Scrapbooking All Night Long!

Since finishing my test, I've been busy making sure to have lots of fun and enjoy my weekends more to eliminate some stress and get rid of my heart palpitations that my dr. says is stress-related. The cure: exercise, exercise, excersize, have some fun and get away from the news.

So, as part of my medicine, I invited two girls from work to come over on Friday to scrapbook and have a barbeque-- Paul was included in the barbeque but opted to watch movies while we worked on our albums.

Now, I'm not known for my late hours, but if I am busy working on a fun project, I can do ok.

But even I was surprised that we made it all the way to 4:00 am! Everyone crashed out for a few hours' nap and headed out by 8:00 to their various activities.

I had a dry stone walling class at 8:30 at a local Presbyterian church cemetery. This was really fun and I found out about it when I met the Stone Man at the garden show I went to a few weeks ago. He said to come on by to help out on this volunteer project of restoring the 300 year old church wall that borders the back property line behind the cemetery. It was a really really fun event and we ended up building a section of the wall that was about 30 feet by 4 feet high! All without mortar-- looked straight out of Scotland.

After the wall experience finished at 2:30, I went back home and Paul and I went for a walk, to Starbucks for a hot chocolate and then we had barbecued hamburgers and watched movies until 10:30. I did all this without a nap and I impressed myself immensely!

This week I'm dragging a bit at work, but since I'm just monitoring the safety of several workers on a site, it's not terribly taxing.

Have a good week!

The Garden Show experience

What a show this was! The Southern Spring Home and Garden Show in Charlotte was fantastic! This was the 49th annual event and I thought every bit worth the time to go. I sat in on a talk about organic gardening, and was impressed by the amount of booths set up that were focused on environmental decorating or water conservation tools and green architects... it was really neat to see environmental consciousness a bigger presence in the market.

The show was completely indoors, which was a surprise, but the landscaping competitors did a phenomenal job of making the surroundings look real. Of coarse each landscaper was there to pass out business cards -- it was really clever how it all worked.

In the landscaping area shown in the pictures above, there were intermingled home settings where interior designers showed off their skills in home decor. This room was designed out of environmentally friendly materials -- non VOC paint and fabrics, etc. I loved this room for its cozy feel.

Then in another part of the center, there were booths for folks to sell their wares. What is a garden show without the Gourd Lady? She made hand painted gourd decor and with enthusiasm! She was a real crowd pleaser.

I ended up coming home with some plants for the garden and then Darth Orchi II pictured here in his ominous glory amongst the tulips. I had bought Darth Orchi I when we were still living in California. He was a beautiful orchid, I thought, because of his originality. Paul thought he looked downright scary sitting on a shelf in the bedroom and thought he resembled Darth Vader. Of coarse Paul would think that since he is on a one-track mindset of Star Wars. But anyway, Darth Orchi caught some mysterious orchid disease after a year or so and I found out his roots were shot. So I did a emergency surgery, cut off the dead roots, dipped the base in rooting hormone, placed him in moist soil with an upside-down vase over the top of him to keep in the humidity. Paul immediately drew the similarities between the real Darth with his supplied air in the dome-like helmet to Darth Orchi and his dome-like oxygen chamber. So the name was truly a good fit. Sadly, Darth Orchi didn't make it and we missed him bad. I never saw another one like him until this show and so I couldn't pass up Darth Orchi II when I saw him sitting amongst the orchids at the orchid booth. Paul was thrilled and gave him a special place on his bathroom counter.

Geology Test Done

It is done at last! That's the good news. After weeks of studying (which should have been months) I can have my life back and hopefully start having some fun again. The bad news is that the test was way harder than I had anticipated, which is hard to believe! It was a gruelling 8 hours of 230 questions/problems to solve. I knew about 1 out of 10 questions, narrowed it down to two of 4 choices in about 5 out of 10 questions and the other 4 out of 10 questions I didn't even know what they were talking about! It's kinda funny really, to come to the realization of how little of geology, and the practice of it in the workplace, that I actually know. Even though I read the study manual from front to back, memorized terms, and practiced the word problems, I couldn't have studied that material for another 3 months and feel like I would have done much better because there was so much on the test that I don't think I've ever learned or even know where to look to find the subject matter. So bizarre considering I did well in school.

But it's not the end of the world and there's definitely more important things in life than my career (and this isn't a career-buster anyway). I couldn't sleep last night except for 3-4 hours because I was wide awake thinking of what I could have done better, will I attempt this again in 6 months and fork out the money or should I just go on and say this is one of those things to lay at rest and close the chapter. After all, I do want to continue working on getting my side embroidery business up and running and hopefully have children at some point before I'm too old!

I'm heading out soon to go to the Southern Spring Home and Garden Show with some friends. Have a good weekend!