One of the eggheads

Today, after spending my usual 1 to infinity hours in Dr. Hill's office, I tagged along to an academic lecture on Thomas Aquinas being delivered by a UTM philosophy professor. And boy oh boy did I feel smart. Well, at least, the language Dr. Brown used wasn't way over my head, I followed the Q's in the Q&A session, and my attention span gave out around the same time as the two professors with whom I had come to the lecutre. We all three gave up on listening after being there for an hour and fifteen minutes and instead focused on attaining the refreshments in the back of the room.

All in all, it was a very successful afternoon. I was glad that I lollygagged around after class for long enough to catch the local nerds heading over to the lecture; otherwise, I would have missed out on the opportunity to feel like I could actually someday maybe be these peeps' intellectual equals. In fact, I will officially be on an equal playing field (Sort of, sans PhD and whatever) as these very egg-headed men in just 88 days. But who's counting? Today I told someone that the day after graduation, I will be coming up to the university with a sole purpose of calling every professor by his or her first name and not feeling weird about it. Except maybe Hill and Glass...might still feel weird about them, but at least my family's cool with referring to their family by first name and the two of them as Dr. Lastname.

In other news, my dogs may kill each other before they can ever successfully procreate. Skippy is the most hapless courtier I have ever met...could have something to do with being a chihuahua.

Sleep is taking over my brain, and I apologize if this is incoherent. I didn't want to leave my friends and family hanging, now that I'm reintroducing the regular blog posts.

Summer Vacation!

Interesting how my vacation begins just as everyone else down here is going back to school. I'm not complaining. For the next two weeks exactly, I have no college class, no final, no worries, just making money to take up my time. Another fun college fact, I have a 4.0 at Martin. I know, I've only taken 3 classes, but by my third class at Penn...I had to withdraw from one in order to not fail my freshman fall. Yayyy for being invested in my education and yayyyy for not being in a cut-throat money-hungry college anymore! At the moment I'm in the top 25% at Martin, but I'm hoping to keep climbing as my Penn GPA gets tackled by the classes I take from now on. They don't have Phi Beta Kappa at a low-key school like this, or else that would be my goal by graduation. Hahaha

Anyway, I've been enjoying life for the past week. Not only did it feel super good to be finished with school, but I had a light work week and plenty of time to work on some Parrrrty things for Lara. Plenty of pre-purchasing has been done, but no true official crafting has begun. So continue to stay tuned. The sewing machine will eventually be kicking up dust, and things will be built. No, certainly not cryptic at all. Also last week, Thomas and Lara went back to school! Thomas' first day was Wednesday, and Lara's was Thursday. First grade and kindergarten! They are some big kids. And as if Lara weren't big enough, I took her with me to college on Friday; she didn't have school, and I needed to take two finals in order to pass my classes.

Lara and Pandy the Panda Bear being very studious in the library...playing games on pbskids.org..

Typical college student, passed out surrounded by snacks and study materials.

Lara did great at staying quiet while I took my tests, and of course everyone thought she was just the most beautiful person they'd ever seen. So it went pretty smoothly, I have to say.

The thing that has taken up most of my time in the last two weeks has actually been grocery shopping, believe it or not. I started reading a lot on this blog about meal planning and money saving, and it inspired me to not enter married life as the brokest housewife ever to cross the planet. The writer of that blog feeds her family of 5 on less than $200 a month, which just about blew my mind when I think about how much Matt and I can spend on a Sunday evening if we go grocery shopping together. It made me really stop to think what kinds of dinners I can make that aren't just heat n' serve frozen foods. The answer, two weeks ago, was really not that much. July 29th marked the first day of a two-week (TWO WEEK!) meal plan, for which I did all of the grocery shopping at the beginning of the time period. (Sunday's dinner, on the meal plan, was frozen pizza. I know, I was off to a great start on this whole "from scratch" thing. Haha but I knew it was in the freezer so I didn't see any point in not eating it! Especially because my plan was never to eat frozen pizza again for awhile!)

And can I just say, honestly, that grocery shopping trip where I bought all of the supplies for all of Matthew's, mine and the kids' dinners (just dinners are on the plan) came in at a cool subtotal of $76.00. I near enough fell over in Walmart. Meal plans for the win. $38 a week for dinner for four people. Anybody else excited? Okay good. Because I was really excited.

We've been a lot worried about money saving as we gear up for this here combination of finances taking place on May 25th, 2013. Mostly because there is a big long laundry list of "Stuff We Want to Do" in the next, oh, 5 years or so. And as things do, they all involve some large sum of money that we have no obvious way of obtaining. I guess we'll just pray about it and do those of the things on the list that we can!

I think that's most of my updates for right now! Next weekend we're going to an air show with lots of WW2 fighter planes and other stuff of that nature. So I'm sure history buffs will enjoy my pictures, but I'm sure most others won't. Something to look forward to! Hahahaha

See Y'all!
The future Mrs. McCaslin

I Promise I'm Just Boring...

...And that's the only reason I haven't blogged. I'll tell you what I've done: school, driving, work. That's every day for me. Right now I'm sitting in the library at school because I finished a theatre test early and have 3.5 hours before I have to be at work. This and other similar moments are really the only available time to update, and even now my time would be better spent doing homework. I just don't have the motivation. So aqui estoy!

I would like to put out an open invitation to anyone that wants to come over and help me make some accessories for a one Miss Lara the Fair's Birthday Party. Further details will be disclosed after the party takes place...I don't want to let all the secrets out! ^_^ But the main point is, I'm going to be having a whole bunch of fun in the next 5 weeks, getting ready for what promises to be a really cool birthday theme. Trust Lara to come up with an awesome birthday theme all by herself. Hit me up if you want to be part of the crafting frenzy between now and then! There will be things to cook, bake, sew, draw, and anything else you could imagine. I'm pretty excited.

This weekend we have a little bit more going on. I don't have to work and I get to hang out with the kids allllll day tomorrow (it's been too long since we got to have an all day long play date to ourselves). So maybe we'll all get to enjoy a little bit more of what's going on in my life, post-weekend. I may even do a Sunday weekend recap. Maybe not, though, because I do have several assignments to do for my classes next week. Starting August 10th, though, no more school until the end of the month! Do stay tuned for a bit more fun adventures! I promise that eventually life will slow down, and I'll catch up the way I was for awhile. Right now, though, I'm going to hit the road for Dyersburg and have a lunch date with my man candy before I have to go to work. Doesn't that sound fantastic? Agreed.

Side note: I somehow broke the zipper on my shorts this morning. Can I fix that? Or do I have to buy a new zipper and sew it on...? (Note: "somehow broke" could possibly be attributed to the fact that I bought them on Clearance at Wal-Mart for $4.00. Just sayin'.)

See that wasn't so measly of an update after all, was it?

See Y'all!
The Future Mrs. McCaslin

Fantabblyastic News!

When I typed out that ridiculous title, the post was actually going to be about my Tennessee residency for college this summer. In the last 30 seconds since typing that, however, I realized I have other fantabblyastic (now that I had to type it twice I just feel stupid for even thinking of it the first time...) news: My big brother Johnny has lived for a whole 23 years! That's a lot of years without getting struck by lightning or anything else crazy like that! So I'm very happy that it was his birthday yesterday. Whenever it's a loved one's birthday, I always smile and feel the need to tell everyone why that day is special, every time that I write down the date. Which, when you work in a deli that needs to keep track of expiration dates and stuff, is quite a lot.

So, Ynnohj, although neither of us are as cute or stylish as we were in this picture, I still hope you had a great one. We haven't been together to celebrate in awhile so I have no idea what all you got up to yesterday. Hopefully somebody made you a cake :) If not, I'll make one for you this weekend for Mother's Day.

Moving on!

After all of the stress and trips to the library and searching for a notary public in the nearby vicinity on Monday, everything worked out. The college wrote me an email on Tuesday afternoon saying that I had been granted in-state residency. Holla holla! This means that I will be starting classes in the first week of July and not stopping until I have a degree. Hopefully. If I, say, get married or have kids or something...I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Until then, college. Because minimum wage is very difficult to live on, especially when your car gets 19 miles to a gallon and you live 20 minutes away from your minimum wage job and have to like, pay for stuff.

Anyway chitlins, that's my good news for the day. And I know, I know there is more going on in my life. I haven't told you about any of the cool stuff that we got up to last weekend. I didn't even tell you what was Wonderful about Yesterday. It's rough going. I will be stuck in an airport for enormous quantities of tomorrow afternoon so expect updates tomorrow night (maybe earlier, it depends on if Houston has free wi-fi in the airport.)

I must go get ready for work at 9:00. It's been lovely.

See Y'all!

TFMM