February 1st, 2023

The weather lately has been really cold (unusually cold for Texas!) and rainy. Even in February. THis isn’t normal. It’s my absolute least favorite kind of weather, and a huge reason why I left Michigan to begin with. I have a hard time staying motivated, social, and even just getting out of bed when it’s cold. I can’t stand it.

DESPITE THE WEATHER

Life has been pretty good.

Work has been constantly busy. My schedule has been blocked off every minute of the day for about two weeks. Although it’s exhausting, a schedule like that makes the days go by fast and I feel accomplished when it’s over. I do look forward to a break here soon though because maintaining a schedule this busy is just not sustainable.

My relationship has been top notch lately. We celebrated our 6 months anniversary by going to sushi and getting wine to take home while we watch Netflix. The initial plan was to go to this cute little wine spot in town that we haven’t ever been to before, but apparently I cannot read and they were closed by the time I wanted to go after dinner. 🍷

This weekend we will be going to Dallas with a bunch of friends to celebrate my bf’s birthday. We have plans to do a winery tour, go bowling, go to the casino and have dinner at TexasLive (which i’m very excited about). 🥳

📸📸 An update on my last post, my GoPro has arrived and I am learning how to use it and can’t wait to start putting together videos. I’ve been watching as many youtube videos as I have time for to learn about how to best use my GoPro as well as video editing techniques and I’m still just as excited as I was before to get started on this journey.

I’ve been in a little bit of a reading rut because this weather is already making me sleepy and every time I pull out my book recently, I’m asleep in 10 minutes or less. Ooops. 🥱🥱🥱

For today, I’m working from home, trying to stay warm, and wishing for this cold weather to pass soon.

2/8/2023

Again, more BAD WEATHER NEWS over here. But instead of cold and gross. It’s more like this:

Also, not great for my serotonin levels, but thankfully, we did have great weather in Dallas this weekend for my bf’s birthday! 🎉🎉

We visited Lost Oak Winery and had a great tour of the grounds and got to taste a few different wines. Although it is not peak grape season, it was still a fun and informative tour and I learned quite a bit.

Most impressive was that white wines could be made out of red grapes!

Who knew. – Not me.

We also went to a fun dinner venue called Texas Live!, ate and bowled at Bowl and Barrel, visited WinStar (the worlds biggest casino) and had a lot of fun at the airbnb playing games and drinking with friends and family.

When we returned on Sunday I was ready to decompress and have some comfy couch snuggles.

Thankfully I was approved to work from home on Mondays and Fridays so I was also able to stay home Monday with my dog. Photo courtesy of a friend who was so kind as to watch Bentley this weekend while we were out of town celebrating. Thanks, Alexis. 🙏🙏

Work this week has been just as busy as usual lately, but I don’t mind it at all. I had a really great conversation with my boss recently about a project he had assigned to me that I felt was way over my head. I’ve had the project in my lap for MONTHS and made no progress so I had to address him and let him know of my failure and ask for help and that was tough.

Thankfully he took it well, put me on the right path, and is going to help me continue through the project until the end. BLESS.

Travel Goals: I’m hoping to take a long weekend February 17- 19 to complete another camping/hiking trip, but it’s entirely up to this weather. I’m still showing rain showers on the 10 day weather forecast, so more to come on that next week.

🗺️🗺️ I’ve also started looking at different routes and making travel plans for my overseas trip in May! I’m going to visit some old friends and roadtrip around the UK together. The hard part is figuring out how to get overseas without spending my entire vacation fund.

To add to the challenge, I will be flying into and out of two totally different places… so here’s to planning for MONTHS. 🥂🥂

2/17/2023 <– Not a Wednesday

Well friends, I wasn’t able to get a post up on Wednesday because I woke up with a sore throat that quickly progressed to an exhausting head cold. Unfortunately, I’m still at home, still fighting the cold, and trying not to go stir crazy.

You’d think with all this time at home it would be a perfect time to write and get some content up, but my sinuses keep acting up and my eyes keep watering and I have head fog, and I’m just accomplishing nothing.

I’ll check in as soon as I’m well.

For now, I’m binge watching old youtube videos from my favorite youtubers – @KaraandNate and @lostleBlanc. I also discovered a new channel I’m binge watching and growing to love @NicoleandMico. All three of these channels are travel vlogs. People who are literally living my dream.

2/22/2023

Well… I was sick last week, completely overbooked for work, and generally just exhausted.

And not only did I survive the weekend, but I thrived!

I planned a camping trip for the weekend, but of course I got sick so I cancelled Friday’s day hike and camping, but Saturday I had had enough of being on bed rest and decided to just go.

I drove over 2 hours to visit Fairfield State Park, which is closing down at the end of the month to begin construction of a new millionaire community with fancy homes and a private golf club and the likes of rich people. 💰💰💰

Despite that sad news, I feel very blessed I was able to visit.

Unfortunately, the headquarters closed at 4:00pm and when I arrived at 4:04pm, there was not a person in sight to stamp my State Parks passport, which made me sad, but I will be okay. The park is really beautiful and I can see why people would want to live there. (Not in support of closing the State Park, but understandable motive).

I created my first ever youtube short which I was pretty excited about. However, I made it only using the photos from my iphone and I had some really great ones (even some better ones) on my GoPro so I have to figure out how to balance blending the two.

I intentionally took pictures and videos both on my phone and GoPro this trip so I can practice using the two video editing programs I have Imovie and Capcut. I’ve never really used either of them so I’m looking forward to the hours of work I’ll put in here soon.

Work has been constantly busy. We have a lot of open positions in our department right now which means I’m constantly training temporary position fillers as well as training new onboarding staff when they arrive. I’m also on multiple search committees, which is incredibly time consuming. I have literally one project on my plate and I haven’t really even started it so that’s stressing me out a bit.

The days are going by quickly because I’m so busy, which is a positive. 👍

My Goals Right Now Include:

• Write a new post about the three parks I just visited this past weekend
• Play around with the footage I took and see if I can put together a real youtube video
• Put together two more short videos for the other two parks I visited
• Learn more about how the wpform for blog subscriptions work. I just added it to my site and I know I get a notification when someone subscribes, but that’s about all I know. Idk how to notify the subscribers if something gets posted. I am learning about all of that right now.

As always, see you next week!