30 Day Challenge: Day 1

I'm such a sucker for these things. They remind me of the days of MySpace bulletins, where I'd waste the majority of a weekday evening answering survey after survey full of silly, pointless questions. Ahh, junior high. 


I feel like I've been out of the blogosphere for so long I literally have to go months back to catch up on all my favorite blogs. I was reading my friend Chloe's blog today and found that she made up a 30 day challenge like a week ago. It's a good one too! So I've decided I'm going to follow it. A good way to breathe fresh life into this old blog and hopefully get it rolling again. 


Here are the rules, I encourage you all to visit Chloe's blog and follow along too!
1. Your name, nicknames, changes to your name (if any), favorite usernames and meanings behind them. Insert your favorite picture(s) of yourself.
2. Some of your favorite things. Smells, songs, food, movies etc. Why are they your favorite?
3. Guilty pleasure things/secrets. That thing you like that people might make fun of you for.
4. Tattoos you have, their meanings, and/or tattoos you want to get.
5. Opinions on those things everyone argues about, brief or not so brief, and any one or more topics. (Politics, religions, rights etc) i.e. Things you feel strongly about.
6. Things you want, rational and irrational. Places you want to go, famous people you want to meet and more.
7. Working out: things that work for you; things you should do vs. what you are doing etc. Get motivated!
8. Style your hair in at least four or more ways and take pictures. Do you ever do these styles on regular days or for occasions? 
9. Comfort things; what do you do when you're sick to feel better? What do you eat/watch/do when you're having a bad day?
10. Childhood things; traditions and things that take you back. Did you have a favorite stuffed animal? What kind of books did you read? What were your favorite movies?
11. The best day; describe a good memory or the elements of a good day. 
12. Your best traits and your worst habits. Personal struggles as well as accomplishments. Balance it out. 
13. Things you're addicted to. Foods, sites, shows, whatever. 
14. Your favorite meal of the day and the elements that make it perfect. Obviously, post lots of delicious pictures. 
15. Things that make you jealous, whether it's possessions or people. 
16. Things you can't let go of. 
17. Something (or things) you haven't done in a while that you would really like to. 
18. Your hobbies or hobbies you would like to pick up. 
19. Your significant other. How you got together, your favorite things about them and maybe even things that bother you at times. 
20. Things you don't like that other people do. It's ranting time. Be specific.
21. Things that make you laugh really hard. Include some youtube videos. 
22. Your favorite video games and/or board games/card games/party games. Also include your least favorite.
23. Songs from your childhood/teenage years. Post some 90's/ early 2000's songs that take you back/make you laugh etc. Talk about the memories attached to them. 
24. VLOG DAY: take a video of yourself for this! Pronounce the following words: Aluminium, salmon, talk, caramel, lieutenant, mirror, scone, nearly, bath, grass, near, bacon, beer can, again, been, garage, process, hot, coffee, thought, not, tomato, potato, cheese, cake, Barbie, fond, duck, dog, cat, fish, chips, milk, friend, fried, disenchanted, sleep, dream, state, cinema, last ,lost, Raxocoricopalavitorious, antidisestablishmentarianism, dance, aunt, copper, win, one, on, herbs, rotten. Where were you born?
25. Three completely unselfish wishes for other people, and three selfish just-for-you wishes.
26. Some things you always think about. Where does your brain go when you try to fall asleep? 
27. Things you wish you could do. Skills, traveling etc. Include a video or pictures.
28. If you absolutely had to go back and relive a part of your life (say, a few months), what would it be? Would you change something, knowing it would most certainly have an effect on your future? 
29. If you could see a day of your future somehow, would you take the chance? How far forward would you go? What do you hope you see? What do you dread to see?
30. Admit or confess something. 


 Day One:  Your name, nicknames, changes to your name (if any), favorite usernames and meanings behind them. Insert your favorite picture(s) of yourself.


My first name is Emily, my middle name is Louise. I haven't made any changes to my name and I don't plan to, aside from maybe changing my last name when I get married. 

 I've got dozens of nicknames. Literally dozens. My mom called my "lou", "louie", "lou-lou", "lou-la-belle" and many other things as a kid. She still does, actually. My friends in middle school and high school called my "auntie em". some of them still do. I also got "mama emmy", because I was like the mom of the group at times. I also got just the standard "em" and "emmy" and of course "emi-lou". Stewie called me "emilem" all through our relationship and he sometimes still does. Probably the nickname that stuck the most was given to me by stewart's brother, brian. That would be "msoss" (it's pronounced em-sauce) or often just "soss". Brian calls me "sossy-poo" on occasion, too.

 usernames? hmm. lately I've taken to just using my first two initials (el) and attaching it to my last name. That's what college email addresses do for you anyways, so I just go with it. Sometimes I've used Emilemsoss (like on my twitter and stumbleupon accounts) because It's a combination of my two favorite nicknames. When I was younger I used to come up with all kinds of ridiculous screen names for use on msn messenger. remember msn messenger? does it even exist anymore? all I know is that is was all the rage in 8th grade. How else were you going to talk to your crush over summer? or before text messaging was something everyone had access to? I don't know if I can remember them now, but I can guarantee that many of them were cring-worthy emo song lyrics that I thought mirrored my life exactly. Thank god I graduated that phase. Now I just post them as my facebook statuses ;) jk. kind of.

See you tomorrow for day two!

Love,
Em

A visit from my mother: aka, all my problems are fixed!

 Last weekend, my wonderful mom visited me down here in Tucson. My dad came as well, but for the most part he was at my grandpa's house doing some work. So, it was pretty much a mom-daughter girly weekend. I thought we'd pretty much just hang out and maybe visit a few of Tucson's modest attractions, but we ended up getting a lot done!

A little back-story. My car, a 1997 Subaru outback, is great. However, over the past few months little things have been breaking or falling apart. Nothing serious, just aesthetic things. For example, my radio stopped working. Then my cigarette lighter (which is essential for my handy-dandy two-in-one phone and ipod charger) completely fell out. There were also a few things wrong with my apartment... I tripped a breaker (faulty outlet) and lost power to half my apartment. I still had my fridge, my stove, my internet, and my dining room light, so I put off calling maintenance and just waited for my dad (an electrical contractor) to get there. Also, as much as I love my little pup clementine, she wasn't exactly house-trained when I first got her. My apartment has carpeted floors and even though I tried to stay on top of taking her out frequently (and cleaning up the messes when I didn't), there were more than a few stains after 7 months. Enough to keep me from inviting anyone to my apartment. Finally, stewart moved out last month to get his own place, and took half the furniture with him. This left me with an empty living room, since the futon was his. My poor mother had to sleep on an air mattress on the floor.

But all that changed this weekend!

My mom borrowed one of those steam carpet cleaner things that looks like a vacuum from my aunt and uncle. At first I was seriously skeptic, and told her we could definitely try it but I seriously doubted it would make much of a difference. At this point I had pretty much given up on ever getting my security deposit back. After running a few other errands on the first day, I took an hour long nap and she decided to try out the cleaner. When I woke up and walked out into the living room, all I could say was "oh my goodness. oh my goodness!" over and over again. I was shocked! The carpet literally looked brand new. If you have ever been to my apartment before, you know how crazy that is.

We also went out to a little car accessory shop, where my mom bought me a new radio for my car- one with an auxiliary output, which my last radio didn't even have. AND, the guy fixed my broken cigarette lighter for free when he installed the radio. This combined with the ipod dock/charger that stewart gave me for christmas turned my previously mute car into mobile musical awesomeness.

Finally, while my mom was finishing up the carpet, she had me look on craigslist for futons. I found an awesome cherry wood one with a super comfy mattress for only 200$. The next day my parents and I drove out to buy it, packed it into my subaru, and then brought it home and set it up in my living room. I have a real living room now, people. Not just a barren puppy pee-stained room with a bookshelf.

Ta-da!

 The futon has a bed sheet over it right now, but the mattress is actually a lovely cream color with decorative cinches. I just moved the furniture around today, so some of the pictures aren't in the right places. I'll probably get to that tomorrow.

I took a picture of my typewriter, just cause I love it so much.

Anyways, it was definitely a super productive weekend. It was also a lot of fun, too!

My mom and I went to the Tucson Art Museum, where there was an exhibit of photographs of Frida Kahlo taken by one of her lovers. There was also an awesome exhibit of artwork featuring text/words called "con(text)". some really cool, inspiring stuff. We also tried the museum's restaurant, which I had been dying to go to for MONTHS. Stew and I tried to go once, but downtown Tucson can be confusing and hectic if you aren't sure where you're going, and since we didn't see it (or the museum) right away when led by my phone's gps, we decided to just get out of there and go somewhere else. This time, however, we did find it, and it was awesome. It's called Cafe a la C'Art- so cute, right? They have lovely outdoor seating with mosaic benches and pillows running around the perimeter, and lots of delicious sounding salads and sandwiches.

 This was a sandwich with baby spinach, havarti cheese, tomatoes, bacon, turkey, and apple slices on a ciabatta roll. It came with a small side salad and a thin asiago cheese and sesame seed cracker. sooo good. I will definitely be going back.

One other exciting thing happened last weekend, and that was Clementine's birthday! Clemmy turned one on Friday, February 24th. To celebrate I bought her a little "happy birthday" shirt...

a little green squeaky bear (although her mouth isn't big enough to make it squeak so she just chews on the arms and legs)

And of course a special birthday dinner. I also let her come to the pet store with me and sniff around at all the yummy goodies.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend and I definitely feel much more comfortable in my car and in my apartment.

I hope you all had a nice weekend as well, and a happy leap day! the world is back on schedule now.

Love,
Em

I'm back, and there's change a-comin.

Hello lovelies, it's been awhile.

This happened:

This is less than 24 hours after it was done. it's not like that anymore. If you can't tell, it's on my right chest.

This happened:

and a lot of this happened:

I can't really describe the past 3 months because they've really just been an absurd, emotionally strenuous (but also at times wonderful) blur. Linn- my boyfriend and best friend- passed away and that really shook the reality that our friends (his roommates) and I had come to know. There was a lot of crying, and a lot of talking, but even more silence and numbness which made things complicated and difficult in some ways.

Regardless, the experience brought us all closer together than we have ever been before. As best we could we put the horror in our minds aside and tried to connect with one another- sharing family dinners, having dance parties in the living room, drinking (probably too much) together, and on more than one occasion having snowball fights at 2AM in completely snow-inappropriate attire. I learned a lot about myself and about my friends, and although most of the time I felt (and knew) I was skidding along rock bottom, they kept my from hitting the ground.

As for school, I didn't go back. Not for the rest of the semester anyways. I attended one class on the last day to turn in all my assignments from the entire semester. Luckily, none of my professors hassled me at all. I turned in half a semester's worth of work in one week and pulled off a 3.0 average for the semester. Not too much worse than what I would've gotten anyways (I'd like to hope).

I'm back now though. It's a new semester, and new year, and I just can't justify continuing at the pace I've been going at any longer. When Linn passed, I let all my responsibilities and good judgements slip away and put myself first. I let myself take the much needed time to process and grieve, and I stopped thinking about things like doing homework, eating right, working out, and generally just taking care of any part of myself aside from my emotions. And now, while emotionally I feel much better and I feel I've learned how to cope with and manage my everlasting sadness at losing Linn, I feel like shit physically and mentally. So for the next few months at least, you all get to watch me pick up the pieces and put myself back together into the person I want to be, the person I used to be. This girl:

The girl who eats lunches like this:

and throws brunches where she makes shit like this:

and takes pretty pictures of flowers like this:

and takes silly webcam photos like this:

Not the girl whose DSLR has been sitting in the back seat of the car I haven't cleaned out since summer for god knows how long.

I'm going back to an all vegan diet, but here's the thing: I love being healthy and good to my body, but I also love to cook! And it's hard to develop your cooking skills if you limit yourself too much. Also, there are a gazillion recipes I want to try which contain meat, dairy, or eggs in the original and yeah, I could sub, but I'll always wonder what the dish was meant to taste like. So I'm allowing myself a max of one cheat day a week where I can cook something new (or an old non-veg favorite) and not feel bad about it.

I'll also be attempting to get back into working out, but I'm going to have to get more adjusted with school before I really set up a regimen. I'm just going to go back to my tried and true one that I love, but I have to figure out scheduling.

The most fun thing I'll be doing over the next few months, though, is whipping out those 20 things I want to do in my 20s. A couple I've done and just haven't posted about yet, but a lot of them are going to take some serious time and effort, and I'm running out of the former! My 21st birthday is on May 10th, and I'd really like to give this project my all. You might want to check back on the page in a couple days, because I'm making some minor tweaks to the list. For example, #10- invent a cocktail, name it the soss. Really an endeavor that makes more sense to do in my 21st year, don't you think? So instead I'm going to make a sauce. A really freaking good sauce that would bring magic to whatever you dump it on. And name it "M Soss" (my full nickname). A couple other things need tweaking too, but we'll cross those bridges as we come to them :)

Anyways, at least for a little while I'm not going to be doing my regular features such as movie mondays, tasty tuesdays, lovely little things, etc. Since I'm just stepping back into the blogging world after going on a verrry long hiatus, I don't want to make any promises I can't keep. As I get back into my blogging habit, I'll begin reincorporating them in with my regular posts.

But I think I'll have plenty to post about anyways.

So, welcome back to GO1000F! Thanks for still being here :)

<3
Em