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, (: