New Semester!

Our fall semester begins this Monday, and I’m both excited and nervous. I’m taking three fairly difficult classes. Two are difficult because of the content, and the other is difficult because, well, there’s just so much work! Here are the three that I am taking:

History 102: Modern Europe

English 488: Victorian Literature

Humanities 303: Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution

All three classes will discuss Europe in the 1800’s, which is why I wanted to take them together. I also have interesting movie and reading lists: Frankenstein for Modern Europe, and Faust and The Communist Manifesto, plus a DVD of Verdi’s La Traviata for the Humanities class. I don’t know yet what novels I’m supposed to read for the Victorian Literature class, but I’m VERY excited (I’m a big Dickens and Brontë fan).

Anyway, wish me luck! I’ve done very well the past 2 semesters, but this semester is really going to test me. I only hope that the material is interesting enough for me to keep up with. LOL!

Our New Home!

We haven’t yet bought a couch, nor are all of our pictures up on the wall, so I haven’t taken any photos of our new place since we’ve moved in and unpacked. I’m waiting until these last things get done. But, I wanted to share some of the photos we took the night we dropped off our first boxes. The rooms are empty, but at least you can see what kind of place we’re now calling home.

This first photo is of the outside of the house. You can see our front porch and our garage.

Now here are two pictures of our living room. It’s really nice and big.

Here’s a picture of our kitchen. The room at the end is the laundry, and the picture is taken from the eating area, which is pretty big.

And here’s our big (but very dated) bathroom. The windowsill is now covered with all my perfumes!

Finally, here’s a picture of our front yard. We don’t spend much time in it, but I think it’s kind of pretty.

I’ll be taking some more pictures once we have all our furniture set up. It’s already feeling very homey and it’s extremely peaceful here. We definitely made the right decision moving here!

So Depressed Today

Even though I woke up feeling good, my mood very quickly slid downward until I was moping around the house all day. It might just be hormones, but it scares me when my mood gets this low. Especially because it was triggered by something so insignificant. My boyfriend was poking me in the belly and teasing me about my weight (I used to be super skinny) and I blew up at him. True, he does tease me about it quite a bit, but I know that he never means to hurt me. He has his own little Buddha belly after all. What I said was worse; I told him I wanted to break up with him and find someone who would treat me better. I didn’t mean it, of course, and he knew that, but I still think it was a horrible thing to say.

He’s been wonderful all day, trying to get me to smile, but my smile feels broken. I feel a little bit better right now, but I still haven’t fought my way back up. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

When Will Life Get Back to Normal?

We’ve been in our new home for about two and a half weeks and life still hasn’t returned to normal. Of course, this move went much less smoothly than our last one. For one thing, we didn’t have any help loading the U-haul, so my boyfriend pretty much did everything himself. My brother, sister-in-law, mother, and 2 year-old nephew came to help us unload, which was great, because by that point, my boyfriend was exhausted! We got everything unloaded, returned the U-haul, and spent our first night here in Gig Harbor. Our first full day was spent unpacking, with books being unpacked first…even before our clothes! We lost a bookcase during the move, so we eventually bought a nice new bookcase, even larger than the old one. Even so, with two full-size bookcases and one small one, we have about 5 boxes of books in boxes in a storage closet…they didn’t make the cut to be unpacked.

We had to go all the way back up to our old apartment to clean up and get rid of a few things, including our old couch, which we gave to Value Village. We also took advantage of our remaining internet connection to order some new utilities, including new internet and TV service. Unfortunately, because no one at Comcast came online to set our appointment date, we didn’t get an install. We had to wait another week and re-order before we got an install date. So, for the first 2 weeks here, we’ve had no internet and no cable. We only just got reconnected this past Monday. It was weird being out of touch for that long – I don’t recommend it! The only upside is that I got a lot of reading done!

Now we are basically all moved in, except that we don’t have a new couch yet. We don’t have a lot of money (I’m completely broke), so we’re going to have to wait until school starts on the 25th and we get our financial aid payout before we can buy the few things we still need to get. Our living room has just three armchairs, so no way to really lounge in front of the TV. We also have one more box to unpack, which is sitting right next to our most comfortable chair and it’s acting as a side table, so I’m not in any hurry.

All I want to do for the next 10 days is relax, watch the Olympics, play with my new On Demand service, and get some more reading done before my school reading begins. I have a feeling that this new semester is going to be very reading and writing intensive. One bright spot is the arrangement we’ve made with my brother to babysit my extremely delightful and well-behaved nephew once a week this fall when my brother and his wife go back to work. Benjamin is a complete joy and he absolutely loves my boyfriend to death. Seeing him every week is going to put all our school stress back into perspective. It’s like therapy.

A Long Absence

My apologies to my readers…all, like, 4 of you. I had no idea that moving would cut me off from the internet for 2 whole weeks. Alas, it’s taken longer to get an internet connection that I had planned, but by Monday, I should be plugged back in to the online world and I can resume my blogging. I haven’t forgotten you all! I hope, very soon, to post up some pictures of our almost-completely unpacked new home, so you can all see in what kind of squalor I live. Seriously, though, this is a terrific new home and I am very happy here. And from the enthusiastic hammerings going on in the garage, I would say that my boyfriend is happy here, too.

Stay tuned for more moving-related excitement!