Ice, ick, and furniture.

I took Amanda to work this morning at 5 am. She volunteered for overtime and while that is fantastic and I am glad she could get some, we just had a big ice storm move in on top of all the ice and snow that has yet to melt. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining about cold and lovely winter weather, on the contrary, I love it. I don't even mind driving in it, what bothers me are the other people driving it in. 4 wheel drive doesn't mean 4 wheel stop. Spokane is shit at plowing their roads, especially if they are residential, and this morning, I had to pull over because a Semi-truck was far to close for me to be comfortable and it was spraying a wave of dirty slush-ice at me. Then, as I tried to get back on the road, some jack ass coming up from behind didn't want to slow down and flashed me with his high beams. Really? No, seriously, because I can't tell that it's taking me extra time to get back on the road because my car is caught on a little patch of ice and you might actually have to be inconvenienced for all of 30 seconds by having to slow down. You never should have been driving that fast on icy roads to begin with, moron!

Now that that rant is out of my system... I am sick again. This time it feels like a head cold that's trying become a sinus infection or it's just a straight up sinus infection. Not totally sure, just know I'm not sleeping very well, my face and head feel awful, coughing, snot ick and drainage, and my teeth hurt a bit... so yeah, probably sinus infection. I've been self medicating with lemon ginger tea, a ginger tincture a friend made, a homemade chicken enchilada soup, coco, and water.

Behold! I finally got a hutch!

Okay, ignore the mess on my kitchen table  and bag of bags. A hutch has been on my semi-secret wish list for many years. As someone who has grown up with a hutch in my parents house for a time, and two in my Grandmother's house, hutches have always been nostalgic and make, for me anyway, a house feel more like a home. 

This one popped up on Craig'slist last Thursday for 50 dollars. It came with a matching table and 4 chairs. We don't really need another table or 4 chairs, but we agreed to both because the seller needed money to fix their broken car and they had an infant in the house. It looked like they were selling pretty much everything to get the car fixed. We decided to give the table and chairs to a friend and her boyfriend for their soon-to-be-new- apartment. This hutch came at the best time for us. I had  reached my limit with our apartment and its lack of storage. Sure we have been sick and the holidays did us in as well, but it just seemed like we couldn't make anything fit without it being messy or me getting overwhelmed.  So, below are the bigger appliances that don't really fit in the cabinets, dish towels and tea towels are in the drawers, my tea and a couple of my tea pots are in the display cabinet along with a bag of kitty treats. On the shelves we have most of our coffee cups, my tea making supplies and some herbs, and the bottom shelf is a nice little altar because I wanted something pretty. 

Just having this has made so much of a difference in my kitchen cabinets and made my kitchen feel more like home to me. I am not sure I like having so much white and had thought to paint the cabinet a light blue or green, but my Dad thought that might make it look more Swedish or Swiss (?) can't remember. Which of course is nice, but not really what I am going for in the kitchen. I thought about redoing everything Gothic fantasy like the living to tie the two rooms together, but you know what, I really like my greens and blues and I can still have the gothic fantasy charm in the kitchen without changing too much. So for now, anyway, the hutch will remain white. I also cut out some of the mermaid coloring pictures I've done and might put them on the backs of the shelves to break up some of the white... maybe, we will see. 

Lastly, I was holding Thorin an hour or so ago and my phone rang. He reached for it as my friend Fiona, who is up for a visit, handed it to me. Amanda was on the line to tell me she is staying a couple of house late for more overtime, but before she could tell me that Thorin pressed his paw to the my phone screen and hung up on her. I had Amanda on speaker and when I tried to call her back he tried to hang up again. I had to move the phone out of his reach and thankfully, the little shit was too lazy to move to chase after my hands for once.

An eventful morning, one pair of glasses, and story critiques.

Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade works characters Archer and Rin tohsaka

Okay, I found another anime that I am in LOVE with and it is called Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. I've had it in my Netflix queue for awhile and just decided last week that I was going to watch it. It is wonderful! It's also a little dark and heavy, which I love. I really want to see the other Fate/Stay anime and see if I can't find books and what not. 

Moving on, one pair of my glasses, the black frame cat-eye ones that I really love, aren't really working out. I think maybe the prescription is a little off and that they are a tad too tight. So, I may have to send them back to get readjusted. *sigh*

This morning has been eventful. I woke up really cold, got up to go to the bathroom, and had just settled back in bed when my phone rang. Poor Amanda was sick at work and needed to be picked up. Since the jeep is still not fixed and she took the car to the park and ride this morning, I had to call a friend to take me to get the car. From there, I got Amanda, of course. There's been some roadwork the way I normally take to get home, so I automatically went the way I've had to take to get home, only some asshat was riding my ass far too close and distracted me just enough that I turned up Stevens instead of where I usually do. So finding my way to the highway again was a short adventure. Of course, not before some other asshat decided his shiny SUV deserved to take up the whole road and nearly run me off of it. Bastard.  Then, I passed my bank where I needed to make a deposit, had to turn around and go back. That was obnoxious, but at least the drivers were better.

So now we are home, Amanda is asleep on the sofa next to me, snoring terribly. She'd been kicking me in her sleep a lot lately, so I told her if she does today, she will be sent back to bed. I have some chicken and broth slowing cooking in the crock pot to make soup later.  

I discovered that the author I wrote about in my previous post did not leave the book off in a cliff hanger, instead it was a teaser from the previous book. Leave it to me to get confused, then again why would a publisher put a teaser from the book prior in the series at the end of the series?

Okay on to the story critiques for my short story in my writing class. I like feed back as long as it is constructive. However, one of my fellow students seemed to get a little snippy in her critique of my story concerning page length. Uh huh. I don't think that special permission needed to be granted and if the instructor had had an issue with my page length, she would have said something in her critique. If anything, the instructor wants me to add a few more scenes. There were a couple of other things that she and another student commented on, like the glazed over death of a character I had to do to focus on the death of another. *sigh* Yes, I know, I am not happy about it either but I can't put everything everyone wants within 20 pages, not for it to make sense and flow smoothly anyway. Which is why I am going to tear the story apart and make it into something longer after the class is over. I just want to say, quit bitching.

Now for one of my critiques. I have been following another classmate's story since the beginning of the class. Last night I remembered why her story frustrated the crap out of me. Her writing. I sat reading with my hand over my face through most of the story and there were a couple of parts that I actually laughed because no, just no, no, no, no, no, that's not how that works! Her story idea is really good and she did fix some stuff from the previous draft, so I know that she is paying attention to critiques. I also know that in the beginning I wrote like she writes, which gives me an indication that she might be just starting out with writing, but this is the last creative writing class before graduation. You can't take this one unless you have taken all the others. What was her writing like before? Has she improved along the way or not? I'm not trying to be mean, I just want her to be successful and at the moment, unless she self publishes, she's going to have a lot of work ahead of her to get where she wants to be. I would really like to see this story published someday. I think she could make a whole novel out of it, if not a series. There's enough foreshadowing to allude that there is a great deal more.