la la la la life goes on

What's new in my life? I will tell you.

• I'm engaged to the most wonderful guy in the whole world. No, we have not set a date yet.

• I have a kitty cat named Hercules.

• I had a nice spring break traveling around and visiting people and wild horses.

• There is only another month of school left and then I get to start some unknown internship.
• I now reside in the large upper room of the house, which is rather warm on hot days.
• My potentially-lesbian fish keep having babies even though there are no males in the tank.
• I'm not sure what I think about the healthcare bill yet; ask me later. (But I do think Obama sucks at being president.)

I kind of want to write but at the same time I'm feeling really lazy--I mean, it is almost 1 in the morning. So I will just make this a short post and maybe I will write more about interesting things later, like some of my recent trips.

Birds of a feather

Check out these gorgeous bird photos. There are a ton of them, so just take a few minutes and watch some of the slideshow. Isn't God's creation wonderful?

Birds

-K

More musings

Okay so I'm not talking about abortion--yet. I'm waiting for a chance to sit down, take a deep breath, and speak from my heart. It's not like I haven't had the time; I would if I didn't procrastinate doing my homework so often. Procrastination on my part generally involves creativity, so I redid the blog design. The background was actually titled "Katie Girl" by the creator. I guess it was meant for me, considering it's practically named after me and embodies my style. Coincidence? I think so.

It seems that people's names are becoming trendy--they've always been trendy in the sense of what baby names are popular during any given year. But what I mean is that they are being used to "name" certain styles of fashion, design, etc. I bought a pair of jeans at Gabes because they were labeled "Katie flair" (and they did look good on me), and I probably spent more than I would usually spend on jeans at Gabes, simply because the pants must have been made for me. Yeah, right. I still haven't worn them because they are freakishly long and need some major hemming. Then I realized through further store browsing recently that my name has become trendy in terms of fashion. I still think it's pretty cool, considering there's never been a hurricane Katie (although I can assure you that if there was, you had been run for cover 'cause it would be INSANE), or many songs about Katies. I guess we Katies have Katie Holmes and Katie Couric, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

In other news, my butterwort finally bloomed today, and I snapped some pictures of it before class this afternoon. It was a good thing I did, because the flower doesn't appear to be lasting too long now that it's finally open. But what do I know? Maybe it will open again tomorrow. I guess I could look it up if I really wanted to know, but bed is starting to sound pretty good, considering it's 1:00 a.m. and I didn't get any sleep last night due to 2 cups of coffee after 7:00 p.m. Bad idea, but I keep doing it. I guess I'll never learn. I just really love my coffee.

-K

Here it goes again

So I planned on updating this more over winter break, but somehow that didn't happen. The blog has gotten a facelift though--less glamorous, more seasonal.

The first week of classes went really well. Plant Prop and Nursery Mgmt are looking quite promising. I'm considering taking 3 extra classes and picking up my entrepreneurship minor before I graduate. Just 3 more semesters (counting this one), or 4 if I decide to hang around and get some more hort classes under my belt.

Needless to say there's been a lot of snow around here lately, so much so that in the city it reflects light back up unto the sky, which is reflected off the low stratus clouds and keeps the sky from being anywhere near dark at night. I took this picture with a 15-second exposure on my front porch around midnight on January 6th. It's hard to truly capture the effects of the light, though.


It's nice having all this snow. It seems like we haven't had a really snowy winter in a while, so I'm trying to make the most of it. The cold temps are taking a toll on our gas bill, but we have electric space heaters that we can use while keeping the furnace turned lower in order to save some money. Once the weather warms up it won't be a problem though.

I'm looking forward to some spring/summer projects for the house. Assuming I'll find an internship in Morgantown this summer, I'm hoping to get a few things fixed or improved around here. I'd like to actually get my garden looking nice this summer and probably start some kind of compost pile for the grass clippings from the yard. We're also looking into painting the side porch if maintenance doesn't do it like they're supposed to. Hopefully the crumbling front porch will get fixed so we don't die when we go into and leave the house.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the summer. And this post is a bit scatter-brained because I'm trying to write and watch Oceans 13 at the same time. Brilliant.
-K

A vrry kitteh Krismus

In celebration of my finals being over and Christmas is coming up soon, here are some festive LOLcats.





-K

The piggy bank is broken

I need money. I guess that's a given, considering I'm in college. I've been thinking about ways to make money other than getting a second job (my last resort), and so far I've made few actual attempts. Through the grape vine I discovered Dollarsurveys.com, which I don't recommend. Very naively I jumped in head first, only to discover that you take very few surveys but receive a lot of "special offers". So now I'm getting phone calls from 1-800 and unlisted numbers and ads in my inbox and I've had to just completely stop using Dollar Surveys. Get paid $1.00 for every survey you take?! That's a lie. If you actually get to the point where you get to take a survey, you may not "qualify", or you may never know when it's finished because of all the offers you keep swimming through. So I haven't seen any money in my PayPal account yet and I doubt I will ever see any.

Andy suggested I start a small flower arranging business, which might be possible if I had some external financing, but I'm pretty sure my lease stipulates that I can't run a business out of my house. So there goes that idea. My next thought is that I could sell my best photos as prints/posters/whatever. I have an account with Snapfish so I could only charge slightly more than what I paid for the prints and make a small profit. I'm not sure if any of my photos are actually worth purchasing; I guess this is something I would have to contemplate further to decide if it would actually work.


Or maybe I should just get a second job. I might have to over Christmas break. I should have an internship this summer so things will be better as long as I get paid, but for now I'm stuck in this unbearable monetary limbo where I slowly drain the money I saved for utilities yet I am too afraid to buy groceries (much cheaper than buying lunch every day) because it always ends up costing way more than I feel I should pay. I buy generic brands and I look for bargains so it's not like I'm irresponsible with my grocery shopping. It just makes me nervous. Anyone who has ever gone grocery shopping when their fridge is empty knows that it's very easy to be overtaken by the snowball effect of buying way more than you came for because you see so many things you didn't think of putting on you list. Or maybe that's just me. I know it won't last forever but I feel like I'm running in circles.

-K

Everything has a beginning

I received a new digital SLR camera recently--new to me anyway, it's actually a hand-me-down. It's great for learning how to use all the manual settings, though, and it still functions perfectly. I don't have much content to post at this point so I decided to start with a picture to get the ball rolling. I'm really interested in plants and photography, so those subjects with most likely be the primary content of my writing. Writing also helps me utilize all those vocabulary words that my brain has acquired over the years but has no use for in daily conversation. So we'll see how this goes.

-K