Not so good at this blogging thing.

Hey guys, I'm at Barnes and Noble again, surprise surprise.

Since I've last written, I'm sure a few things have come up. First of all, I've decided to quit my job at Forever 21 as soon as I have another job. I'm looking in the heart of Boulder because that's the reason I wanted to move out here in the first place. It's hard to find something, but I've designated tomorrow morning as my morning to go searching. We'll see what that yields. I'll keep you updated, as soon as I remember to go somewhere with internet and blog. hah.

Rach and I are in the process of procuring more furniture, but it's hard as all of our money goes towards bills right now. I don't have enough experience with this "adult" thing to know if we need jobs that pay more/offer better hours or if we need to manage our money better. I love my job at Panera, but I'm thinking of switching to a mainly mid-day worker so Rach and I can actually eat meals on time and not feel horrible when we wake up. Right now she has a job at RAAP, which is a Denver rape assistance program. She walks door to door, collecting money for the organization. She makes commission on that, and if she doesn't collect very much in a night, she is still paid minimum wage. We both get home around 10:30 at night. It's exhausting on our bodies, I think. So anyways, back to the furniture thing! We found a perfect side table for our living room... in the dumpster. lol. I was taking the recycling out as we were leaving for somewhere, and I saw it, and we snatched it up. We think somebody is moving out and just leaving behind all the unnecessary stuff because the table is perfect and wonderful. It has a drawer in it, which we love.

One other piece of furniture we have been desperate for has been chairs for our counter. We don't have a dining room table or anything, and to tell you the truth, we don't really have room for it. We do, however, have this enormous bar in the kitchen. So we decided it would just make more sense to buy chairs that are the appropriate size for the bar, and use that as a table, at least for the time being. So one day we were dropping off a bunch of crap at Goodwill, and Rach found these wonderful stools. They're almost like old school barbershop chairs or something. They don't really technically match our theme, but they look wonderful anyway. And they are so much fun to sit in. It's a great place to journal or pay bills or eat.

We also got cable! After a very long delay (they didn't have our receivers in stock and had to order them.), we got DirecTV. We were originally planning on getting Dish, but we found out our apartment complex doesn't allow Dish after the technician came to install it. It was a trying process.

Almost a week ago we went for a picnic in the mountains. (: I finally had a day off, and Rach had the same one, so we packed a lunch of sandwiches, chips, carrots, bananas, yogurt, a chocolate chip cookie, and capri suns in my picnic basket! We ended up driving for about six or seven hours that day. We randomly drove and ate on top of the mountain, at the grave site of Buffalo Bill, and then we drove to Breckenridge Ski Resort, about an hour and a half away from our apartment by major highway. We weren't all that into taking major highways, so instead we found backroads. It was so gorgeous, I still can't believe I live so close to it. In Breckenridge we wandered around like tourists, buying stickers and sunglasses. We also found a Crepe Hut, where we ate... some kind of meal. It was strange and fantastic.

Now we're in the process of saving our money for a dog. We definitely have dog fever (Rach has it a little worse than me...). Rach is constantly online looking up puppies for sale, dog treats, etc. It's like when we were just ready to move out here and couldn't wait, and all we could do was plan and replan the same thing over again. We're talking about whether or not he'll be allowed on the furniture and if so, which furniture. Who will get up to walk him in the mornings and in the middle of the night? What kind of treats, what kind of leash, what kind of toys, what kind of dog! There is so much we've been talking about. And I've never had a  dog, so I'm nervous. Rach couldn't be more excited. We're hoping to have him/her (probably a her because females weigh less) by Christmas, so we can take her with us on our great Christmas adventure to Kansas and Oklahoma... but we'll see.




I do have pictures of all these fantastic events, except my phone/computer aren't cooperating... hopefully soon I'll be able to upload a bunch. Until then<3

Ah, it's been so long!

     I'm sitting at Barnes and Nobel on the floor in some back room by a bunch of calendars. BLAH. All the seats in this building are taken. That's okay though, I've always kind of preferred sitting on the floor.

     Not a lot has happened recently, but some things have, so I'm going to put this in list form, because I slept horribly last night and woke up in a funk and just don't feel like doing it any other way:

 1. I got a car. (: It's a 2005 Honda Accord, and it is perfect. The more I drive it, the more I like it. It has 4 doors, a sun roof, a huge trunk, 90,000 miles, and it's mine all mine. (: Rach has been bugging me to name it, but I'm so afraid I'll name it something I'll want to change in a week. This is why I should never have children.

2. Barnes and Nobel has become my sanctuary. Especially now that I can drive here myself. Rach leaves for work around 12:15 every day, and I have nothing to do for 4 hours. And considering I don't have enough money to go out to lunch or shopping or anything, I come to B&N and read. It breaks my heart, not having a concrete schedule. I end up feeling depressed and bored most of the time. It's so hard to meet people. I don't know what to do. :(

3. At least I've kind of been journaling lately. I can't wait to have money for books and stickers and clothes again. My bosses from F21 are not kind people. I don't fit in there. At all. I want to work HERE, where nobody will judge me for wearing a tshirt and not accessorizing. :/ It's not a good fit. I want to quit. BUT THEN THERE'S RENT.



i feel awful, im going to go read. <3

Back at Barnes and Noble.

I'm in kind of a funk. It's the worrying about getting paid soon enough to get bills in on time, it's the not having friends to hang out with, it's the not having money to go anywhere. It's the fact that Rach's car is falling apart and I don't have money for a bus pass. It's that the bank charged me twice when they should have only charged me once. It's the being starving, but not being interested in eating anything. It's a lot of crap.

I've been working mostly nights so we haven't eaten a lot of meals together. My training is over, and with that goes my free food from Panera. I normally work from 4 or 5 until about 10 or 10:30, and the times falling outside that bracket are not really times I'm interested in eating. And then I want to go out and meet people, but we don't have money for gas, money for parking, money for any event, and we shouldn't even drive at night because Rach's taillight is out on her car and guess what? We don't have the money right now to get it fixed. And we don't really need money to have fun, but we're running out of things to do, just the two of us. And we don't know how to make friends besides going to hang out at CU. It's frustrating.

The plus side of all this is that at least my "Panera Family" is beginning to look familiar. It's nice to have people I know, a place I'm comfortable in, and a job, I suppose. It's just frustrating. I'm beginning to feel that I'm going to get behind on bills, and since they never stop I'll never get caught up. So much for the dream.


I'm just ranting; I'm really okay. <3

Hey guys...

Sorry these posts are so far and few between, it's been difficult to get to a place with internet lately. Also, I do have pictures to post, but my phone is apparently too low on storage for me to send any messages, so I'm sorry, but there will be no pictures in this post. :(

So, to get you all (ha, if anybody reads this) caught up on the happenings of my life... here is a list:

1. a week ago Rach and I went to an lgbt club in Denver, not necessarily because it was lgbt, but because we figured it tends to be easier to make friends with the lgbt-friendly. It was the craziest club I've ever been to. I got my ID checked three times, had to empty my pockets, and was patted down before I was allowed in the building. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore. We weren't really in the mood to dance, so we mostly creeped outside on the patio, looking for people to be our friends. It's so hard to make friends without being in school. We'll see, I guess. It's lonely sometimes. It was a fun club, with 18 year olds all the way up through about 50 year olds. There were straight people, gay people, friends, couples, you name it, I saw it. Not to mention all the restrooms... they all had signs that said, "This bathroom is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transexual, trisexual, and lastly unisexual." It reminded me of my bff Tony. :)

2. WE HAVE BEEN HORRIBLE ABOUT COOKING LATELY. Also, we've been eating crap. It kind of breaks my heart. Today we went to Sprouts, this local organic, natural market, and loaded up on the veggies and fruit. It's just really hard to have a set schedule when...

3. I'm always working nights. In case some of you haven't heard, I have two jobs now. :) I work at Panera Bread (about 5 miles from my apartment), and Forever 21 (about 3 miles from my apartment in the other direction... in the mall, lol). They're both part-time gigs, but Panera might as well be full time. I work from around 4 or 5 until about 10, which makes cooking dinner a difficult process. We're going to try and figure out some schedule, but my days are kind of off anyway, so maybe it's best to eat "lunch" around 3, which would make it okay to be eating dinner around 10:30. I just don't know yet.

4. Not much else has been happening... a lot of hanging out... waiting. We're so desperate to find a group of friends to hang out with, but it's so so so hard. We're looking to go to CU on Sunday afternoon (maybe... I think I work :/) to watch the Broncos game. (: It's so much fun to be so close to an NFL city... we're 10 minutes from the stadium, too. We're desperate to find a place to watch all the games, lol. buuuut we'll see about that.


SIGH. whatever. I'm going to go find a book about things. <3 <3 <3

barnes and noble.

whatever. today hasn't been a good day.


sorry i've not been updating very much, i don't have internet in my apartment. And I tend to not get to places that have it as frequently as i would prefer. whatever, again.

This week:
* we bought a patio table. it's really little and green, it was $4 at goodwill... it is perfection.
* i got a job at panera bread... it's 5 miles from my apartment and next to an organic shop(:
* cleaned the apartment all day yesterday and went grocery shopping.

whatever. i'm not in the mood to write. i'm not really in the mood to be.

love.

A perfect Sunday

Except that I missed church this morning... I want to go... It's just strange to have to find a new one, especially since I'll probably have to go by myself because Rach really likes the style of Baptist churches. Which is cool... I just feel like I could never be myself in a Baptist church. And isn't that really the point of church? I don't know. We'll see.

In other news, I am apparently an adult now. I've only been here for 6 days and I can't believe how restless I am. Not in a bad way, there is just literally not much I am able to do yet. This summer I saved up a little over $1,000 specifically for when I got here. And the day after the family left, Rach and I decorated the apartment. We hung everything, organized, took out the recycling, etc.
                                                               

And the day after that, we went job hunting! I got applications to Forever 21, Williams-Sonoma (this extremely overpriced kitchen store), Starbucks, Panera Bread, The Body Shop, Barnes and Noble, this fantastic little local, organic, dairy-free, gluten-free cafe just by the entrance to my community. I know a job is a job, but how do I retract my Starbucks application from the universe? I don't want to be a part of something so commercialized. We'll see. I'm probably not going after that one so much. We're ready to have jobs though, ready for a schedule. Ready to be bringing in some money so we know what all we can afford. And ready to go out and meet people.

A better photo of our bookshelf... we also hung my Day of the Dead painting. (:

It's also been a challenge to come up with meals. It's more challenging than I thought it would be, I think mostly because I don't eat certain things and Rach always has. For example, I don't regular spaghetti. It's just not my thing. But Rachel loves it. So we bought angel hair pasta, because it's practically spaghetti, but I can stand it. We both also love Velveeta cheese, but it is so processed it almost pains me to buy. It's the little compromises.

The first night I actually cooked, I made spaghetti and homemade sauce, the way my Daddy has always made pizza sauce. It's 1,000,000% better than anything you've ever tasted. We also had green beans and homemade garlic bread (the bread wasn't homemade... you can't expect that much out of me so soon). I was very pleased with myself. (:

We made nachos/tacos the other night. Because I don't eat red meat, we used ground turkey. Do you guys even realize how much more disgusting ground turkey is than ground beef? It's really disgusting to cook. It tasted almost like ground beef but I was okay eating it. And since my current food obsessions are green peppers and onions, I threw some big chunks in to cook with the turkey. Since Rach doesn't like things in her meat, we fished them out, reused the peppers in cheese dip, and tossed the onion.

 One of my friends had told me that, even though we lived together all last year in the dorms, living together in an actual apartment/house is an adjustment. A word of wisdom: if somebody tells you that, believe her. It's not a bad adjustment by any means. Once again, it's the little things. One day she asked me if I had used the towel hanging from the fridge handle for something and I told her I had wiped my hands on it. And she told me that the towel on the fridge and the stove handles were just for looks. And I laughed at her. Because if it's there... I'm using it. It's just the way we grew up, I think. It's just interesting to get used to. Not to mention the fact that we'd been apart for so long that we are not on the same page at all anymore. We are having to relearn the way each other thinks. We're getting used to it, but we aren't clicking right now the way we used to.

Our apartment faces the mountains and has a little, perfect balcony, so we went out and bought some $15 plastic yard chairs for it the other day. We were tired of sitting on the cement floor.

Mine is on the left, Rachel's is on the right. I've also gotten into the (bad? whatever) habit of leaving a blanket out there with a book in the morning. I tend to get up early (this time change thing, ugh) and go read out on the patio. It's coooold in the mornings and hot in the afternoons right now. I remember my book is out there around 3 or 4 p.m. when I can't find it anywhere else and abandon all hope, and decide to just look at the mountains. And why wouldn't I?      

 Yesterday we went to Pearl Street, which is this amazing outdoor mall in Boulder. It was so packed because this is the weekend all the CU students return to campus. We watched a magic/acrobatic show for about half an hour, we walked around, we got coffee/tea, we browsed all the cool little shops. What a perfect place for us. (: Tonight we'll probably eat macaroni and chicken strips (which is what we ate on almost all our visits here) and watch movies... hope that we're employable.


If anyone is reading this, hey thanks for the support. Also, these pictures are all phone pictures, I'm in the process of getting a better way to upload some. (:

Elyse

Moving In

Reading through my old journal entries and my old blog posts, it's amazing to me that I am actually in my apartment in Colorado. Rachel and I had been counting down since we had 135 days to go. It's a wonderful feeling to be done with that. Not to mention, the apartment we chose is perfection. 2 bed, 2 bath, a living room and a kitchen with a long bar/island thing, a laundry closet, and a patio that faces the mountains. 

DAY ONE

Rach has lived in an apartment before so there was already a ton of furniture when I got here. So my family helped me unload a million boxes of crap, and then we went out to dinner at a restaurant called BJ's Bar and Grill (or something). Mom told the waitress they had just helped me move here, and she sounded all surprised when we said it wasn't the family that had moved, that it was just me. And then she welcomed me. (: 

THIS PLACE IS PERFECT.

DAY TWO
Yesterday we went to Walmart and bought some stuff, like groceries and toilet paper, and went out to lunch at a cute little sandwich place... that messed up almost all of our orders, hah. When we came back, Rachel was here and I finally got to see her, after ~80 days. It was glorious. (: 

However, Mom and Dad decided to "get out of our way" way earlier than we had planned, so nobody even got to go into Boulder or see Pearl Street or appreciate the wonderfulness of this place. :/ But they did have a long drive back. So they left, and we immediately went back to Walmart so we could buy the things together that we'd waited for each other to buy, like a silverware tray (it was just being thrown into the drawer (by me)) and tupperware. We also bought some more groceries! 

Here's the thing about groceries. It's been such a long time since I have actually sat down regularly to eat a meal that I cannot even remember what meals might be good to prepare for. And I am really trying to stay away from frozen/boxed dinners. We did pick some up because I was about to have a break down in the meat section of Walmart, but it's hard! I couldn't think up meals like that on the spot. And everything I looked at just seemed to be processed or so over-the-top with sodium that I got so discouraged. My goal is to stay away from frozen, boxed, processed, dehydrogenated foods, but you only have so many options for your first meals! It's harder than it looks. 




When we got back from Walmart, we set to work putting things where they belong!!! We want to get it all done so there is no chance of random crap lingering in the apartment. Everything has it's place. Except there is not enough room in our kitchen, lol.

this isn't the actual curtain, but we figured... we don't need one yet. hah.

We put together a bookshelf Ma and Daddy bought me and omg it was so complicated, lol. But it's gorgeous and perfect now. Our apartment is so wonderful. We put away lots of clothes (Well, Rachel did... she has SIGNIFICANTLY more clothes than I do.) and books and movies and dishes... I apparently think it's necessary to buy every mug there could ever be, with no thought towards storage space. And our kitchen is kind of lacking that. Well, that's not true. It just doesn't really have many drawers to put stuff in, so there are lots of big cabinets, but I'm kind of a drawer person. So... whatever. It still all fits, it's just finding a place for it. But Rach is such an organizer that it's so wonderful, and we're almost done. We have to take out a TON of recycling (single stream recycling in this complex :D) and I have a bag of cooking/baking supplies to put away and then a box of clothes/shoes, and after that we are tackling the second bedroom. We have to go through some boxes and decorate, and then organize the closet for random storage. (:

We also need to pick out paint colors for the apartment (management paints for us once we pick the colors we would like), get jobs, find cheap patio furniture, find either barstools for our counter or a little kitchen table set, and I need a bus pass!!!

I'm going to go unpack, (: