TILT – Things I Love Thursday: The End Of The World 12/21/12

Well it’s been pointed out to me several times that I haven’t updated my blog in a while. I wish I had a good excuse, but I don’t. I’ve been busy, sure, but mostly I just haven’t felt like it. I’ve been unmotivated and feeling down, so I’ve wanted to make a TILT post least of all. But like I have said on other TILT posts, when I least feel like doing it, is probably when I most need to – to remind myself that it’s not ALL bad, and there is still stuff I enjoy. And moreover, it’s not all about me. I mean, it’s my blog, it’s personal, but clearly I’m not the only one who reads it, and so it’s not all about me.


As a side note, I know today is not Thursday. But it also wasn’t the end of the world (as a lot of people who misinterpreted the Mayan calendar thought it might be). So the title is bunk either way. Here’s some stuff.

• Last weekend, I went Wassailing with some of my lovely neighbors. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. Basically it’s caroling – singing holiday songs outside of neighbors’ houses – except after the song we’d come inside and they would give us treats and boozey holiday-themed drinks. I wouldn’t mind doing that every weekend.




• If you’ve been reading for a while, you may know that I have a side business reselling vintage clothing, jewelry, accessories, housewares etc. Before moving to Oklahoma, it was al online, but now I’ve got three in-person sales under my belt and I’ve discovered that I like those much more. You can see some photos that I posted from my first one here.
  




• Over Thanksgiving weekend, I got to go fly down to visit one of my very favorite people in my life, Dylan. And he took me to the shooting range, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. This was my first experience even holding a gun. It was scary at first, but with his instruction it turned out to be more fun than I even expected. At first it didn’t occur to me to aim for the same place on the target over and over, but after I figured that one out, I actually didn’t do half bad! If anyone needs a zombie shot in the crotch, I’ve got you covered.





• That trip also upped my travel-count to having visited 11 states the past two months- not including airports! Only states I actually got out of the car in and went inside at least one establishments. The majority of those were crossed off the list during my move from Seattle to Oklahoma City.




• We got Marni an ugly Christmas sweater, at my insistence.





• Volunteered at Deluxe, which is an indie craft bazaar in OKC. There were a lot of great vendors with art and handmade wares, as well as locally roasted coffee, a graffiti wall for the kiddos and a b-boy battle. Mostly I was taking photos for them (which I’m still in the process of resizing and editing) and watching booths for vendors so they could take a break. Being broke made me have a lot of restraint, and the only thing I actually bought was a Christmas ornament for the ornament exchange at work.





• I finally found my box of comics and picked up where I left off! Currently I’m working on the Walking Dead series (at the time when I stopped reading them a couple years ago, I was caught up, but they have come out with some new ones since then that I need to read) and I’m almost done with re-reading the Sandman series again. Then I’ll get back to Preacher and The Boys. I have a bad habit of reading too many series at once and forget what was happening in all of them. So only two at a time from now on! We’ll see if I stick to that.





• Speaking of Walking Dead… Tyreese is finally on the show! He’s one of my favorite characters in the graphic novels so I was happy to see him show up in the last episode before the mid-season break. I’m curious to see how closely they follow his storyline.




• Christmas isn’t really exciting any more. It hasn’t been for years. It was as a kid, when I was with my family – or even just my mom, and we had traditions and things we’d do. But it hasn’t been much of anything for the past 10 years. I suppose it’s more fun for people with younger siblings or kids in their family, or maybe family close by, but when you’re all grown up and out on your own, it’s just meh. More depressing than exciting. BUT what is still exciting to me are Christmas decorations. I still love looking at all of the pretty lights and things, and Oklahoma City does it up well! Chesapeake has some stunning light displays on all of the trees on their campus, and Devon and the whole downtown area really made me just giddy when we went down there at night and saw the several-stories-tall glittery Christmas tree bulbs and entire streets full of businesses with their fronts encrusted in lights. Now if it would just snow, it would be pretty perfect.





• I went snow tubing a couple of weeks ago. Which, if you knew me personally, you’d probably think is out of character. I’m a wuss. I keep to myself and I don’t do things that scare me. But the past couple of years I’ve REALLY been trying to branch out and DO more stuff. Be more outgoing. Talk to people. Experience things. Allow myself to be uncomfortable. It won’t ever stop me from being an introvert or a homebody, but it makes me feel better about who I am and my life. I usually WANT to do things, I just don’t because they are out of my little tiny comfort zone. So, no, snow tubing is not something I would have done a few years ago. But I decided to this year, and it was FUN. Smacking my already-injured tailbone onto the frozen ground wasn’t fun, but the few seconds going down the slope was a little rush, and more of a rush than I’d had in years. Anyway, I’m proud of myself for doing it at all.




• I signed up for a gym. Something else that is terribly uncharacteristic. There are a lot of reasons that I decided to do this and I’m not going to go in to detail about any of them, but it’s another thing I’m proud of myself for. I’ve only been once this week, but weirdly enough, I enjoyed it. So I’m going to try to make it a habit.




• We went to the science museum yesterday, which was also fun. Mostly I had fun playing in the magnetic sand. I only got to see about half of the museum, so we’ll have to go back because I really want to see all of the space stuff! It seems the museum was mostly designed for children, but luckily we weren’t the only solo adults there.





• That’s all I can think of for now. I had really hoped to go back to Seattle for the holidays and see people and place there that I already miss but it didn’t work out this year. But I do have the next 5 days off from work, so I think that’s going to mean that I’ll put my septum ring back in for the next 5 days and that will make me happy too :)




Hope you’ve all been doing well in my month of absence. I’ll try to be better, scouts honor.