I'm starting to feel a bit depressed and overwhelmed right now. I feel like I'm stuck in a rut. Or in a cage. Which may be partly due to the fact that pretty much my whole world is in a 9x10 box that is my room, and the occasional trip to the bathroom. In this case it is a water closet. Literally. I feel like I'm going crazy, suffocating and in a fishbowl. My shop/jewelry making is essentially at a standstill.
On the other hand, I ordered some awesome new wire from
Rio Grande to make wire bracelets....the first attempt with my other wire I had was just a tad bit small for me, so I gave it to my grandmother when she and my mom came to Greenville. I took my wire home with me this past weekend and made another bracelet that used up less wire, although it looked the same to me, and made it big enough to fit me. I have to re-do the half-round silver ties I put around it, though, because they started snapping at the corners when I was wrapping them around the gold frame of the bracelet. It's rather dark and misting and icky outside, so no good light for pictures today. :(
More good news: I finally found my other earring stash, which includes my $10 earrings in my shop! I was getting really worried that I had somehow misplaced them and would have to delete the listings when I found them in little separate earring boxes inside another box. Whew! And now I can redo the pix for those, too! I also need to find some kind of white teacup or something to hang my earrings on for a dangling perspective.
I also think I finally found a good standard size for wrap bracelets like the ones featured
here at Ornamentea. The measurements just weren't working out for me, even though my wrists are fairly small, but I think I finally got my magic numbers! For a double wrapped bracelet I used: a little over 13 1/2" of ball chain (I'll probably make it an even 13 1/2" next time), 44" of leather cord, and 58" of waxed linen cord. The leather and waxed linen both had extra left over, but I would rather have too much than too little anytime.
In other news, I have been looking at other apartments like crazy for next year. One bedroom or studio apartments. That way I have my own space, don't have to worry about who's using the washer, who left their dishes in the sink, who's drinking all the tea, whose food in the pantry really makes me gag, who's slamming cabinet doors in the middle of the night, and who's using all the hot water. I cannot wait. Pitfall: all the apartments are a HUGE price jump from what I'm paying now. But I guess the reality is that you get what you pay for. I'm paying (in comparison to the 1BR apts I've looked at) low prices for a cramped room, cramped kitchen, cramped bathroom and two other people I'm sharing with (except the BR & BA). I have one roommate I sort of knew before I moved in and we get along just fine, despite the fact we rarely see each other. The other roommate drives me nuts. She's older than me, for starters, and sometimes you can tell, but she is just.. agh. I really need to get this out of my system. She acts like she's such a neat freak, she even made a schedule of whose week it is to "clean the apartment," but it seems like she's really the one making the mess. She must brush her hair in the kitchen or something, because every time I go in there, I see her hair on the floor. Gross. She also must use the towel that's lying there for her food or something, because it is disgusting-looking and apparently no one wants to wash the kitchen towels with their towels. It'll wait until I wash mine again, I suppose. The one time we went to the grocery store together, she said she had a time limit and had to be back to class by 2. Well, I'm a get-in-and-get-out kind of person when it comes to shopping for groceries, and I'm much faster when I have a time limit. She decides to skip class and spend TWO HOURS walking up and down each and every aisle there. She occasionally stopped to apologize and ask if I was mad. The way I see it, if you have to ask more than once, you know you're getting on my last nerve and no, you're not sorry about it. Then when we went to check out, I went to the self-check out and she got in line because she had fresh veggies, etc. She doesn't have an MVP cad, but I do. So on our way out the door, she decides she's going to go and return everything and use my MVP card and say the guy didn't ask her for hers. I should have put my foot down there or something. So of course while the manager lady or whoever she was is re-ringing everything, she says something to the cashier about him not aksing for the card, and he says he did. Roomie tells me that he was to busy flirting with her to ask. Yeah, I didn't buy that. Needless to say, she is never going to the grocery store with me again, and I don't come out of my room unless no one else is downstairs.
I kind of went off on a rant there, but I really had to just let it out for a minute. I keep telling myself I don't have that much longer to go before I'm outta here for the summer (or at least the semester, for starters), but it doesn't seem to be working. If I thought I could afford it, Id just move in January when the new semester starts, but my lease isn't up until August. Blegh. So my jewelry-making habits remain tethered in a closet for now.
