"Wait, let me check my planner" -- said me never.

I feel like life after house sitting is going to feel like a vacation.

House & pet sitting is a great way to make a quick buck -- I get to pretend I have a dog for a few days (or weeks, in the current case), and I get to stay in beautifully decorated homes -- but I swear my brain has a limited number of responsibilities it can handle before things start to fall through the cracks. Between school and it's accompanying homework, actual work, dog-walking and working at the Farmer's Market, as well as time with family and friends and professional junk development, like tailoring my resume and researching jobs, my mind is pretty darned occupied before having the responsibility of an entire home, a garden, and two pets thrown at me. (Note- I am, however, so thrilled that my friends could go on their trip to Europe, and I'm happy to have played a major part in helping them get there. I just don't think I'll be house-sitting again any time soon.)

On a similar note, I have a subconscious aversion to planners and calendars (unlike this girl, who I think is super cool, but we probably definitely couldn't bond over planners). I've tried countless notebook/academic/weekly/designer planners, and they end up 99% unused at the bottom of my purse. Even my mom (who, ironically, passed on her incessant to-do-list-making trait to me but forgot to give me the writing-in-a-planner trait) has bought me a planner nearly every year since early high school, and they all end up being tossed in the trash.

                - Birth! Newly torn out of Christmas wrapping paper or drawn from a bookstore bag

                - Next hour: Lying on the counter near me as I explain to my mother again why I don't use 

                              planners.

                - Next 10 minutes: Being written in as I attempt, once again, to try to use a planner. It
                              usually goes something like this:
                                "Do homework."
                                "Football game."
                                "Farmer's Market."
                                 *...star doodles...*
                                 *My thoughts concurrently:* "Uuuuggghhhhhhh thisisdumbbbbb."

                - Next 6 months: Sitting unopened in my purse or on my desk.

                - Next week: lying on the floor of my room.

                - Next 3 years: Stuck in a shoebox once I get around to cleaning my room.

                - Tragic death by trashcan.

Anyways, I am a hopeless anti-planner and furious to-do list maker, hoping that life continues to be kind to my awkwardly imbalanced organizational ways.

Some random photos of my week:

What I walk by every day to get to class and work (Ohio Stadium). O-H!

 Equally monumental, the elixir that often gets me through those days of work and class.

 I celebrated the first day of fall with a batch of homemade pumpkin cookies (recipe here). I thought they were pretty fantastic, and I ate, uhm, several.

The prettiest flower bush on one of my dog-walking routes. These flowers have literally been there since May, changing colors ever few weeks from white to pink to blue to green to burgundy. (I feel like Professor Sprout from Harry Potter secretly uses this house as a summer home....)

 

 On yet another dog-walking route, I found a low stone wall running along the sidewalk for thirty feet or so with hundreds of hen-and-chicks growing in the cracks and crevices. Given that I've only seen hen-and-chicks in bunches of like, 3 or 4, this was super cool.

A sunflower I was lucky enough to snag at the Farmer's Market :)

More to come soon! The weather is continuing to cool down, and I can't wait for apple cider, brainstorming about Halloween costumes, chili, more football games and more free time!!

Sammie

Life Lately

Ahoy!

Life has been insanely busy lately; along with classes, accounting (granted, this is a class too, but I count this one as a separate kind of hell -- who cares about debits and credits anyway? That's why they have ACCOUNTING MAJORS), work, dog-walking and fruit-selling, I am now house and pet-sitting for two weeks for some friends of mine. While they're flitting around Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome, I'm staying in their cute home in Grandview just a couple of blocks from my apartment.

Here are my companions:

Basement cat, aka Peanut (oh, come on, you guys know Basement Cat)

Gunther

These two are quite the characters, let me tell ya. Gunther is like a happy-go-lucky, slightly destructive ADHD child who skips around the house, nearly breaking his legs jumping on and off of furniture that is much bigger than he is, barking at nothing and staring with his buggy eyes. Peanut is like that kid's grizzled old grandmother who has to put up with his antics -- if she's not sitting in the doily-covered chair where she spends 90% of her time, she is looking on with the most perfect scorn I've ever seen as Gunther whines about everything something.

Aside from my brain feeling like it's running on overdrive (and the hint of my annual fall cold, which I am stubbornly ignoring with my own personal classic "It's just ALLERGIES!!" They always say to be positive when you feel a cold coming on, right? Mind over body?), life has been sweet. I finally bought some new jeans from Old Navy, whose fall styles seem to be a huge hit or a miserable miss for me every year -- this year's a hit! Levi's just ain't cuttin' it for me anymore. 

Also, running is going well (surprisingly... If you know me, you've probably heard me say, "I hate running. Did you know it's actually bad for your body?!" Yeah). I'm doing Cool Running's Couch-to-5K program, which has been completely manageable and has surprised me with great results so far! But more on that later.

Now for a few iPhone pics of life lately:

Creme brulee cheesecake at the wine tasting my mom works at every Friday evening (drool).

Peaches, nectarines and Asian pears at the Farmer's Market.

Cat-in-a-box. Hope you didn't want a Mountain Dew.

Walking the big dog on a rainy day.

Said big dog, Snickers, my daily walking buddy 

(picture obviously from a long-lost, wintry corner of my iPhone).

My all-time favorite zoo animal, the okapi -- it's a horse! It's a zebra! It's a giraffe!

...Nope, he's just an okapi.

:) happy mid-September!

Sammie