Summer!  Except for not really just yet.  I did get out of school on Tuesday, though, and moved out yesterday.  So, technically, it’s summer, and it’s going to be summer for four months.

That’s a lot of months.

And somehow I have to fill those months.  I’m going back to Boston three days a week to work at the Career Services at my college, but that still leaves four days that I am determined to make productive.  I’ve compiled a list.

1. Get another job
Four days off a week is not really acceptable.  I still have college to pay for.  I’m hoping for something that I can do on weekends, like waitressing on something.  I seriously miss my balloon job.

On an semi-unrelated note, I fell in the shower the other day, just an episode of my life-long clumsiness.  Shelly questions whether or not waitressing is within my realm of doing.

2. Operation: Get Buff
While I did not gain the freshman fifteen, spending hours sitting on my butt at work or in my dorm doing homework certainly did not result in me losing weight.  Also, my dorm’s convenience store had a lot of Nantucket Nectars.  I developed quite a dependency.

So, me and Little Buddy have decided that we are going to run and play tennis together.  Little Buddy does this stuff anyway because I’m pretty sure he came from different parents than I did (he spends long periods of time talking about how he one day hopes to become rich, while I got to college that is putting me in monumental debt while preparing me for a career that is not particularly lucrative, and I spend what remains of my money of Malabrigo lace-weight).  I told me college friends this, and they laughed, remembering an episode when my roommate insisted that I go to the gym with her, where I walked on the treadmill for 40 minutes then complained that my legs hurt.  So now I have to get incredibly physically fit to prove them wrong.  Which is somewhat disappointing because if there was one thing on my list that I would be okay not accomplishing, this is the one.

3. Read
For a writing/English major, the amount of reading I have time to do for pleasure is embarrassingly little.  Over the year, I’ve been going with my friends to all of these great used book stores in different parts of Boston, and I’ve been collecting books, but never really having the chance to read them.  The goal, therefore, is to read all of the books I’ve collected, develop a list of all the books I want to or feel like I should read (shall be long), plus read a crap-load of young adult novels (seeing as that’s what I want to spend my life doing, I feel like I should try to keep up with it a little bit, especially since my school doesn’t have any specific classes about writing children’s books).

4. Send stories into magazines
In my fiction class, we had to write two stories that were workshopped by the class.  Mine went over very well, and I got good critique for how to fix it.  My professor told us that the next step is publication.  I’ve sent work in to literary magazines before, but the stories I sent sucked, and I was only 15 or 16 when I did it.  So I’m going to send these two new stories in and see how it goes.  Hopefully well, but I try not to be too expectant.

5. KNIT!
Okay, this is a big one that needs subcategories of all the things I have to finish:

a. Dr. Who scarves: They’re getting there, probably about 3 out of 12 feet done (see last post).  But they’re made of wool, and since I’m making two at once, it’s basically like working with an afghan on top of me.  In a few months, it’s going to be too warm to even thing about working on them, so I’m trying to get some of it done now.

b. Fish Hat: college-friend Casey wants one for her birthday in September.  She’s a special breed.

c. Slouchy hat for Alana

d. Granny-square afghan: I took up crocheting.  Sort of.  Technically, I hate it, but I wanted an afghan for my dorm room that matched my comforter, and I’m not about to knit one as I only have three years left of college and it would probably take me that long to finish it.  This is a good alternative.

e. Reject Beaded Cami left-over yarn: I frogged my beaded cami, as mentioned in my last post.  Now I have all of this sport-weight yarn with no home.  I’m going to have to find a pattern for it.

f. LACE!: I have a new thing for lace.  I’m working on a new scarf from Malabrigo Lace (I’d put pictures up, but I don’t know where my camera is amongst the boxes and boxes of dorm stuff that’s now in my basement), and I can’t stop thinking about small lace shawls that are small enough to be warn as scarves, but still have a unique shape to them that looks interesting against a plain t-shirt.  But I have too much stuff to finish before I can even think about that.

Except that I’m thinking about it a lot.  A lot.

g. Learn to play the piano: But this is only if I run out of stuff to do.  Ha!

Song of the Day:
“They’ll name a city after us, and later say it’s all our fault.  Then they’ll give us a talking to.  Then they’ll give us a talking to, because they’ve got years of experience.” -Regina Spektor, “Us“