My husband and I went thrifting last Saturday and I acquired some great finds.This outfit only cost me about 15 dollars! My favorite piece is this sweet striped skirt I got for $5! It’s super comfy, stretchy, and awesome quality.
Fulfilling My Dreams of Working at a Museum
I’m happy to say that i’ll be interning at Desert Caballeros Western Museum this summer in Wickenburg, Arizona. I’ve known for awhile now, but i’m not very good at staying up to date on this blog. I’m trying to get better at that. Anyways i’ll be helping out with research for future exhibits, entering collections into a database, and helping out with their store. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity and its nice that i’ll have something to do after I graduate thats related to my major. The museum focuses on Western History which is perfect for me because i’m mostly interested in the Southwest and Westward expansion. I’ll be starting at the end of May and staying till the middle of August. Then Nate and I will be returning to the valley for his last semester of school. Lots of changes and new adventures.
You can check out the website for the Museum below. 🙂
New Adventures This Summer
This summer will be totally new for Nathan and I. We will be leaving the comfort of our home in the valley to embark on a journey to the middle of nowhere. But really we are going to be living in the middle of the desert. Wikieup, Arizona, with a population of about 300, is just outside of Bagdad, Arizona where Nate will be interning at the Freeport McMoran mine. We couldn’t find any place to live in Bagdad because it is all company owned, but i’m actually happy about that because Bagdad is not pleasant at all. Luckily we’ll have the quaint town of Wickenburg nearby as well as the more metropolitan town of Kingman to go shopping in. In Wikieup we’ll be living in a single wide trailer in an RV park. Sounds comedic I know, but it is actually a pretty nice little place. The owners just renovated it and it is normally used for handymen for the property. On the property is a laundromat, small store, and cafe run by the owners. There is a museum nearby in Wickenburg I think i’ll be volunteering at or interning if i’m lucky, and hopefully I can find some part time work somewhere to keep myself occupied. I think our dog Gladys will be the happiest out in the country, so long as a Coyote doesn’t eat her. We’ve got a few months of school before we leave, but I’m excited for the adventure. Oh and don’t worry, we’ll be back in August.
Maroon and Stripes
I thought it might be fun to find an outfit I like on Pinterest and try to recreate it with thrift store finds. I was planning on having to go buy some things, but I saw this outfit and realized I totally had what I needed already. I nixed the scarf and jacket since I do live in Tempe and its not cold enough for them yet. All the items I wore were from Goodwill and a thrift store up in Show Low.
The Maroon Pants are a target brand from Goodwill. The clutch was just $1 at a thrift store up in Show Low. And the shirt is Ann Taylor also from Goodwill.
Red is my least favorite color, but this dress is gorgeous!
I got this dress a few weeks back at Goodwill on their half-off Saturday for just $5. What a steal! It’s absolutely adorable and its 100% silk. I think I buy nicer clothes at Goodwill than I ever would at the mall. Many of my Goodwill finds are dry clean only and require extra care. I wore this outfit the other day for my birthday dinner. We went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory so I wanted to get a little dressed up. I’m also wearing a cover up from Namebrand Exchange and a necklace from Nordstrom. Excuse my awkward pose in the first pic, I never know what to do with my hands.
From that one semester I decided to be artsy and take beginning poetry
This class made me realize I wasn’t very good at poetry. Not that the teacher ever told me this, but writing a poem requires a lot of skill and effort beyond just an initial thought. I learned quite a bit in this class about imagery and different rhyming schemes. I think the whole experience made me a better writer in general and has given me the ability to spot a good poem.
Below is an acceptable poem I wrote in the class. I believe the assignment was to write a poem with a different subject in each sentence. It doesn’t rhyme because we weren’t allowed to write any poems that rhymed. Some might find that confusing, but a Poem does not need to have rhymes per say. My teacher’s favorite part was “little plastic thingy” because it showed the author thinking about writing the poem within the poem. That comment made my day.
“Life”
The sunflower, through no fault of its own,
Becomes wilted, removed from its life source
By some unknown being.
Without the sky
We are all just wanderers.
Our existence in this world
Defined by so many,
But only realized by the few.
It’s the distance that keeps
Even those with unwavering hope
From realizing the reward.
On a mid-April day the children,
Concerned only with today,
Play in the grass amongst the
Lilies of the field; while the
Wise adult worries
And uses their reason
To explain the world away.
Oh, the glorious light through the
Blinds, only embracing those, who upon active effort,
Turn that little plastic thingy—the name escapes me–
And allow this force beyond their own
To touch their face.
–Cassandra W.
And now here’s a really fantastic poem I like, and most certainly did not write. haha
Poppies
–Jennifer Grotz
There is a sadness everywhere present
but impossible to point to, a sadness that hides in the world
and lingers. You look for it because it is everywhere.
When you give up, it haunts your dreams
with black pepper and blood and when you wake
you don’t know where you are.
But then you see the poppies, a disheveled stand of them.
And the sun shining down like God, loving all of us equally,
mountain and valley, plant, animal, human, and therefore
shouldn’t we love all things equally back?
And then you see the clouds.
The poppies are wild, they are only beautiful and tall
so long as you do not cut them,
they are like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg
but will scratch you if you touch back.
Love is letting the world be half-tamed.
That’s how the rain comes, softly and attentively, then
with unstoppable force. If you
stare upwards as it falls, you will see
they are falling sparks that light nothing only because
the ground interrupts them. You can hear the way they’d burn,
the smoldering sound they make falling into the grass.
That is a sound for the sadness everywhere present.
The closest you have come to seeing it
is at night, with the window open and the lamp on,
when the moths perch on the white walls,
tiny as a fingernail to large as a Gerbera daisy
and take turns agitating around the light.
If you grasp one by the wing,
its pill-sized body will convulse
in your closed palm and you can feel the wing beats
like an eyelid’s obsessive blinking open to see.
But now it is still light and the blackbirds are singing
as if their voices are the only scissors left in this world.
Birthday #22
I turned 22 on November 5th! Most of my birthday was like most days. I had 4 classes that day and had to do some reading in-between them. Nate was nice enough to go get me lunch from Subway though. Since it was my Birthday I had him add bacon to my sandwich. Crazy splurge right? He even surprised me with a cookie with my sandwich. Little things like that are always the greatest and really make my heart smile. After class Nate and I headed over to Cheesecake Factory to eat dinner with his parents. I got all dressed up for it (see thrifted fashion blog above for pictures). Nate surprised me with a beautiful necklace made out of petrified wood, carved stone, tigers eye, onyx, and copper. I’m kind of obsessed with cool looking rocks so he definitely got some brownie points for it. It is pretty fantastic having someone who knows you so well.
My First Blog and Life After Death
So i’ve been wanting to make a blog for awhile now, but like many aspects of my life I have been indecisive and a bit of a perfectionist. I grappled over what site to use, then I wasn’t sure what to call the blog, then I had to deal with making it look “oh so perfect”. Ugh. Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much. But here it is in all its glory, or its hideousness if you prefer (just don’t tell me if it’s the latter–I will cry).
So I’m dead!! Well according to LDS young single adult terminology anyways. However, in actuality I got married a few months ago. I can see why it can be called death though. I have socially died in a sense. I hadn’t fully realized this until my husband and I had nowhere to go for Halloween and sadly I had no reason to dress up, and I love dressing up! I had two other opportunities to dress up earlier in the month, but I was devastated nonetheless. I’ll get use to it I guess, but hopefully we find some married friends before too long. It is beyond bizarre being in a family ward though. The transition from the quite YSA(young single adult) wards to the often loud and sometimes boring family wards has been tough. It doesn’t help that there is a lack of familiar faces. Overall though being “dead” is great and Nathan and I love being together. I think my favorite thing is always having someone to sleep next to. I really hate to be alone so that companionship has definitely brightened up my life.
The Nifty Fox 