Favorite Things from January

Because I'm a blogger and I'm only posting three times a month now, I feel like it's best to update you on a few things I like. Let's get into it!

yarn things

firstly, I recently bought myself a YARN SWIFT for maybe $30 on Etsy. It's simple enough; you use it to wind large skeins of yarn into balls without the skein getting really messed up. I got a lot of yarn for Christmas and it was super helpful to have the yarn swift. I was able to start winding yarn from Christmas last year that I didn't get to because I didn't want the headache of trying to wind all of it and getting it all snagged on the back of a chair or something. but now I have this, and it's great!

I also really liked going through my old yarn; this month, I've realized that I have way too much yarn that's not going to go into any project. So I decided I'm going to make a blanket (or five) for someone who needs it more than I need that yarn. I know it would probably be better to give really nice blankets out of really nice yarn, but acrylic blankets are better than no blankets at all.

book things

I started (but did not finish) two books this month. The first is Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which a friend of mine gave me for Christmas last year. It was the perfect size to carry on the Metro for the first few weeks of my internship. I wish I had thought to bring it for the second half, because having such a small book would have been helpful in a crowded Metro train. The book is a nonfiction one about the development of the English language, which is actually more interesting than you might think. Linguistically, English is a hella weird language, and there are several reasons for that. Check it out if you're curious!

The main reason I didn't get more into it was because a good friend of mine (TheReviewingFangirl over at BooksMoviesandMore.Net) mentioned the series Outlander. When I was fangirling over All Souls last summer, she was fangirling over Outlander. Around Fall Break, we swapped. I know, I'm awful, because it took me until Jterm to get to reading it, but I like it so far. Now that I've actually got time to read for more than 20 minutes during Jterm break, I'm eager to get more into it.

writing things

I haven't well kept my "editing novels" new years resolution. HOWEVER, that's partially because I've been writing and editing a tour for a tavern during my internship. That was pretty cool. The main takeaway I got from that writing experience was more of an academic writing hack: to write out everything in an outline (or print it, or whatever), and then cut up all the sections and lay them out on the floor. It's easier to visualize everything if you can see it laid out like that.

In other writing news, I have kept up with the resolution of "writing a journal every day." I bought this journal from a Papyrus store last summer, and I finally started writing it more. It's really small, which is really handy. If I didn't have five other journals waiting to be written in, I would probably buy it again.

makeup things

I wore makeup a lot to work this month. It wasn't super fancy, mostly eyeliner and sometimes eyeshadow or mascara. I got two new eyeshadows in December that I wore a lot.

One was called Indian Summer from Maybelline. It's two-toned and very muted; one color is for the main part of the eyelid and one is for contour. In this case, the main color was slightly lighter than my eyelid and the contour was quite a bit darker. That made it ideal for everyday things.

The nicer one is also from Maybelline - it's 30D (Golden Star); it's a gold color with a dark blue contour color. I've got 0% credibility for mixing colors from huge eyeshadow selections, so I really like how both of these were just straightforward: FIRST THIS. THEN THIS. NOW LEAVE. Since Golden Star was more shimmery, I didn't use it quite as often as Indian Summer, but check them out wherever you get Maybelline things.

I also bought a bunch of eyeliner a million years ago from the drugstore - just a few pencil shades from Wet and Wild that are $1. I typically use either the dark brown shade, Pretty in Mink, or the dark blue shade, Deep Ocean. (Apparently, Deep Ocean's foothold into the Blue $1 Eyeliner World has been replaced by "Like, Comment, and Share," which is a terrible tie-in to the social-media-blue color of the pencil. I haven't used the lighter blue shade yet, but my dark blue eyeliner is nearly out and it makes me sad.)

SO HERE ARE MY OPINIONS! I wasn't sponsored by any of these. I hope you liked it.

See you next month!

What Am I Doing in Jterm?

So this January term, I didn't move back into my dorm. Instead, I stayed home, boarded the Metro on Monday morning, the 4th, and went to an INTERNSHIP! I'm working at a museum and it's been very interesting thus far. Like, genuinely interesting.
It's also been giving me research frustration, because there are only so many ways you can put your search terms into JSTOR before you start seeing the same things that you KNOW aren't what you're looking for. But that's what in-house libraries are for, right?
It's been an interesting month, for sure. I've learned a LOT of history things (I expected that, but still). The most frustrating thing so far is the number of snow days that have made me work from home. The city owns the museum, so we have to do what the city does. Since the city has been closed today and was closed on Friday, we've been closed too. I'm running out of things to do that are work-related. It's frustrating.
I'm hoping that the city is open tomorrow, just so I can actually DO something. My bus isn't running tomorrow, but the Metro is. I'm just hoping I have somewhere to go. It's irritating to have too many days off.
It's been a really cool month for sure, though. :)

What Posting Schedule Can You Anticipate This Year?

Well, it's a new year, which means it's a new time to figure out what I'm doing with the year ahead. This includes what I'm going to do with blogging.
To be honest, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this URL once May is over and I graduate. It's been a fantastic four years (both blogging and not), and I've kind of dated this time frame by saying it's for my college years. So there's that.
I don't know if I'm going to keep this blog going or make a new URL for something that's more relevant to my life as a whole, in the future, or if I'm going to keep this blog, change the URL, and... then what? I don't know.
Until the end of the semester, at least, I'll try and post at least three times a month. That seems to be manageable at this point. That's all you can reasonably expect from me, I think, but I may try and post more often than that. But senior year and all means I'm going to be finishing up graduation things, so three times a month is the best I can assure you for the next few months.
It's really real, though, the fact that I'm about to graduate. I haven't really internalized it yet. But here we are.