A Change of Sorts

If you're reading this, then you've likely noticed the new layout happening over here on my blog! I've been trying so hard to find a new layout, a new design, a new anything to spice it up. I'll just be honest—what I had been using...well, I'd been using it for quite some time. And I was ready for something a little different.

This here is my new layout, folks. What do you think?

This is probably only the third true 'revamp' I've done. This is mostly due to the fact that I know little to nothing about HTML and the like, so once I get a template working for me, I'm hesitant to go back to the drawing board.

But it was time. I hope you guys like the new layout. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure that it'll really stick around. I'm still in the process of looking at other options. Actually, I've been spending the bulk of my time trying to figure out how to make one of my own. Or at least use one of my own photos for a background. I have high aspirations, but unfortunately it's much easier said than done!

That being said, I'll probably leave this up for a little while. I may keep tweaking things.

So if you come back to my blog tomorrow and things look different, never fear! It's still me here. And all is well.

And don't worry—I've got more blog posts in the works.

I was just excited about the proverbial face-lift my blog has gotten.

What do you guys think? Feel free to sound off in the comments!

Also, for you Facebookers out there, feel free to mosey on over to Pencil to Paper on Facebook and "Like" what's going on over there!*

We're having fun over on Facebook! I'd love for you to join in! :)

*Yes, this is a shameless plug.




EDIT
I know I literally just posted about how I made some changes and whatnot, but...I've made some more changes. Again. Not just because I'm weird and I can't commit to a new design, but actually because of an issue with the 'Comment' feature. The issue being that with the new template I had, there wasn't a way to leave a comment without a few extra steps.

So. I've got another new look happening now. I think I like it. I'm still toying with it in Photoshop to see if I can't personalize it a little more, but by using a background instead of a template, it's easier for me to customize my blog using Blogger's page editing tools. So consider this The Revamp, Take 2.

What do you guys think?

New layout. 2.0.

Find me on Facebook!

I did it, guys. I caved. Now you can become a fan—er, "like"—my blog on Facebook!

So any of you Facebook users are more than welcome to catch up with me at my page there as well! I'd be more than happy for the conversation to continue. I like interacting with you guys in comments, but Blogger's comment form doesn't make it as easy as it could be.

I've added a widget on the side of my blog to make it super easy for you—just click "like"! That page will allow me to post links whenever I publish a new entry, share pictures, and chat with you guys more personally.

Thanks again for the comments, readership, and support, you guys. Y'all are the best! :)

Hello December

For me, December is always synonymous with Christmas. The holidays. The rush of excitement that comes from finding the perfect gift. How cozy I feel when I bundle up in my coat, scarf, gloves, and Uggs.

Lights? Check!
Where to put them? Uh...

So whenever December officially arrives, I always get really excited.

I mean, extra excited. I put up my tree weeks ago. Before Thanksgiving. And I'm not ashamed. I have my wreath hanging, my candles dispersed, my lights—okay, well they aren't hung yet. But it's my first holiday season at my new apartment, and I'm not quite sure where to put them yet. I discovered there's no outlet on my balcony. So I don't know. We'll see. I need to at least get some garland. But you get the idea.

Cold weather just makes me feel very warm, safe, and cozy. Even when it gives me a runny nose. Although frankly, I blame that on the bipolar weather here in College Station. Example—Right now it is 59º according to my phone. With a high of 65º. However, Saturday the forecasted high is...79º.

Yes. Almost 80º. It kind of makes me sick. I'm wondering how this city didn't get the memo about it being officially December! It's seriously conflicting with my cold-weather fantasies.

But I'll live. I'll just turn my AC back on and pretend. I have a very good imagination.

In other news, finals are fast approaching. Monday is the last day I'll actually have normal class, then the week after...finals.

I have mixed feelings about this semester coming to a close. On the one hand, I have spent a lot of time stressing and complaining about the classes and workload I've had going on these past few months. I'm burnt out on writing papers, reading—especially reading theories that I completely disagree with. I've had several classes where I can do nothing but sit back and keep my mouth shut, try not to roll my eyes, because really...disagreeing isn't worth running the risk of making an enemy out of the person who's ultimately deciding my grade for the class. It's kind of annoying. But then, on the other hand, if all goes as planned, next semester will be my last semester. Then I'll graduate. And while I can't wait, and am super excited to graduate, I'm also starting to realize that I really do enjoy college. For all of the complaining, I enjoy classes. I even enjoy going to classes. And taking page after page of predominately useless notes. I'm not sure that I'm ready for life after college—but I'm also not sure that I'll be pursuing grad school. At least not right away.

So there's that. A conglomeration of mixed feelings about the end of this semester, plus excitement about Christmas and all that it entails. Like a break from school, seeing friends from out of state—I'm lookin' at you, Matt—holiday shopping, hot chocolate, and Christmas lights.

I can't say for sure, but I have a feeling that this holiday season is going to be awesome.

I spent way too much time making this stupid flow chart. I apparently am not good at making them. But here is a really poorly portrayed layout of what I spend my December doing. And/or thinking about.

Fig. 1.1—Crappy Little December Flowchart

Behind + Ahead = Behead?

Maybe being beheaded wouldn't be so bad at this point. I mean, that would totally kill my headache, right? Among other things...

Well, okay, maybe being dead wouldn't be so awesome. In fact, no, it definitely wouldn't be so awesome. But it is pretty tiring to work so hard to get ahead on some of the stuff on my To-Do list, but still be behind on so many other things. It's like the extreme satisfaction of getting ahead is totally mauled by the knowledge that I'm still not done.

I think I spent more time this weekend doing homework than I did like...all last week. Catching up on homework for one class inadvertently put me behind schedule on some other things. Some literally and some only according to my self-imposed deadlines.

I have this paper. This 10-page research paper for my Marriage Institution class. It's basically one fifth of my total grade for the class, so there's definitely some pressure to do a stellar job on it. It's due the class period before Thanksgiving break, but my professor had encouraged us all to talk to her about our topics. When I did just that—which was extremely helpful—she also said that she would take my paper early, grade it, and give me comments, which would then allow me to make any changes necessary to make the best grade possible.

Quite frankly, I'd be a fool not to take advantage of this. So I talked to her Friday, and told her I hoped to have something to give her on Monday.

That left me spending this weekend writing like a crazy person. And researching. And re-learning how to cite internet sources, movies, books, etc. And how to properly quote them.

Block quotes are my favorite.

They look awesome. They break up the monotony of a Times New Roman 12 point double spaced black and white research paper. But they can be hard to come by because they can only be used for quotes that take up more than four lines of the page. So my overall paper only has a few. Not including the snippets of movie dialogue I included in order to discuss the family structure evidenced in the exchange between characters.

I suppose technically not having to put those quotes in block form would take up more space on the page, but I'm tellin' ya, 10 page papers look pretty monotonous without them.

Monotonous.
And yes, 1 and 3 are different pages.
Note the near identical nature of the paragraphs and their spacing.

Not monotonous.
Note the block quotes and even some dialogue!

Fortunately, I wasn't the only person from my Marriage Institution class who wanted to get a head start on the paper. So myself and two other girls from class decided we'd have a Paper-Writing Party.

We met at Starbucks on Saturday. Because really, nothing makes homework more tolerable than coffee.

We got there at two, and I honestly didn't expect to get as little actual writing accomplished as I did. I left at five (three hours later!) with barely more than a paragraph written. Turns out it took much longer than I had anticipated to find my last of three pop culture examples of marriage (it's more specific, but I'll refrain from bogging you down with details) and pull quotes from my sources. When I did finally start writing my introduction and following paragraph, I kept having to stop to make a citation of my source so that I could do my in-text citations. So that held me up. That's when I decided I'd compile my sources and cite them all first, that way I could just refer back. That mostly worked.

When I left, I had just about half a page and a headache.

Since we didn't finish our papers, we decided to hold a continuation of our Paper-Writing Party at the same Starbucks the following day. Again at about 2.

Thank you for existing, Starbucks. <3

This time I got about five pages written. Again I left with a headache.

I managed to be a semi-responsible adult when I got back to my apartment. I avoided all distractions.

The problem I was having was that by the time I finished up page 7, all that I really had left to write was the last half of the paragraph I was working on and my conclusion. Not so easy to stretch out into three pages... I had to elaborate on some of my earlier paragraphs and lengthen my analysis of the last example, plus split my conclusion into two separate paragraphs.

Yikes. It was such a headache.

The good news is, I finished up my paper—not-so-creatively titled "Family Types and their Reactions to Marriage"—at a hefty ten and a half pages. And this morning I turned it in. So now I must anxiously await my professor's comments and criticisms so that I can edit it accordingly. Ideally, it'll be fine. And I won't have to change much of anything. Which would mean I finished my paper just over a week early. That might be a personal best!

So that's what I'm ahead on.

However, I am certainly not ahead on everything. Sadly, NaNoWriMo is not going so well for me. I should have about 25,000 words. I don't. I have just over 13,000 words. Yeah, that's pretty behind.

Maybe it would be wise to just give up and focus on my schoolwork.

But I am rarely wise.

I still have half a month to catch up. During Thanksgiving break, I'll have even more time since I won't have to deal with classes.  Last November, I stayed behind all the way up until the last week. I think. Either way, I know towards the end there was an outpouring of wordswordswords and I crossed the finish line with just over 50,000 at more or less the very last minute.

It could happen again. Right? If anybody else out there is doing NaNo and is behind, hark! Don't lose hope! It's not over 'til it's over.

I just have one more big thing—wait, maybe two. No, three. Sorry, four. Three more big things to get out of the way before I can buckle down and get to work on my writing. Yes, that's three more things I'm behind on. Two that I'm actually behind on; one that isn't due yet but that I'd intended to finish already. And another that doesn't exactly have a due date but that needs to be done nonetheless.

The two I'm behind on are for my Shakespeare class and my Sociology of Gender class. The one I'm "behind" on is my Campaigns & Elections paper. All three I am determined to take care of this week. The one I just plain need to do is...well, a multi-step process involving meeting with my advisor, nailing down what I need to take next semester, figure out what classes I want and working them out on my schedule, re-advising to make sure they'll all count, and then actually registering for them as soon as I'm allowed to. (Which, if you're wondering, is November 23 at 5:30 am. Yeah, I think that's cruel, too.)

So my current mantra is pretty much, "Go! Go! Go!"

Hopefully I can continue to avoid all distractions...

Major distraction.

HTM(hel)L

Well, I thought I was learning some HTML...

HA!

HAHAHAHAhahahahahuhuhuhah...*wipes brow* Whew!

Boy, I don't know who I thought I was kidding!

That there HTML stuff is a bit more complicated than I'm used to, apparently. So much so that I've grown fond of calling it HTM(hel)L. See, I've been trying-trying-trying to learn how to make a table of pictures. Thumbnails to be precise. So that I can post a bunch of pictures, but not all full sized. Instead, they'd show up in this nice and neat little row, and if you so chose to see a bigger version, all you'd do is click the thumbnail!

...Yeah...It's not quite as easy as it looks. I managed once. ONCE! Woo-hoo! But then I didn't dry my eyes out by staring at that cursed internet script for a couple of days, and so today when I sat down to try my luck again, I unfortunately discovered that all of my table-o-thumbnails knowledge had somehow completely escaped me.

Alas, it would seem I'll need at least another free 48-72 hours to figure that out. 

Yes, because I can spend hours and hours working on an HTML code, and if I walk away to get a drink of water before I finish it, when I get back I am absolutely and completely LOST. It's just like visiting a land you've never been to before, and driving along is alright, but then you look down to change the radio station and suddenly you may as well be on the moon. Because when you look up again, nothing is familiar.

Only in HTM(hel)L, not only are you lost, but your eyes also burn from trying to discern anything out of strings and strings of letters and backslashes and these little things < >!

So, forget that. I'll post my pictures later. Maybe next year. By then, surely I'll have it down.

[Don't quote me on that. Thanks.]

In other news, I'm in the creative process of reworking the look of this blog! Well, okay, I'm in the creative process of thinking about figuring out how I'd redo this blog if I knew what I was doing. (Which, coincidentally, is one of the reasons I'm trying to get a handle on HTML.) But that's just a bit of "I'm excited about it, so let me share!" news. Not for sure when that would happen or what all it would entail. Probably not much. So maybe a new banner, different colors. You know. BIG differences.

So anyway, if that comes out...I'm sure I'll post more. Maybe a countdown. That could be fun.

Also, since this post has no rhyme or reason thusfar anyway, I'll offer something else. In the interest of playing around with layouts and such -- you know, so I don't screw up mine before knowing what to do with it! -- and because I wanted to, I started another blog. If you know me, you'll know that I admit to loving Paris Hilton. That said, I've started a blog of random Paris news, updates, whatever. As if I'm the first person who's done that! In case you happen to want to check it out, it's just as easy as clicking this link. If you don't, then by all means...don't!

And - a question I wanted to ask. Does this happen to ANYONE else?

So I decide I sort of kind of maybe want to buy a new digital camera. So I have in mind this one that I'm looking at. And I've checked it out at a few different places. Then I get paid and realize if I want to buy it I actually can, so I get out again thinking that I'll look again, and perhaps be more interested in buying it than I was.

Only THEN I can't find it ANYWHERE.

Okay, I found it at once place. But I actually had a couple of cameras I was scoping out, and I only found one of them and I didn't really want to buy one without looking at the other one again. But still.

Is this just me? Am I the only person fortunate enough to suffer such a...condition?

I hope not.

Okay. I'm ending this post now. While I'm ahead. Or before I get too far behind. At this point, I cannot pretend that I'm not just babbling. Oh dear.

In closing, here's a picture of my dog Kelsi. :) Ain't she purdy?