Arizona

Watching: Hoarding

Since my last blog post I've been to Arizona for my second vacation. I visited Amy Parker, a gal I met online almost 5 years ago on Gaiaonline.com (a chat thread I frequent - everyday) as well as her son Dallas who is a very well-behaved four-year-old boy. We had some great fun; watching movies at her house, took her to experience hookah for the first time (she got sick though, wah), visited the Arizona Wildlife World Zoo & Aquarium and had a BLAST at karaoke.

I also took an unexpected visit to my old neighbor Julie who is attending college at ASU which was only a 40 minute drive from Amy's house. We went to Whattaburger to which neither of us had been to before.

My final visit was to my cousin Sarah where I also met her finace. We watched a lot of Netflix and had dinner.

Overall I was very please with myself on this trip. I was nervous about flying alone, but I did it. I rented a car and navigated around Arizona very well on my own (well, with lots of help from mapquest) and it was a great experience.

I will post more photos once the film is developed.

Lady's got a brand new bag!

That's right! Me. I've got a brand new bag. Mega Messenger/Laptop bag to be more specific.

Yes, it looks quite a bit big on me, but any laptop bag would. This bag was made to my specifications by Candy Glendening who's business, Candied Fabrics has seemed to have taken off in the last few years. She starts with her hand-dyed fabrics and creates from them scarves (silk), totes, purses, clutches, even journal covers (and more!). She allows her customers to personalize every inch of the bag which in my case even included the size of the inside pockets (there's a pocket for a pen or pencil and a slightly thicker pocket for my slightly thicker than usual lipgloss) as well as the exact dyed purple fabric patch.

I chose the flower on the front - an Echinacea.

I chose the 'squigglies' (her technical term is 'fiddlehead') for the side cell phone pocket.

To further personalize her bags, Candy gives her customers the option to stitch their names on their bag. Odd as it may sound, I find it kind of weird to see or hear my name so I didn't want that but I still wanted to make it personalized in that way. So I decided a great idea was to choose one word that could be a positive reminder to me every time I opened my bag. And so I chose:

Generosity. Candy liked the idea. So there you have it. My very awesome, very sturdy, very ME bag.

There are some more photos that she put together for her blog that I'll share:

HERE

HERE

Now, it wasn't cheap and I really did fight myself over it for a while. I caught my first glance of Candy's work at the Orange Muffin Festival in Redlands (urgghh... old people) I believe back in early 2010 or even late 2009, I forget. But I couldn't bring myself to spend that much money on something like a bag. I'd read her blog and see her in our paper every so often. Then I saw that she made Natalie, a line dance instructor I had, a laptop bag. Then I saw Candy in a photo in our paper the same week. And THEN as I was composing an email to Candy to tell her I think it was time for me to give in to my urges (after having talked it over with Chantal - she said I deserved a present to myself - 'go for it'), my co-worker Joy said something out loud about her. Cur-azy! So all that kinda sealed the deal.

I will still look at it and say "God, I can't believe I spent that much" but she let me know that the bag she's using now has held strong in the past year and she uses it often, so hopefully in a year I'll look at it and say 'damn, you're still here, you're still beautiful and now I see you're worth the money I spent on you.' And then I'll probably hug it. Because that's what I do (I guess I'll have to start hugging things now).

Unfortunately the next week is when our work told us our pay is being cut 5.5% but oh-effing-well. Got the bag, it's cool and I gave her a deadline so that I could have it just in time for my flight to AZ which is this coming week. I'm taking one overhead luggage bag and my laptop bag and that's it. I'm still worried about what to take and not take, but I guess I'll deal with that a little later. I set up a date to rent a car so that's taken care of now.

Furloughs... again

NOTE: I seem to have unlearned how to color code my damn posts.

This is either the second or third time we've had to do a quarter of furloughs. This one is the worst though. This time it's a total of 10 days. But the bright side of this is that we can choose to take unpaid furlough or paid holiday for those 10 days. 'Furlough' automatically gives off a bad vibe because people associate it with a business not meeting goals, so naturally quite a few of my co-workers (me included) were upset.

But then we started thinking about what to do in this time and we realized how great it will be. Unlike the last time we took furloughs under the reign of my old boss, this time I will feel comfortable asking for multiple days off at a time. When Dobbs was the managing editor, I took pride in being so depended on to get my job done, but since I didn't really have anywhere to vacation (and no money to vacation with), I didn't care about taking multiple days off at a time. The one time I thought about it, I realized it would never happen. But now that I work with people who know how to do my job (granted, at first I was pretty terrified that it meant that I was going to be replaced), I feel like my job will get done without me.

So, a few things planned: a Sunday outing with Chamie, Joy J. and possibly Kevin on this sky tram thingy that we got a coupon to earlier in the year, a few day visit to Sulvang (Sulvane?) with Chamie, possibly a visit to AZ to meet a friend I have only talked to online for over 4 years (she loves karaoke) and an hour drive from there to visit my cousin and her significant other whom I haven't met (her and I have been talking more because of FaceBook - thanks social networking!). There is another trip I might take, but I'm waiting a bit more to really think on that one. As of right now I'm slowly gathering information about a round trip ticket to AZ and car rental.

I'm currently working on my final business project (well, not at this moment of course, because here I am blogging). I need to write a blog on some items I purchased on Etsy recently as well as updates on projects from kickstarter. I will soon. For now, back to that project.