Stressed Out

I feel like I'm falling apart, and I'm not even 22 yet. What is up with that?! My knees are bad, my back constantly hurts, my hips are achy and my husband is going bald. I guess that last one is more towards Felix getting old, but I feel the burden too. He denies that he is losing any hair whatsoever, but I can tell that it is indeed thinner than it was only 4 months ago. Maybe I'm stressing him out? I know that I'm stressing myself out, that's for sure.

I feel like I'm ready for a break from life. Well, at least from school anyway. I want to just drop out and become what I was always afraid of becoming: the mother who dropped out of college to have children. I never wanted this... until now. I have been so stressed out lately that the only thing I can do is cry. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up balancing school, work, and doing all the house-wife duties.

I tried to cope at work by being creative:

I was working in the visitor lot just north of the MOA, and I have to hand out little rectangle pieces of paper with tape called "validators" to allow visitors to park there. It looks like a waste of time, but this tree saved me for the first part of my shift.

This just in...

So, I'm up at 3 am, changing my blog, and posting a post. As you may have guessed, life has been quite busy, and is not slowing down anytime soon. But, I did want to just have a quick word that I am still alive, and with blogger's new designing features, I'll be livening my blog up a bit too. Oh, and I'm married now. That is all. Carry on.

Felix the Cat

This post was originally created for posting on June 13, 2009. At the time, my mother warned me to not post things that are too personal online. However, I'm in love and I don't care who knows it! Here are my original thoughts of my current boyfriend, Felix Guzman, almost 9 months ago, while he was still on his mission...




I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Why? Well, here's the reason:

The one on the right. His name is Felix Guzman, and he's serving a mission in Houston, Texas. Felix is my missionary. We were friends in the Canoe Creek ward in Saint Cloud, Florida before I left for college and he left for a mission. When he left for his mission, I had to write him. I had to- there was no question. I have known a few boys who have gone on missions, but never wrote them. You would have thought that I would have written Jonathan Smith, who is like a brother to me, but I didn't. I wrote him one lousy email, and gave up. I'm not much of a writer, and it's a miracle that I can even keep up a blog. But, it may not be a surprise- since it is apparent how often I update- once every month or two. But, when Felix left for his mission, I knew that I would write to him. My friend, Norma, emailed me his address soon after he arrived in Texas, and I wrote to him soon after that. It started off as emails, and then became letters. The more we wrote, the more we got to know each other. It sounds a little silly to explain how we fell in love, but I'm Marie, and if nothing else, I'm silly. So, pretty soon we were signing the letters with, "love ya" then "love you" then "I love you". To be perfectly honest, I know it's not the kind of love that they sing about in songs, the kind that lasts through the eternities, but it's the kind that makes you want to write a letter every week and the kind that keeps you up at night, because you're dreaming so much about that person you think you're already asleep. I know that I'm going to have to wait to develop that more powerful love until he gets home, but I really believe that he's the one that I want to love like that. Felix is a genuinely good, nice, caring person. He's always happy. Like me, he loves to make people laugh. When we were in the Canoe Creek ward together, I thought he was so cute- just the kind of man for me. My mom used to tell me that as well. While we would be sitting in Sacrament meeting, she would lean over to me and say, "Marie, you should date Felix" and I would say, "I know, Mom, but he won't ask me out." He is bright and has a lot of similar interests as me- "serve the Lord, hiking, play volleyball", quoting movies, being happy and laughing, reading books, and of course- he speaks spanish. However, I do realize that because we never dated or spent much time together, I have no idea how we will interact. But, those details can be discovered when he gets home on January 25th. So, because I still don't know a lot about him, and how we work together without paper, I'm not planning any wedding.. yet. He is darling, isn't he?

He looks good even when he's helping victims of a hurricane. And he's my missionary.




Post post note: As I said before, Felix is my boyfriend, and has been for almost three weeks now. I can confidently say that I am in love with him, and it's the kind that they sing about in love songs- the kind of love that lasts forever. Yeah, I am pretty twitterpated, aren't I?

Just the Newness of it all

So, I haven't written in a while. It's hard to talk about anything of meaning mostly just because what I have been thinking about lately is more personal. And, this is a blog, so it's an unspoken rule that you can't talk about anything really personal if you want to have any readers... or any secrets.

So, I recently purchased a larger fish tank. I now have my goldfish Gill in a 25 gallon tank.







His tank mates are:

Sully (a gold mystery snail), Shelly (an Ivory mystery snail),


Rosy (a Shubunkin goldfish),


Free Willy (the cone snail I got for free),


and four fiddler crabs whom I named the Pirates of Penzance.



I thought it a fitting name for the four since I have Gilbert and Sullivan already, and it's a tough-looking group of orphan crabs. Well, the remaining four are tough... not so much the one that got out of the tank and died a few days ago.

I also used the five gallon tank that I already had to house three guppies. They are named according to their colors: Orange, Red, and Blue. I know, I'm original.





I also recently put up a "bed curtain" that has the japanese painting of The Great Wave on it.
It's pretty sweet, and now I have a fort just like when I was little. You know, when your mom would move the kitchen table and all the chairs to the living room so that she could mop? Then you and your brothers would grab a sheet and throw it over the chairs and make a fort. No? Well, here is a picture that I found that resembles my childhood chair-sheet-fort very well.


We even used close pins like these people did, but there were no cats allowed. And now with my Great Wave sheet, I get to go back in time and have a permanent fort for a bed.



That's about everything that is most recent in my life. Tune in next time for chains of song quotes, childhood stories, and vague hints of my personal life.






Random note: As I was typing this post I glance over to the map on my wall of the world, and saw my name. "Marie Byrd Land" in Antarctica. I never had the desire to go to Antarctica until now.

It's my life, and I will fight.

The source for the title of this blog is Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband, and their wonderful music that I'm currently listening to. I guess it also kind of fits with the topic for this post.
I changed my major. I am no longer a (pre-) dietetics student, but am instead studying to become a certified-in-the-state-of-Utah Home Economics teacher. The exact name of my major is Family and Consumer Sciences Education (FACS Ed) in the school of family life at BYU. I changed my major because I lost the fire for nutrition. I believe that I used to have it- I loved the idea of helping people in hospitals figure out their life with new health restrictions. Being able to have a hand in helping them make their diets healthy with my knowledge of nutrition would have been wonderful. However, I found that the process of getting there was much more tedious than I am able to bear, especially when there's something I would rather do. I hate reading for and being in my nutrition classes, and I could never really see myself being confident in my half-knowledge of nutrition enough to tell someone how to eat. Another evidence of how nutrition is not for me: every time I've tried typing out nutrition, I typed nutrtion. If you truly love something, typing the name should come easily. See- home ec teaching. Easy.
The real reason I changed to FACS Ed is because I thought about what I love doing. My ideal day would be sewing a blanket or cooking or crocheting or teaching children... Ok, so not the last one, but I do love kids and I think I would like teaching. The classes look wonderful, too! I almost feel bad for taking some of them- they're the fun classes that I've always wanted to take, but have had to take the boring, required classes instead. And with my spanish minor, I could even teach spanish if I wanted to. Or teach home ec in spanish. The possibilities are endless... well, there are two anyway.

Time for a change

You may have noticed, but I changed the layout and colors... and everything basically. So, let me know what you think.

Lost, not found

Recently I've been feeling more scatterbrained than usual. That sentence may mean more to some than others, but for me, to be more scatterbrained than normal, means that my level of scatterbrainededness is reaching a population high. Meaning, I was already higher than most people, but now I'm lucky that I haven't forgotten where I live and lost my shoes behind a dumpster. I lost my cell phone last night. Yeah, that's right, it's the replacement cell from when I lost my real cell about three and a half weeks ago. About the same time I lost my first phone, I also lost my iPod. But, it wasn't the same day- it was the day after. And I didn't really lose my iPod, it was stolen out of my bookbag while I was at work and my bag was in the changing-bathroom. Which was kind of like when my camera was stolen from my bookbag in the women's locker-room in the RB about a month before that. But when my iPod was stolen, no one took any money along with it. I'm thinking that maybe I'm supposed to learn something from all this. Like, maybe don't own anything that you like, 'cause someone else likes it too, and they know where you keep it in your bag.
Along with all of my posessions, I'm losing my mind, but that's not really new

By the way, if you see any of these- they belong to me...

The first phone, the one I loved best:



The second phone, lost within a mere three weeks after the first:



The best camera I've ever had. And it was purple...


And my iPod, which I named "Silver Surfer". We had so many dance parties...




PS. By changing-bathroom, I mean a bathroom in which one changes clothes. I do not mean a bathroom which changes itself... into another less useful room.