that my baby cousin has joined the Air Force and will be shipping out soon too. Knowing that there’s girls like me out there that can help me in supporting him and his boys just really makes me feel better about the world. A few months ago we sent an entire box of beanie babies and kid’s socks to Iraq because the particular group of troops was working in a mission that was all about rebuilding and on a daily basis they encountered these kids who are so poor and curious. Everyone here knows how I feel about kids. I got an email from the guy that the whole box was gone the first day and the kids were so happy. I’m SO glad we’re able to do that. And maybe now even one little Iraqi kid won’t hate us Americans. That makes it all worth it in my opinion. I was really sad because I know in my dad’s basement we have an entire trash bag of beany babies but we couldn’t find them, so we just pulled out the few we found in random places. If everyone I knew shipped me 3 or 4 they had leftover, we could build a few

more boxes and it would be awesome. It’s just so overwhelming and I dont know where to start getting help with it. There’s so many rules and regulations and Customs forms you have to fill out first and it’s so much damn work. I’m getting off topic…. this is just a newish hobby I’m sure you’ll be ready lots more about in the months to come.