I cannot wait until the bar exam. I’m going to spend days just organizing and cleaning.

I am too lazy to edit my photos before I post them. What this meant before was that I simply wouldn’t post. But I’ve decided that I’ll just go ahead and post my crappy photos so I don’t just keep taking them, and doing things, and not writing about any of it because I’m too lazy to color correct my photos.

Anyway, this is an ongoing project that I’ve been working on since we moved in. Yes, it’s been six months now. I didn’t have a yard in DC, obviously, and I promised myself that as soon as I moved, I’d start gardening. I wanted to plant spring bulbs and maybe a flower bush or two, maybe some grass for the dogs to run around in… Well, this is what I started with:

Actually, that’s not quite true. That’s much better than what I started with. When I first got here, the yard was completely overgrown. There were weird pavers (stacked on the stairs in the photo) kind of randomly placed (with concrete poured around them, wtf), a leggy half-dead rose bush in the upper left corner and a weird pokey shrub in the lower left corner. Oh, and you see that cart full of rocks? Those rocks were scattered around like a poor approximation of a “border” (for what? I don’t know, because there weren’t any flowers…) and there were random stone “sculpture” things kind of scattered around the yard. It was a mess.

So I hired an illegal immigrant to clear it out for me. (I wasn’t about to tote all that concrete around on my own! I tried putting it in the trash, but the trash people wouldn’t take it…)

I asked him to take out all of the rose bush roots and all the rocks (there were also random rocks just kind of mixed in with the soil, which made digging impossible.) I also asked him to level the yard out, so there weren’t holes and whatnot where he’d pried out rocks. He did a pretty good job… except that, instead of removing a bunch of the rocks, he just smoothed the dirt over them. I didn’t find out until I tried breaking up the soil and realized that it was rocks.

So I went out and bought more dirt to cover them up. My yard’s a little taller now, but who cares.

After that whole mess, I decided to lay sod. Have you ever laid down sod? It sucks. The rolls are heavy and constantly shedding dirt all over you. Also, we live in a townhouse, which means I had to walk to the parking lot, then around my neighbor’s house, through her back yard and finally into my own yard. Like, 20 times. This was the result (note the patch of extra dark soil in the upper right corner by the sod… I bought that to cover the rocks so I wouldn’t have to hire another immigrant to tote them away again):

That was all in December. Then Christmas happened, and bar exam study started, and I forgot what outside looked like. Until today. I’ve been chilling at Lowe’s lately, buying wood and whatnot, so I decided to stop by their garden center and bought a ton (probably not literally, but when I had to carry each one, one at a time, it sure felt like it) of concrete border things. I took out all the rocks the last tenant left behind, and now I’m putting my own damn rocks back in.

And that’s kind of what it looks like now. I’m pretty sure I took that photo today, but… what day is it? I totally can’t remember insignificant things like that. My brain is way to full of rules about when things need to be filed and whether or not someone is vicariously liable for something and something about contracts (I did NOT like the contracts lecturer, and I think my brain shut itself off during her 7 hours of lectures…) (Also, please note the cart full of leftover sod… from TWO MONTHS AGO. I tell you, I’ve been busy.)

So now I’m going to be spreading leftover dirt in the beds there, and finally planting my bulbs. They’ve been hanging out in a corner of the living room for the past five or so months, and I think I read somewhere that they need cold temps before spring comes so they can bloom or something. You know, that’s why you have to plant in the fall. I think. Anyway, they’ve been at a comfortable 72 degrees for the past five months, and it’s already starting to warm up outside, so yesterday (earlier today? I don’t remember) I stuck them in the freezer to trick them into thinking they had a winter.

I’ll probably plant them this weekend. I hope they bloom.

It has been so long since I wrote anything. I promise I’m doing stuff, I just don’t have the time or energy to write about it. And I feel a little weird just writing about stuff without supporting it with pictures, which makes it so much less likely that I’ll write anything, because lately I have just been too damn lazy to take pictures of anything.

I’ve been doing bar exam study, but I don’t know if any of it is sticking (I’m guessing no) and I’ve been doing a little wedding planning. I think I found The Dress. We found a baker and a venue, and now I’m looking for an officiant. I have no idea how to go about finding a damn officiant. Supposedly I should have done this ages ago. So maybe we’ll have a wedding, but no legal marriage. I don’t know. I can’t care about it right now.

I’m going to sleep.

I decided to bring some of my crafty things with me to work, so I could get some stuff done while I’m here. (Note: My job involves sitting at a desk and looking pretty for 8 hours a day. Occasionally I will answer a phone. So crafting isn’t cutting into any working time, it’s just keeping my hands busy while I listen to barbri lectures…)

Anyway, I prepped some fabric last night so I could cut it today. I used a stamp pad I got to mark the pattern I wanted to cut, which turned out to be a mistake. Oh, the pattern is clear enough on the fabric, and I remembered to bring my fabric scissors, so the cutting is going well, however the stamp ink isn’t very… permanent. Until it touches my skin, after which no amount of scrubbing will remove it.

Somehow I got some on my face and I can’t get it off.

Yes, I’m going to take a moment to brag about what I got for Christmas.

My parents still do a pretty big Christmas for me and my siblings, gift-wise, even though we are all definitely old enough to be fending for ourselves. They do things a little differently, though. Ever since I was around 15 or so, they’ve just sort of handed me some cash and told me to go buy my own Christmas. Same with my siblings. It sort of ruins the idea of being surprised with your gifts on Christmas day, but in my family, the surprise comes when we call my parents on Christmas morning and tell them what we got. So… they’re surprised. It works for us.

Anyway, my Christmas haul.

I have no idea why I’ve gone all Home Improvement lately, but I’ve been wanting to do woodworking forever (when I was younger, I wanted to be a carpenter/cabinetmaker when I grew up)(my dad said no, so I went to law school instead)(sometimes I still wish I was a cabinetmaker). So this year, I finally decided to start building my home workshop. I’m starting small, but I’d eventually like to have a real garage and enough tools to build whatever strikes my fancy.

The biggest thing I got was a Dremel Trio. I’d heard good things about it from John, over at Young House Love, so I decided to give it a try. Supposedly, it cuts, routs and sands. So far I’ve tried cutting and putting a decorative edge on wood. I’ve found that straight lines are not my forte, even when I use the rip fence. Somehow I always end up making it jagged and really weird looking. My decorative edge didn’t come out so well either, but I think I’m going to blame that on my not-so-straight edge. I’ll keep trying.

I also got myself a Dremel Stylus, for no reason except that it looked neat. So far I’ve used it to carve my name into the storage box it came in, and played with carving a design into a piece of scrap wood. Power carving, also not my forte. It’s way harder than the online videos make it look, seriously. But again, I suppose practice makes perfect. I also got a bunch of extra bits for this, so I’m going to use all the wood that I ruin using the Trio to practice with the Stylus.

And finally, D got me a Black and Decker jigsaw. I guess he saw the trouble I was having trying to cut straight lines with the Trio and took pity on me. I haven’t tried it yet (D has restricted my power tool use until I get some protective gear… killjoy) but I’m hoping I’m a little better at cutting with this than I am with the Trio.

And that’s mostly it. I also got an assortment of bits for the Trio and Stylus and a teeny little workbench. I think I’m going to try to turn our little storage shed into my workshop. I ordered some protective glasses, so I should be able to start using everything in the next few days. I think I’m also going to get some noise blocking ear muffs, too. Cutting wood is way louder than it sounds on TV, for real. Every time I do something, I get embarrassed at what the neighbors are probably thinking. I know the earmuffs won’t deaden the sound for the neighbors, but if it’s quieter for me, maybe I won’t think about it as much and I’ll be able to enjoy myself a little more.

We’ll see.

It’s been a while.

A long time ago, in a district far far away, I was a law student. I started this blog to document the things I did at home while trying to avoid losing my mind at school. I decided to try my hand at baking, sewing, gardening… anything and everything I could try to put my focus on my home and take my mind off my studies.

Well, I’m not a student anymore, but I’ve discovered that I really like doing things around my home. I like making things pretty and making pretty things. I like the smell of sawdust and paint, and the sound my sewing machine makes when it’s going full-steam. So I decided to come back to my blog and start documenting my real life, rather than my transitory in-school life.

Right now? Well, right now I’m planning a wedding. So this blog will be full of wedding decor and wedding crafts and all kinds of wedding whatever. After that? Well, what comes after marriage? A house? Babies? We’ll get to those when we get there.