Weekly Schedule, Gifts and Cooking Meat

Goodness, how is it already so late? Ridiculous.

Truth be told, I tend to like the beginning of my school week more than the end. Strange? I know, but there's a reason for my madness. At the beginning of the week, I have less to deal with in my classes. As the week goes on though, I start getting busier and busier. However, usually after class on Monday, I have quite a chunk of time. Today was pretty busy though. Eh, what can you do.

Before I finally stop talking about my birthday, I want to show y'all the lovely gifts I received.

My mom and dad (really, all my mom) got me this nice running gear:

Plus, that adorable apron. I can't wait to use it! I also got a jacket and a purse from her, although the jacket was an odd exchange:

"Hey, do you like this?"
"Yeah, it's cute."
"Good, you can have it for your birthday."
Yeah, that's how she works. She likes having excuses to hit up Ross and TJ Maxx.

My sister got me two very cool things:

Tikki Masala Sauce and the metal tin thing. Apparently, it's a type of lunch box thing from India, how cool! Reminds me of bento boxes. I can't wait to use it!

Finally, my aunt got me this:

A dumbbell, you ask? That's strange. Well it would be, but take another look:

It's a clock! I saw this in a magazine maybe a year ago, and I thought it was the most interesting thing. No, it's not interesting because it's a dumbbell. It's interesting because it's an alarm clock that you can't push a button to turn off. You have to do bicep curls. This tells you how lazy I am, doesn't it? I'll try to make an alarm make me do bicep curls. I'm trying it for the first time tomorrow.

It seems the theme this year was clothing, fitness and food, huh? Speaking of food...

My hopelessness in the kitchen has been getting better, but there's always one problem I tend to run into. Whenever I'm cooking patties or a chicken breast or something, my pan always turns into a pan filled with chopped up or crumbled meat. Why? Well, whenever I'm cooking, it appears that the outside cooks, but the insides never do. Then, as a precaution, I always end up chopping it all up (Yes in the pan. I'm kind of ridiculous like that.) hence always having chopped meat. It's fine for now, but I really think a burger could be nice.

To all of you cooking out there, I have to ask: how do I cook meat and actually get it cooked all of the way through?

Welp, that's all from me. Some magazine reading is in order perhaps? Probably bed would be better.

What's the quirkiest gift you've ever given/received?

Learning How to Grow Up?

I've got be honest. I haven't gotten a good chunk of solid sleep in about a week. I've woken up at least once during the middle of the night every night for awhile now, and it's not just a wink and back to sleep. It's like get up, bathroom, lay there for awhile and take a bit to go back to sleep. My mom says it's my body trying to get sick again. Good lord, I've been sick for two weeks, I don't need it longer than that. Last night was the worst, including waking up around 4 and not getting back to sleep until about 8:30. Ridiculous. I thought I'd put that out there for the fact that I might seem to be a tad unstable.

After contemplating my birthday, I realized what my problem was. I realized that as you get older... birthday just don't really mean that much. That's a part of growing up. Maybe the reason that I had so much trouble with this is that perhaps I don't want to grow up. Despite acting like I'm a forty year old women who works in an office, I still want to be a kid. I feel old for saying this, but I can't believe how much time I spent as a kid wishing I was older. Why didn't I just live as a kid, and be happy about it?

That's right, no one does. Everyone looks to the future, looking for the exciting things that could be. The freedom, the ability to have a job, the cool things that adults get to do. Why would you ever want to live with bossy parents telling you what to do all of your life?

Who knows, maybe I am growing up.

I think the other thing that's been freaking me out about growing up is doing things I dreaded falling into. What I mean starts with a busy week, or busy chunk of schedule. After spending a lot of time trying to get things done, your body starts getting tired, right? So, once you're able to take a break, you want to take a BREAK. That doesn't mean doing the things you wanted to get done in your free time, no. That means becoming a zoned out zombie and wasting big parts of your evenings/free spaces/whatever. I didn't want to become that, but I know I've fallen into times where I'll get some free time and I'll simply space out to whatever things I can find surfing the Internet. I won't get my room cleaned like I told myself, or I won't read that article that looked interesting. I'll just devour whatever will waste my time, which will just end up spilling out of my head in an hour anyways.

It's just another case of just working at it. That's weird, trying to work to function normally? Yeah. Trying to force myself to live in the moment. I've gotten a lot better at this, but it's still really hard for me. Also working at not becoming the god-awful zombie. I've got to write these mantras somewhere or something.

I was really hoping that I could get to bed early tonight, but that's obviously not happening. Which means I can't take NyQuil to try and help me sleep, because it'll be too late. Which just pisses myself off more, but what can I do? I didn't have a lot of time to do this assignment that I've been working on before, and... guh, I can't even deal with this shit right now. Remember how I mentioned how I'm having a little bit of a difficulty staying stable? Yeah, you can see that coming out right now. I'd better get my assignment printed... I hate not having a printed at home that works.

What mantras do you work at following?

Happy birthday to me! Well, officially yesterday, anyways.

Instead of another bullet list post, I'll try to think of something coherent to write.

This was certainly a weird birthday. It didn't really feel like a birthday. It just felt like... a day. where I went out to eat, and had some cake. Ate until I was sick, but it's my birthday, dangit. Still, it just felt weird.

I ended up staying up way too late the night before, and ended up waking up early again. Probably not the best idea, but what are you going to do, right?
I went to breakfast with my parents. I told them all about how school is going. I did laundry. I went out to dinner with my cousin and sister, who made me an amazing cake. The levels included cream cheese and funfetti frosting, red velvet cake, chocolate mousse, and a brownie/cookie mix. YUM.

But that's it. I was going to run today, but with the maybe 5 or less hours of sleep, and my body trying to shut down from overworking it/being sick, I thought it was okay to not go.

Being that I just moved to my new school, I'm still getting to know people you know? So, I just don't really have good friends to spend time with over at UofO. It just stinks, you know?

Like I said, it didn't feel like anything very different. Just an average day, with slightly above average events. I know I should be complaining, but... it just didn't feel special. Shouldn't turning 20 feel special? Sure, I could have made an event, but I don't really know anyone at UofO. Who would I invite?

Still, I'm super appreciative of my sister and cousin for going out with me, and making me an awesome cake. My parents are pretty great for taking me out to breakfast too.

How did you feel about turning twenty?