Going back to the boring real world stuff...

Alright, so enough with the dilly-dallying and the 'oh I have nothing interesting to say' bullshit because I want to update and I WILL and who cares if it's not the most exciting thing in the world. Right? Right. So, here's a bullet-point list of shit that's on my mind today, because there's a lot of it and I like bullet points. But not bullets. Go figure.

- Going home in 12 days. Eeeeeeee! It's been a year and 7 days, now. I think it's the longest I've ever been away from home before. I almost did a whole year one time when I was in college, but this is definitely the longest. I feel like I'll die if I don't eat a real Honduran tortilla soon.
-So, going home for my older brother's wedding. Eee! We're spending New Year's together in beautiful Copan Ruins. Then the wedding's on the 2nd and I'm home til the 13th. I'm going alone because tickets are way too expensive for both Graham and I to go, so alas. But still! Exciting.
-So I have a dress for the wedding. But I want new shoes for it. And I just went to every single shoe store at the mall today and found FUCK ALL. Everything seems to be either boring old flats (no!) or gigantic 5 inch platform heels that just makes me think that some women must have a death wish. How do you WALK in those? Besides they just make your feet look gigantic. Ugh. And the ones I liked were either $300 (um, no) or in the wrong color. It's driving me insane.
-Oh, yeah. I've quit my job. At least I put in a two-week's notice last week. Last day is December 21st. I should probably feel terrified, but truth be told I'm nothing but relieved. I only planned on staying on til the end of the year, anyway, and it really wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Plus it was just kind of miserable. I'll miss some of my coworkers, but overall it was just a temporary thing, and I won't miss the exhaustion at the end of the day.
-The plan is to finally get to work on getting my teacher's degree next year. I badly want to go back to teaching, and just making a decent salary for once. That'd be nice.
- Christmas shopping DONE. Mostly. I'd write the details here but I suspect some family members might read this so hush, hush. I love Christmas. Can't wait.

So, that's a start. I'll try to get back into the hang of this, since it's been so damn long since I've written anything that's not a facebook status. That's kind of pathetic.

Update, on the Real World Front

....And yet again I've neglected this thing for too long. But I hope you'll understand: I have an actual job and a real life to deal with for the first time in two years, and it's taking some getting used to. Specifically, getting up at 5am to be at work by 7- I leave the house at 6 and take two buses and a train to get to work. The work itself is pretty good, I always keep busy and I'm getting along fine with everyone. It's exhausting, but I get off at 12 or 1 so I have the rest of the day to rest and the time goes by quickly. I won't get into too much detail here, so I'll just say it's easy, relatively mindless work but it's something, and what with the horrible job situation all over the place, I'm incredibly grateful just to have a job. So this was my first working 'week' (it was only three days) and hopefully it'll get easier as I go along. I know that I'll be incredibly happy to be earning some real money at last.

So that's the update on the real life side of things. Don't have much else going on, doing some artwork (almost finished with the one big project I'd set for myself for the summer) and working on my brother's wedding invitations, though I've been unable to work on that all week because of coming home from work too exhausted to care about painting. Also been working hard with Pajiba-- doing the Project Runway recaps has been incredibly fun but also exhausting. Writing an actual recap (instead of, you know, just shouting incoherently as I did here) is harder than I had thought it was. It's fun, but you have to really edit yourself and not end up babbling or recaping every single second of the show. But it's so much fun to write and read the comments, and I've been getting a good response. Good writing practice and thankfully the show is giving me enough good stuff to work with this season.

In case you missed them, here's the recap for Episode 5 and the one for Episode 6. They're full of spoilers, obviously. Next one goes up this Monday, so go and give us some more page views.

So I've had that, plus the EE and I have the Twilight recaps to write. Of course, no one's making me do the Twilight thing, but I feel bad that I haven't updated. I also haven't read past chapter 1 of Breaking Dawn, mostly because I'd completely forgotten about the damned thing. But I'll make up for it. And, now that I think about it, reading and writing in a state of mental and physical exhaustion might be just the perfect mood for dealing with such levels of crap. A mushy brain is all that that garbage deserves.

And that's that. Having a meet-up with some Pajibans next week that I'm ridiculously excited about. Then it's the week of my birthday and I really want some cake. Couple of weeks after that we're going down to visit the in-laws in Houston and it'll be a big party to celebrate 3 birthdays in the family. And the summer is finally over. I love September.

So stay tuned, I'll be posting the next chapter of Twilight in a few minutes. Exciting!

Books, books, twitter, life.

Two bits of news:

I've joined Goodreads in an attempt to keep up with my reading for 2010. Since I was late in finishing Cannonball 1 I was unable to join Part 2, though it was half as many books in the same amount of time. It's alright though, as I preferred to not do another marathon read and take my time about reading and reviewing as I settle into life in Dallas. I really want to get back into reviewing, because I really love doing it, but I found that when I tried to go back to books I had read months ago I had an incredibly hard time trying to remember how I felt about them. Which is my own damn fault of course, I should have been reviewing as soon as I finished a book, but I got lazy and I got further and further behind. I think I'll try and review some of the 40-odd books I left unreviewed (you can see the list on the right hand of the blog down there) but I probably won't review them all.

What I would like to do is review books I'm reading now. One of the most wonderful things about moving to the States, I've found, is the availability of great books in English. I've told you before how Honduras had one bookstore chain that sold books in English, and their selection was greatly limited--just about everything there was by Stephanie Meyer (blight upon the world), Stephen King (read everything by him), and other bestselling dreck. So you can imagine my utter joy at walking into a gigantic bookstore here, drawing a deep breath and taking in that wonderful smell that bookstores have and realizing --HOLY CRAP I WANT TO BUY EVERYTHING HERE. AND I'm not limited by how many books I can fit into my suitcase! It's intoxicating, is what it is. I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read (based largely on recommendations by Pajibans), and knowing that I can actually find them here is exhilarating. I had to keep myself from spending more money than I could on our last trip to the B&N, and limited myself to two books: Rhett Butler's People (review coming up!) and The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which I have yet to start). I started the year with my husband's (don't get me started on how weird it is to write that word) copy of the massive The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I'm almost done with that. After two months. I'm hopelessly stuck at Justinian. I know I should, and I know that I can finish it, but every time I pick it up it seems to weigh a hundred pounds and it just repels my brain. And I don't quite know why, because I was enjoying it immensely so far. I think it's just that I can only take so much rape and pillaging and family murders before I get tired of it, you know? Even I have limits.

So, I'll make myself review a book this weekend.

The other news is that I've finally, after much resistance and pain, joined Twitter. I hate myself for it, a little bit. But truth is that there's a) there's a buttload of people I want to follow and it's the easiest way to do so, b) I love wasting my time on shit like this, and it's not like I have anything else to do, and c) I love talking about myself. And limiting myself to 140 words might be a challenge. As you see, I'm nothing if not long-winded. So, add me if you'd like, the username is "figgidaboudit". Clever, eh?

In other news, life is pretty sweet right now. We've sent off my paperwork to the USCIS, telling them that yes I did marry before the 90 day deadline was up, and starting my process to get a Green Card. It's a looooooong process, taking at least a year, during which I can't travel outside of the US (so Christmas in Honduras is most likely out, which makes me pretty damn sad). But I can start looking for work, which is pretty wonderful. Lounging around has its high points, but I'm ready to become a useful member of American society. I really need to start looking into getting my teaching certificate, and figuring out what exactly I'd like to teach. I think I'll look into teaching younger kids, because I nearly died from Middle Schoolers two years ago. Granted, I'm sure teaching in the US will be a vastly different experience (hopefully much, much better) so it might not be so bad. But we'll see.

That's it for now. Hope you have a good weekend!

The comfy life...

Oooh, boy, I'm a liar. I keep thinking I need to update but then get extremely lazy as usual and then just...feh. And not like there's nothing going on, it's just the over-consuming lazy whenever I open up this blog. See? I'm already bored and thinking of things I need to go look up.

I blame super-fast internet, a new TV and Netflix. Oooh, yeah, baby. Newlywed life is sweet.

But, really, life is good and exciting and I'm really liking Dallas so far. It's such a completely different place from Honduras, and maybe in a future entry I'll try to explain the many reasons why. This could be come a whole displaced-person type of account.

Anyway, I'll get back to my reading. Getting through "The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire", a massive history book that's got me completely hooked. It's just all murder, betrayal, depravity...followed by murder, betrayal, depravity and death. Brilliant stuff.

fun times! I promise to update more often, at least once a week. I'll force myself to stick to that.