when the sky falls.

i can't work in accounting forever.

i will lose my mind.

leaves will be falling down, down.

fall is coming, people. i have proof:

1. it's starting to get darker earlier. you can only notice this a smidgen though.
2. it's definitely staying darker later. proof of this statement is that i now have to turn on the lamp to get ready in the mornings instead of using sunlight. also the sun hits my silver dash in the mornings and about blinds me when i try to drive.
3. football season is a little over 2 weeks away (hail state!)
4. stores already have halloween candy out (thinking that makes me want to sew a costume. but i think i'll recycle a costume if i dress up this year).
5. school starts next week.
6. the low temp tonight will be firmly sitting in the mid-60s.
7. the tropics are getting more active.


yay fall!

i'll take my chances.

it's been a long time since i've logged on to this blog, and an even longer time since i've made any changes to the design. after looking at it a bit, i decided the owl layout was cute, but it needed to go. so out with the old, in with the new, more grown-up blog, with a few more custom enhancements. enjoy the new look yall! :)

all i want for christmas is you.

first of all, i would like to say how much i hate standard time. it's a lot. here are reasons why it sucks:

1. it starts getting dark at 4pm. i'm still at work at 4pm. so i miss all daylight except for the 20 minutes i drive to work.

2. it's a dark ride home, and pitch black when i get there. hard to check the mail when you can't see anything.

3. it makes me feel like bedtime is sooner. when it's been so dark for so long, i feel like i should be in bed even though it's only 7 (also that makes me sound way older than i am).

4. when i have an off day, and i choose to spend it shopping, i go to stores that have out christmas decorations and michael buble christmas albums on sale. add in the fact that it is relatively cold outside, and i start having premature festive holiday feelings. so then i go home and put on the aforementioned album and break my personal rule of only listening to christmas music in the appropriate christmas music season (from black friday to boxing day). and then i am ashamed.

5. as much as i love michael buble's voice, it is too early to have christmas carols and other christmas songs stuck in my head. and i definitely have "all i want for christmas is you" running around in my brain.

those last two parts are the reason why i hate standard time most.

tears are sometimes words from the heart.

maybe part of the curse of life is that we'll always long for what we don't have. very few, if any, of us are completely satisfied with what we already have.

is this a bad thing? a thought to distract us, to torment us?

or is it just a way to make us dream bigger? to rise up and accomplish what otherwise might not get done?

can it be both?

like the soundtrack of a july saturday night.

today i roasted marshmallows over half a lifetime of my memories.

in case that sounded too dramatic, let me fill you in on the specifics. when i was younger, i filled page after page of mundane daily activities into pink books with sleeping cats pictured on the front. later, i wrote mostly about boys and anything that could be defined as overly-dramatic teen angst into cutesy spiral notebooks. then it evolved into non-descript spiral notebooks of ramblings, some entries several days together and some spaced months apart. last post, i told of how i ripped out all the pages of them and put them into a cardboard box to wait until burn day. which was today.

i used a ridiculous amount of matches, sat indian-style on the edge of the newer half of the driveway, and burned almost all of my fingers setting random pages on fire before dropping them in the ditch below to turn to ash. i untangled a hanger and roasted three marshmallows while my cat sat a little way away and stared at me, clearly indicating he thought i was insane. half an hour into this process, when i have inhaled more smoke than is healthy and accidently scorched part of my left leg, and i was sweating in my black tshirt due to the august sunshine and fire, my neighbor comes across the street carrying his fat (and adorable) infant grandson. he walks around both assessible sides of the ditch to get a better look at what i was doing, all the while making small talk about how his youngest son (not the one with the baby) finished his master's program online and landed a part-time job at a college about an hour away and was bringing home $20 an hour for the effort. said son and i have maybe spoken a handful of times, even though he lives across the street, because he's about four years older than i am and more than likely went to a different school. shortly after my neighbor left, my elementary school bus driver drove her bus to the end of the driveway, opened the door, and preceeded to ask exactly what i was doing. after telling her i was burning pages in the the ditch, she asked why i didn't just shred them. i explained that if the penguin could tape together old papers, so could someone else, and i wasn't taking chances. oh, and i gave less-than-helpful directions to an old man in a minivan.

then i dumped a giant orange home depot bucket full of water on top of what was left of the ashes, collected the mail and leftover marshmallows, and called it a day. but none of that sounded as poetic or enticing as my first sentence, although it is a better story.

past.

under my bed is a small cardboard box filled to the brim with journals. i've kept every one that i've written in, every single page, since i was 8 years old. however, i keep thinking that i really don't want some future (or present) generation to find them and read how stupid i was growing up. and a lot of it details relationships that i am no longer in and no longer care about, so i never read them, either.

i keep getting random urges to clean out my childhood from my bedroom. hopefully i will be moving on soon (not that i absolutely hate living at home, because i don't, i am just really excited about the prospect of having a larger room, a larger bed, a personal bathroom, and all the decorating possibilities i can dream of). but i don't want to have to carry all of the stuff that is in my room right now with me for the rest of my life.

so, i think i may have a mini-bonfire soon. with the pages of all my old journals. my written history, reduced to ashes in my yard.