trip to the great white north!

If you read my blog at all while I was in Australia, you will remember the names Emma and Ayla. If not, here is an abbreviated version of who these lovely ladies are:

AYLA is from Toronto and we met my very first night in Canberra! We spent many nights watching Weeds and Entourage, many trips to Lighty and Belco mall AND got to take an incredible 3-week backpacking trip up the East Coast.

One of our trips to Sydney! What a beautiful city.

Learning how to surf at Seven Mile Beach! Hang ten!

Ayla and I going to Res Ball at our Uni in Canberra!

EMMA is from Niagara Falls on the Canadian side! We met at the exchange student orientation and over the course of 4 months, discovered that we are the exact same person. Except she is blond and I am not:) We had so many pancake-for-dinner nights, Office and AD quote wars and not to mention our awesome Halloween party!

One of our many eventful trips to Civic!

 

 

 

 

our pumpkins on Halloween! We were dressed as Bogans. Definition here.

At the French school's fete!

Why the reminiscing? Because I am GOING TO CANADA to see these 2 awesome girls on SUNDAY! I am spending 3 days in Niagara with Emma and her family, and then she and I are driving to Toronto to visit with Ayla and her friends and family! 

Also in the works is a reunion with 2 other UC alumnae, Bridget and Amanda from New York! We are hoping to meet up with them at the end of the week around the Falls!

Bridget, Amanda, me and Ayla on the gondola ride into Taronga Zoo in Sydney!

Even though we have emailed, Facebook chatted, text messaged, called and Skyped...it seems like it has been way longer than 9 months that I have been away from these girls! I am so beyond excited to see them!

Gimli! My new dog!

As of yesterday…I have a dog!

How it happened…

There is a wonderful couple who go to church with me that started house/dog sitting for this year. They have an adorable little girl who will be 1 soon and 2 little dogs; a Yorkie named Lucy and a Maltese named Gimli.

Amy called me on Wednesday to tell me that Gimli does not seem happy around their little girl. He has been hiding a lot and acting like he is sad because he does not get all the attention! She asked if I knew anyone who would give him a happy and loving home and I said YES! Of course I knew someone because I wanted to take him!

After staying at their house almost the entire month of June, I absolutely fell in love with this precious little doggie! He is 4 years old and is a tiny ball of white fur! He is soooo well behaved and is the best of both worlds: he will sit in your lap and cuddle but he also likes to sleep in his own bed and do his own thing.

I picked him up last night and Mollie and had so much fun with him letting him get used to his new home! I am so excited to take care of him and love him!

Gimli!

 

frequent mover miles?

1.       August 2005. Move from Mom and Dad’s to floor k6 of Hess Hall. Have awful first roommate but in November, move down the hall and have awesome roommate! Stay until May 2006.

2.       August 2006. Move to Crossing Place apartments with Stephanie, Emily and Jessie.

3.       August 2007. Move from Crossing Place back to Mom and Dad’s.

4.       August 2008. Move from Mom and Dad’s to Quarry Trail apartments with Stephanie, Mollie and Kathryn.

5.       July 2009. Pack my stuff up at Quarry Trail apartments and go back (again) to Mom and Dad’s while I am in Australia.

6.       August 2010. Move from Mom and Dad’s (last time?) to North Knoxville condo with Mollie.

Yikessss. Lots of packing tape, newspaper, trips up stairs and trips to Goodwill. For someone whose parents have lived in the same house my entire existence, I am definitely making up for the lack of moving now.

This current move (as in last week and yesterday, today, and probably next week, too) has been quite an…experience.

My dad’s sister and my awesome aunt Celeste, has owned a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo right off of Emory Road for 10ish years. For the past 2 , no one has lived there so it needed a fair amount of work to get it ready for my friend Mollie and I. My crafty and talented Grandma has repainted, refinished, scrubbed and cleaned that place top to bottom for us to live in! Last Sunday, our brand new downstairs floors were finally finished! Last Monday, I took a Craigslist-purchased desk over to the new place to check out the floors and unload some stuff. The very next day, our neighbor’s water heater burst…and ruined our brand-new, 2 days old floors. Oh dear.

We have been dealing with insurance and such the past few days and hopefully by the beginning of next week, there will be a check in hand to order new wood and re-do our floors in the living room and Mollie’s room.  Miraculously nothing was ruined, only dampened a little bit, but all of our furniture AND all of Mollie’s stuff that was on the floors is ok. Whew!

It has been so exciting to see this place come together and I know that when it’s all finished  it is going to look so pretty! I am excited to hang stuff up and do craft projects with Mollie to decorate our new home!

More on the ongoing saga soon…

my sweet teeth

If you know me, and you know me well, you know that I have a mouthful of sweet tooth-s. Cake, pie, cookies, brownies, ice cream, pudding, tart, cobbler, breads, bars...you name it, and I probably love it. Know those people who have aversions to coconut, nuts or certain types of fruit or chocolate? Not me. I love them all.

I recently bought a cookbook that we carry at work called The Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. When I first opened it, I turned to a recipe for Peaches n Cream cupcakes and decided that would be the first one I would make. Now that I have gotten started, the goal is to make ALL the desserts in the cookbook, Julie and Julia style, before the end of the year!

On Friday night I made a batch of Peaches n Cream cupcakes that turned out splendidly! They had slices of peach in the bottom and a bread-like cake over top of them. I made a yummy vanilla frosting for them, which gave me a little trouble because apparently I need a "paddle attachment" on my mixer?

I also made Banana Chocolate cupcakes, because I had a banana that was about to go off and was pretty much already mashed. They were also oh so yummy and had lots of cinnamon and ginger in them. I ran out of confectioner's sugar while making the chocolate frosting BUT I improvised by using more chocolate baking powder:)

My testers included Mom, Dad, Bethany, Granny and  Pop Pop, and various people at church who ate them at lunch today.

I am a HUGE fan of Key Lime Pie, but had always made it with using a pre-bottled lime juice. Today, I zested and juiced the guts out of 5 limes for my 3rd recipe! The only setback I experienced was that the pie is a little more on the yellow side instead of the lime green side. Oh well, I know for next time!

Coming up this week...Chocolate cheesecake! And coming soon at the request of Bethany...Chocolate Raspberry bars!

                                                 the frosted Peach and Banana cupcakes!

                                                                 my gutted limes! Haha

Oh. Hello. Didn't see you there.

Well Internets, I have done a pretty awesome job at updating here. I'm sure my 5 readers are all disappointed...

My life since Australia is sadly not as exciting, which was to be expected I suppose. So in order to aptly cover the past 5 months of my life, here is a chronological list of events from November to the present:

1. Came home from Australia.
2. Graduated. Christmas. Now it's 2010.
3. Thought about grad school.
4. Bought a GRE practice book.
5. Waffled on grad school.
6. Did not take the GRE. Still have the book, though.
7. Thought about the Coast Guard.
8. Changed my mind about the Coast Guard.
9. Doubted my reasons for getting a college degree.
10. Interviewed for HR job.
11. Did not get HR job.
12. Interviewed for administrative job.
13. Did not get administrative job.
14. Sustained major blow to self esteem, confidence, motivation and overall morale.
15. Watched 5 seasons of LOST in 2 months. (low point)
16. Finally unpacked everything from Australia. Rats.
17. Started planning my cat lady career path.
18. Interviewed for job at Bliss in Market Square (we are now in February, kids)
19. GOT part time job at Bliss in Market Square as sales associate
20. Part time job at Bliss turns into full time job at Bliss.
21. Started utilizing my degree by getting put to work on the Bliss website
22. Apply and get approved to be a Girl Scout leader in the fall for 3rd grade Brownies at Chilhowee Intermediate! Can't wait!
23. I turn 23.
23. I start the Instant Bliss blog.
24. Here we are!

I think that about covers it! Not much else happening in my world except trying to decide if I am going to cut my hair and getting pumped for family vacation in June, groundbreaking eh?

THE most exciting thing that is happening soon-ish is that I am going to CANADA to visit exchange girls! I miss EMMA JEAN so much! She and I basically became the same person and I have had an Emma void since November of 2009. I cannot WAIT to go see her and her hometown of Niagara in August!

Woo! That's all for now!

lucky 70!

This is my 70th post! I don't know if 70 is perceived to be lucky like 7 but I hope so, because this is probably the most serious thing I have ever written about.

20 years ago, my uncle Danny needed a kidney transplant. He was able to get a matching kidney from his mom, and for two decades it worked great! It is great that it worked for as long as it did, but while I was in Australia he started going into kidney failure again. People on both sides of our family started getting tested to see if they could be potential donors for Danny.

It is harder to find a match this go around because of the 2 different kidneys, his and his mom's. My mom told me I would probably not be a match, but I wanted to make sure. I knew going into this that I have a history with needles and such, so it was no surprise to me when I passed out and woke up in the ER of UTMC with an IV. Great, just great. I was informed a week later by the nurse that I was not a match either which is a huge bummer.

There have been 2 new options for Danny. One was a nationwide donor "pool" which was basically a group of 9 people who all needed donors, and the donors were all close-ish matches. It fell through recently when one of the donors backed out. Also, bummer.

Currently, we are hoping that an experimental therapy in Maryland works out. What I understand (and how my mom explained it) is that they give him a drug that "tricks' his immune system into accepting the close matches, which there are 2 of here in Knoxville. It is all very preliminary right now and we are all hoping to hear more news soon.

Danny is an engineer and is married to my mom's youngest sister Devah, who teaches kindergarten. They have 2 awesome and hilarious kids. Chloe is in 7th grade and is a smiley, peppy little cheerleader! Molly is in 5th grade and reminds me so much of myself when I was younger. She calls me Big M and she, naturally, is Little M.

I can't even imagine to be going through what they are currently, and especially during the holidays. Anyone who reads this please keep my uncle Danny and his family in your thoughts and prayers that he finds a match soon and is healthy in 2010!

hey world

I have been home almost a month now and I thought I would do a little wrap-up of sorts of my Australia trip.

I'm still not quite sure which adjectives to use to accurately describe it all. I LOVED being a temporary Australian! I love the people I met along the way and I can't wait to meet back up with them over the coming years. I definitely learned some lessons along the way.

Starting with it reinforced the fact that I have too much stuff. I took one suitcase and a backpack with me (granted it was pretty heavy...and I came back with 2 additional bags) and I could have left half of THAT stuff at home. I took clothes that I wore a lot, but never touched some things. In addition to clothes, I took 4 pairs of shoes, some assorted books and my laptop and such. Now that I am home and have a whole closet and more than 4 pairs of shoes to pick from it is a bit overwhelming. I have enough tshirts for probably 8-10 people. Oh my. Also, I had one towel and a shammy in Australia and I was fine. I have waaaaayyyy too many towels for one person.

I also learned that I honestly really love America. Not in an obnoxious flag-tshirt-wearing-bumper-sticker-on-my-SUV-sporting-we-are-better-than-any-other-country-in-the-world way, but in a genuinely interested and thankful way. I met people on exchange (and I won't say from which state) who knew absolutely nothing about the US. I am happy that my parents instilled a certain sense of history in my sister and I and it made me pretty happy to be able to explain things about America that people from other countries may not have known...like why we celebrate Thanksgiving and what's the deal with our flag. And what are chili fries...but that is another story :)

After being so far away, no distance will ever compare and I feel like I can handle literally anything that is thrown at me now. I don't feel as stressed as I used to and I find myself using Nah Worries on a daily basis.

Traveling the coast was BY FAR the best experience of the trip. It was so much fun to have a taste of backpacking, and I am ready to take off again! This time to Peru, wooooo! It was great fun to meet other travelers and hear their stories. So inspiring.

Since I have been back it has been way more difficult to get back in the groove than I had anticipated. I don't know what I was expecting or hoping for but it has definitley been different. Seeing my family and my friends has been awesome! But I'm not in class, like a lot of my friends, or needed at meetings/shows/group projects and finding a purpose once again has been pretty draining. I'm back with mom and dad for now, and I knew I wanted to stay at home through the holidays. I've been hoping to have a plan in motion by the beginning of the year.

And now Christmas is upon us! Even though I lost the fight for a real Christmas tree to my mom, the house sure looks lovely and festive! There was even some unheard-of snow yesterday! I'm enjoying this season and am holding on to Marley's words that every little thing's gonna be alright:) No worries, mate!

PS: I am very much enjoying being free from Voldemort, aka the very loud and inconsiderate neighbor I had for 4 months:) Bethany is much better; nice and quiet.