Cheesy holiday goodness

Thought I'd make a quick post for this week before Thanksgiving, as I'm sure I'll have a Monday post for all of that craziness.
This past week I've been super busy with...everything. I've finally gotten a nice, perfect schedule going for my weeks that fit in everything from school to swimming. Earlier this week I remember thinking "ah, can't wait for the break"...

....but then I remembered that I have a ton of homework and papers to write and still have to keep up exercising...so I'll still be doing everything the same...just in a different location. -_-
The best part of this week though, was the past weekend when Husky visited. We visited our favorite cheese shop in town for a Groupon I had and found out they were having the last cheese tasting (ever) for a 40yr old cheddar. Needless to say we got tickets right then.

From what we were taught, cheese making is kind of like an all or nothing investment. You can try to age it for more years but you never know if it will actually make it to the next year. 15 is about the highest most go, and it was certainly the highest I'd ever had. Supposedly the story behind this cheese is a very old gentleman from Greenbay called the shop to ask if they were interested in buying his 28, 34, and 40yr old cheddars. They thought it was a prank call at first. Those ages are not only unheard of but a once in a lifetime kind of thing. Turns out he was a very old cheese maker who retired several years back. About a year ago he got around to cleaning out the cellar, not sure if he was moving or what the details are on why now, but in the very back he finds these old crates marked with the dates indicating how old they are now. At first he didn't think anything of it and so he sold the stuff to the fishermen in the local town for $5 dollars a pound....  Let me repeat that. 40 year old cheddar, that's actually $147 a pound, was being used at catfish bait. He had started out with 50 some pounds. By the time he called the shop he had 20ish pounds. My heart wept. Then I thought about going fishing.

The shop of course bought all of it and sent out cores to be tested and verified. Some of it was bad, from being so old, so they had to cut that off. Eventually they were left with 17lbs I think. I don't remember the exact numbers. Maybe it was 14lbs. Regardless, rather than sell it they decided to use the 28yr and 40yr in various cheese tastings so that everyone could have a chance to try it rather than a select rich few that would be the only ones able to afford buying it as is. The 34yr they are going to risk trying to age it for one more year and then do the same thing as the other two. 

What was most fun about all of this is that there will probably never ever be another 40yr old cheddar again. At least not in my lifetime...and Husky and I managed to get in on the very last tasting they had for what they had left. The whole tasting started with a 1yr, 5yr, and 12yr. Then we had the 28yr and the 40yr. The first three were paired with a local beer and the 28yr was paired with a port and the 40yr was paired with a 17yr old bourbon. It was really, really cool to be a part of something like that.

And of course, the 40yr cheese was fucking amazing.

I got a nice break on Monday when the city had their 99th anual Xmas tree lighting. It was super awesome. And today the oldies radio station switched over to Xmas tunes for the season, only this time I was able to play them till my little heart was content without anyone telling me it's too early. XD I love Christmas. I might just explode from happiness.

All study and no play...makes for unicorns

 I've been drawing a bit more normally lately. Finally ran out of room in the sketchbook and had to buy another one, so this was the first image I decided to put in it. :)

Pretty proud of it. It was taken from a pic closer to Halloween, since I'm sporting my awesome kitty socks and pumpkin earrings.

Last week I had one of those days where every little thing, that on their own wouldn't normally bother you, kept happening. It was just a bad day. I spilt 2 cups of cheerios in my car, was late for work, didn't feel like I did well on my test, and just didn't seem to feel right at all. I didn't even feel like being nice to the bible people at school.

Luckily it was only one day, and over quickly. For the most part I've been doing pretty well. I've been studying a lot lately. Actually, Husky gave me a few pointers on how to more efficiently study, in regards to my ADHD and OCPD natures of getting so distracted and also trying to get everything perfectly. The help turned out to be fantastic and I've been successfully studying for 2 weeks now! :D I still get a little distracted, which can't be helped, but it's leaps and bounds better than it was before. I'm really happy so I've been trying to stay on task with my homeworks and what not. Apparently, though, we've discovered that not only do I make little noises while concentrating (see a previous post with Ben) but I also make faces while studying...

The only problem so far has been when I try to study on little sleep. Things tend to get interesting. Earlier last week I pulled an all-nighter, which isn't new for me, to get some studying done. After a few hours in the lab (which was the only quiet place I could find) I finally fashioned a bed out of 3 chairs and slept for 3hrs before getting up to study more. Around 5:30am I went home for breakfast and then slept for another 2hrs before studying again.
The second time was with Husky. We went to his workplace, which is awesome and quiet, so he could get some work done while I studied. I didn't get much sleep the night before and after about halfway into the chapter I was having trouble focusing on the pages, which seemed to just get progressively blurrier. After a few more minutes of this my brain could no longer make sense of the book and came up with the only thing it could make sense of before I passed out and slept for the next half hour.

For the most part though I haven't had much trouble.

My favorite highlight of the past week was when I was visiting Husky and got to teach him some dancing. I love dancing and it's so nice to finally be dating someone who's interested in it too. While he's only a beginner he picked up the little that I showed him pretty quickly, and from just that bit I have to say I could have died of happiness right then.

If I had a time machine....

So I've been in the process of downsizing everything. There's much sorting and whatnot while I basically figure out what I don't need in my life and either sell it or Goodwill it. Of course I'm finding lots of things to distract me, during the process, but the real treat (usually for someone other than me) is when I go looking for something and run across my old diaries from middle and high school. I try to hide them from myself every time I do. My mom says they're good to keep for when you're older but I'm older now and still don't know why I don't just burn them. I can never keep myself from reading them again, even though I know the sheer embarrassment of what I used to be is enough to run away and become a recluse.

I had this thing where I would always address my diary. Each post would start off saying "Hey Diary" or "Hey, it's me again" and then end with me making up an excuse for why I had to go and then signing.....yes, actual cursive signing, my name. It was like I was writing a letter every time to this person named Diary...only much, much lamer.

One of my earlier posts from high school was written one night while I was up watching a concert on TV, performed by my current favorite singer at the time, Marc Anthony. At one point I write something about watching him and then say "He's so dreamy!" as if that was a usual thing to say. And yes, I did slant my writing in the diary to look like italics. It wasn't "he's so sexy" or "he's so hot"...Nope. I go for the vocabulary that nobody has used since 1965. I guess I can blame that on my family moving around so much while growing up, so I was pretty sheltered and didn't have much experience with what most girls got at that age. I didn't watch any teen shows and I certainly didn't have many female friends...or many friends period, for that matter, so most of my "boy experience" was gained from books, manga or comics, or suuuuper cheesy movies which tended to use some of the old school vernacular and situations that would never happen in real life.

So here I was acting like a fake girly girl just so I could feel like I was like the other girls in my school. Being a tom-boy in an all-girls high school kind of puts that pressure on you.

I continue writing about how "dreamy" Mr. Anthony is and then change the subject to write how I'd gone and gotten a glass of my mother's box wine and that, quote, "Tee hee! I'm so bad!"

I'll repeat it again in case any one missed it. Here I was enjoying the TV coverage of the concert and had helped myself to ONE small sized glass of my mother's shitty box wine. Now several glasses at 15-16 is something to brag about but here I was with my one little glass, pretending I was such a bad girl for it and acting like it was the taboo of the century.

My parents were smart when it came to teaching my brothers and I about alcohol. When we were old enough to fully comprehend what it was (teens) they allowed us sips of their's every so often. It was also at this age that my father taught me about real beer and the amazing labor that goes into making it...not like this piss water that most big-name companies make here in the US.
This wasn't bad parenting. Actually it was just the opposite. What it did was, in a sense, make us realize that it wasn't a big deal and not something you need to go overboard on. I wouldn't say it numbed us to it because when we all got to college we enjoyed it thoroughly like most normal college students. But it helped us appreciate it more and kept us from going crazy after hitting 21. By then we were like "oh yeah, a few drinks would be great."  Not like "Wooo yeah baby! I'm 21 so let's parteh!!"
Though, on a side note, my mom did totally throw me a private 21st mini-kegger at home, with some of my close friends. :) Thanks Mom. Way better that getting shit-faced at some random bar.

What my parents did really helped my brothers and I mature about alcohol much faster than our peers, and for that I thank them. However, like I said, I was undergoing peer pressure in high school to be a girl and to be a rebel teen. But because of my upbringing with alcohol, and respect for my parents in general, I could only bring myself to take one tiny glass...which for some reason felt like it was groundbreaking nonetheless. I'm sure if I'd kindly asked my mom before she went to bed, " Hey, Mom would you mind if I had a small glass of your wine while I watch the concert tonight?" she might have agreed. So I don't know why I felt it was a big deal but who the hell knows what any teenager is thinking?

And that's not even the worst of it. I was even MORE socially awkward about boys and social stuff in middle school! When I was 13 I was totally about boys. You'd think that was all completely normal, as like most 13yr old girls I fawned over the cute ones (even if they were total d-bags), had a list of cutest ones I liked (for me it was apparently Branden, Levi, Gorden, and Miguel), and wrote about them in my diary. But no. It really wasn't like a normal girl because the boy I liked the most, Branden, was a total douche and hated me...yet I drooled after him to the point where I knew all his classes, locker number, locker combination number, phone number, bus number, address, had 2 candid photos of him, torn bits of paper that I found hanging out of his locker, and a hate letter from him......

Don't belive me? One entry apparently reads (word for word including spelling), "We made Snow Bisciuts in Home Ec. and while we were eating our Bisciuts Branden came over and, just a min. my duck giga pet is calling. Ok I'm back, ah we were just getting to the GOOD part, as I was saying Branden game over to our group and asked if he could have one of our bisciuts!"
Another entry reads, "Branden said probly one or two words in class. Gosh he is CUTE!!!" Notice how it wasn't to me he said these words to. It was just in class...
And this didn't happen just once. I did it again in 8th grade to some poor guy named Eliot. Got hate notes from him too... You'd think I would have learned the first time, but no. I needed to learn the hard way twice before I realized that's not the way you go about displaying your affections for someone.

No wonder I got teased so much... between my wretched attempts at socializing, my 3 giga-pets that I apparently carried everywhere (duck, cat, and dinosaur), being home-school prior, and being totally obsessed with cartoons and comics...I'm surprised I wasn't left as a smear stain on the school hallways.

Taking control

Sorry for the lateness. Most of it is actually school related. I unfortunately didn't do very well on my first 2 tests for each of my classes and pretty much began spending all of my free time catching up and studying harder for the next 2. I did great on one and ok on the second, but improvement is improvement so hopefully I keep getting better. Luckily I got an extra 4 days of studying on one, due to the wonderful flu season.

I also had a number of personal things come up that needed to be addressed. While I can't fully go into the details about those things (to be respectful of the others involved) I can at least give a nice image that I think explains quite a bit on how I at least handled my end.

My therapist is really glad that I basically grabbed each situation by the horns and tackled any problems that I could on my own, figured out my plan for what to do, and prepared myself for what I needed...rather that freak out, let anxiety and/or depression take control, or become the below image:

As cute as it is, I think I much prefer the former of the two pictures.

I'm actually getting pretty good now at either knowing what situations I should and shouldn't care about, what should upset me and what I should let roll off my back, and most importantly recognizing the signs of my dysthymic disorder. Basically, I know when it's right to be depressed (someone dies) but it was harder for me to step back and realize that many situations I was in before didn't warrant that reaction (stressors in life like school, job, finances, or relationships). I not only can recognize the signs of when I'm starting to dip back into those "old habits" but I can also step back and realize why I don't need to feel that way, what I can do to change my situation so it either gets better or doesn't happen again, and do things to help reset my brain's chemistry and mood (like running and other exercise). I'm really proud of myself, and while I'd love to take all the credit I have to say 90% was definitely the help of my therapist.

Unfortunately, since I spent most of my time taking care of those situations, and my school work, I didn't leave much planning for blog posts. However, I did keep up some sketching here and there so that when I was able to post again I'd have something. Only thing is, they turned out to be mostly sketches with Husky and I. But hey! Sketches are sketches so here they all are!


My cookie recipe that I've been trying to perfect for months now has finally been completed. As with all my baked goods I tested them on my 3 male roommates and Husky. The result? My roommates have asked me to either not bake as much or give away the goodies before they eat them and then feel bad for it (the calorie count is not pretty), and Husky had this reaction when I last asked him about it:

He got sick while he was visiting me 2 weeks ago so I made sure to take good care of him, and even visited him during the following week to help out some. Was super happy that he prefered tomato soup with water and grilled cheese with Velveeta slices. Those are big point winners with me.

Speaking of point winners...you know you have a good girlfriend when she finds the reason below as a good reason to love you for...

Aaaand at the same time you've got a good boyfriend when he does things like this:

The last one is a joke between the two of us. We're so damn alike that we're becoming increasingly convinced he was cloned from me (since I'm older) and that somewhere in the cloning process something was changed, which explains why he came out as a male with just a few differences in likes/dislikes, life path choices, etc. Somehow we got on the topic of biggest pet peeves and apparently he hates Africa about as much as I hate stupid people.

And with that I'm off to bed. I'll do my best to get back on track next week with a more appropriate post, though this one turned out kind of fun too.