What-Ho, Good Egg!

It feels weird posting on Good Egg after such a long hiatus.  I’ve been busy plugging away at my summer job and now that I’m 2 weeks away from returning to Indiana I’m becoming sentimental for all the things I could have done.  Like crafting. And writing to friends. In a way, it felt good to shed the responsibility of posting here and having to craft, at the same time I’m itching to get back on top of my old hobbies.

Here’s to getting back on top of my game, I guess.

I wanted this summer to be low-drama, high-crafting, high-fun, moderate responsibility and….thus far I’ve failed. I haven’t been reading or crafting or engaging in my community the way I wanted to and it’s rather disappointing that I’m only 4 weeks away from returning to college and I’ve gotten nothing with a capital N completed. Time to binge on crafting and purge on the drama! Yes yes!

I’ll leave you with a photo from July 4th- I’m doing my Martha Stewart impression with a cake knife and a table knife.

Where do I work? The Rose Garden.

What’s going on? The Rose Festival.

Who’s busy? TEH GOOD EGG IZ BIZZY.

I have over 3000 RSS feeds to look at and 105 emails. I will be with you shortly, World.

This morning there’s a lovely drizzle and it’s making me so happy to be back in Portland! I figured I’d update my dwindling reader base as to my recent activities since I’ve been a Very Bad Blogger (TM).

First of all, I got a really lovely job working for a giftshop/information centre in Washington Park, so if any of you take a trip up to see the lovely roses in bloom at the Portland International Rose Garden, chances are, you’ll see me as well.  This job is fantastic! I get great views of Portland and Mt. Hood, I get to talk to people from out of town….I have no complaints. Of course, it’s a time-consuming job, but it’s INCOME! Which means I’ll be able to send off packages I owe people. Seriously!

Also, I’m registering for classes at the State University in town. Fingers crossed, that will get almost all of my upper-lvl non-division credits out of the way for graduation.  It also means I get to spend 8 hours a day speaking Arabic, four days a week. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but speaking a foreign language rivals knitting in its awesomeness.

Speaking of knitting, which brings me to crafting, I have a laundry list a mile long of projects I want to accomplish this summer. Not to mention I need to lighten that stash load considerably! I’m on a really strict budget this summer so I can afford non-school expenses in the fall/winter, but also because I’m trying to fly E out from OhI0ndiana to visit me for a week. So, no new yarn for the GoodEgg, at least until September. I need to make myself a new purse because Mr. Roboto bag from last summer has been commissioned as a lunchbag for work.  Also, raise your hand if you love the latest IK that came out a few months ago. I love almost every pattern in the magazine, which is a real surprise. Usually I like a pattern or two, which isn’t enough to warrant a purchase of it. The latest issue was just on fire, I swear. Also, my mother and older sister AND father all have summer birthdays and I need to think up some groovy presents pretty soon.

POETRY MONDAY UPDATE– Other than finals, which aren’t really an excuse, I need to apologise for not being on the ball about May’s theme. The regularly appointed theme for June will be selected next week using Quakerly consensus. That means, everyone needs to be respectful and submit a theme in the comments for general consideration. This  isn’t a sign of my laziness, rather that I feel creative input from everyone involved in the project is better than my dictating themes to you.

Finally, and this will probably make all of you cringe, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft with my boyfriend and several college friends.  Yes, it’s nerdy, but it’s really fun and a good way for E and me to do stuff together albiet from 3000 miles away.  I am attempting, like awesome crafter/geeks before me, to balance all of my passions, be they academic, crafting, WoW, swimming, Arabic, etc.  Part of my absence was getting so caught up in my other pursuits that I completely ignored my blog and my crafting. After a while I started to feel guilty about not creating, always talking the talk but not knitting the knit, as it were. So apologies all around, and here’s to a magnificent summer!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Summer school starts in 6 weeks. Which gives me 6 weeks to catch up with EVERYTHING that I haven’t had time for during finals. Like my Knitterly Swap Letter Swap, the prize I never sent out, uh, KNITTING, and everything else.  Did I forget to send you an email, letter, package? I guess the only solution I have is that finals were royally screwing me over, along with a miriad of other school related stressors.

Consider this my general apology for my general lack of communication.

I wrote this poem, so go gentle on me. My mind is addled from exhaustion and mono.

A lone house in a prairie field

- lamenting the crops, sighing with the breezes.

shifting its weight under the winter snows, peeling and cracking

at the edges in the hot summer heat.

A crow rests on her shoulders.

In the silence

the house

remains.

Like the title says, I’m really sleepy today. My sleep schedule has been wrecked by being sick and slightly behind in one of my classes (that paper on that book for that class? what class?) and I’m completey devoid of a crafty and interesting things to write about. I feel like I’m crawling to the matriculation finish line that’s 4 weeks away and I’m ready to quit right before the final sprint. Don’t get me wrong- I love my classes, but having negative amounts of energy from the Mono certainly isn’t helping me slog through endless piles of homework. I’m looking forward to a month’s vacation before heading to summer school in Arabic and statistics. Have any of you seen my fall schedule on Flickr? I’m taking 19 credits- 15 of which are politics courses.  I feel like I took this year a bit too easy on the courses and I need to make up for it by piling on the major requirements so I can graduate on time.

Hopefully I’ll have crafty things to write about in the  near future. At the moment, I’m just going to stick to Poetry Monday.

I apoogise for not posting a poem yesterday. I have several large excuses:

• I’ve been feeling really under the weather and had a nagging cold that wouldn’t go away. My tonsils and glands were none too happy, so I went to the nurses on campus and they did a test for anaemia and mono. Aaaaaaand it’s the latter. Mono. There are about a million people on campus with it right now so it’s not really a good excuse to get out of homework, but it sure is a good excuse for sleeping all the freakin’ time when I’m not expected to be present and conscious at some academic event.
• Last night whilst walking to get some gatorade and various make-me-feel-better pity-snacks, some Townies hit me in the arm/shoulder with a potato. They were driving down the road and AIMED a POTATO at me. First off, it hurt and was not a little humiliating sitting in the campus security office explaining for the millionth time the size and shape of the projectile.  The main issue here is that students are regularly being harassed and assaulted when venturing into town. The population of the town is relatively small, and until recently we had good relations with the residents. A little more than a week ago a student was so horribly assaulted he was sent to the hospital with a collapsed lung and brain damage. They hit him in the head with a brick! I resent the fact that my school has chosen to react by adopting a victim mentality, but this is no laughing matter (aside from Drive By Potato incidents, which has a certain chuckle factor to it). Once a week I have to walk 4 miles to and from my therapist’s office, and that’s not even safe- I have to find a friend to escort me or beg someone to drive me there since the cab fare is too expensive.  I’ve griped far too long on this subject but I gotta say- What the fuck? We live in a privileged society far away from the suicide bombers and ethnic wars in Baghdad and Khartoum, and I don’t see a reason to specifically target some kids trying to study Kant and Hegel.
• Finally, I’m three weeks away from a 3.5 month summer vacation without E. He’s staying behind to take classes at the other University in town and watch our kitten. Therefore, I’m rather heartbroken at the prospect of spending so much time away from someone I dearly love. I know it’s not going to be an eternity, but winter break was hard enough, and that was barely a month! We’re trying to devise ways to still spend time together, albeit over the internet and the phone.  I’m trying to cram in as many walks in the woods and dates as I can before the end of the term and it never feels like it’s enough.

And there you have it, folks. See you next week!

Ok, I said I wasn’t going to post very often due to end of semester-craziness. Well, several tearful trips to the Registrar’s office later and everything (well, nearly everything) has been fixed! Bless those ladies at the Registrar’s office.  Also, my digital camera finally ame back from the shop, so I’m leaving you with a photo of the Reema-kitten, who got interested in the bight shiny moving noisy camera contraption. AWWWWWWWWWW.

So, ladees and gents, I’m in the final four weeks of my freshman year at college and the stress level is making me whacky. Let it be known that I feel bad for my mother, who went through 8 million years of grad school only to end up at college teaching people like me. So yeah. I wish I’d knit myself a Julio doll like the one I made my mother last April, so it could comfort me as I listen to my teachers drone on and on and on…

Anyways, my posting is going to be a bit sporadic until after finals, but I will keep up with correspondance and Poetry Monday, I swear!