{you know...}

I have homework that I could be working on, but instead I am blogging. I think there is something wrong with that, don't you?! Alas, I'm not really in the mood to do homework and it isn't due until Tuesday morning at the latest so in theory that gives me all of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to complete something that will probably only take me 30 minutes. Maybe I will make use of my time tonight and instead of spending it lounging in front of the TV from the moment I get home to the moment I decide to crawl into bed. That, and I have laundry and packing for the weekend to get done before tomorrow night. Such is the life of a mom and graduate student, eh?

I have been feeling very blah so far this week and it hasn't helped my mood any. Last night it was especially bad. I think we all were a little crabby in our household. Ayden didn't want to eat what we were having for supper, Jay was yelling when he didn't need to be, and it all just soured my mood and so I went to bed super early. Like crawled into bed before 8pm (even though I watched TV until almost 10pm) and then I ended up sleeping like crap. The sleep I got was good, but I kept waking up. I think I was afraid that for some reason my alarm wasn't going to go off and that I would be late for clinic this morning. It also sucked because I had to get up an hour earlier because I had to drive farther this morning. I feel like I was awake and looking at my clock more than a dozen times last night. Insert sad face here, haha!

I am MORE than ready for this weekend! I am meeting up with one of my besties from high school and her son early Saturday afternoon for a game or two of bowling! Then Ayden and I are heading over to my mom's house for the rest of the day. On Sunday I am getting together with three more of my besties for an afternoon of girl talk and just venting. We got together last just before Christmas and I am surprised that another six months hasn't gone by before our next gathering. We all have families and so it is hard to coordinate our schedules so we all have time to get together. But we did and I am so thankful for it because I always leave our get togethers feeling a million times better. Friends make the world a better place!

I think just having some plans for the weekend is making me excited. We haven't done anything super fun for a couple of weekends so getting out and seeing some different people gets us out of our rut of staying home and getting on each others nerves the whole weekend which is bound to happen if we stay home this weekend. I can feel it already!

The weather has just been cold these last few days and I hate it! Ugh! At least we haven't gotten any more snow so I should be happy about that.

For some reason my school email will not work on my phone or my tablet today and it is driving me nuts. It seems like I can still receive messages, but it doesn't work to send any out and it is extremely frustrating right now. This happens every now and then and I do not know why. What I do know is that it is increasingly more annoying each time is happens because it takes me forever to figure out how to get it working again, ha! Stupid technolog is our best friend and our worst enemy most of the time!

I suppose that along with completing my homework this weekend, I should probably also work a bit on my capstone stuff. I had a meeting with my advisor that went well and now I have some more direction to move in. Pretty happy about that!

CIAO! LOVE ME!

{pen pals}

Today has the potential to be a long day. I am starting out my second week of clinic and it is at a sister facility from the one that I was at last week. There are potentially three different places that I could be visiting, although I will primarily be only at two of them. I say that it could be long because there are just a few breaks in our schedule. During said breaks (especially lunch), I often use that time to go on my tablet or my phone and do things online. Apparently all of the medical buildings around here have craptastic service for my phone because whenever I enter one (even if I am near a window), I get jack for reception. Normally these facilities have a free wi-fi connection that I can tap into; however, this place's connection SUCKS and it will not connect to my laptop and therefore I am unable to connect to do anything that requires a connection... namely everything I would like to do on my tablet. Oh well... maybe it is a good thing then that we have a relatively busy schedule for the day, right?!

I must tell you about this insane new show that Jay (and his friend JT) have gotten me hooked on. It isn't all that new of a show because I guess the first season was aired in 2010, but new enough and now that we are trying out Netflix for a month I can watch the whole first season and DVR the secoond season until I get caught up. So far they have only played two episodes in the second season so I am not that far behind. The show is called Spartacus and it airs on Starz (I believe). When I watched the first episode or two I thought it was pretty dumb. It is about gladiators in the Roman time and there is a lot of cussing and nudity in the show. Definitely not something we can watch while Ayden is up or nearby. That stuff sort of bugged me at first, but now I just look past it to the story line. I have to say that Jay's friend JT was right when he said that I would have to watch the first couple of episodes to get sucked in. It is truly a dumb and fascinating story all at the same time. I say dumb because just after you get into the show and start liking someone, they go ahead and KILL THEM OFF! So far they have killed off two of my favorite people and from what Jay says, they are going to kill another important person off in the next episode, ugh! It sucks and yet I still watch it! Why do I torture myself?!

A few weeks ago I happened upon a blog that was talking about pen pals and from there I happened upon another blog that had a pen pal group. I remember being in grade school and having pen pals and thought it was the neatest thing to get letters in the mail at that age... plus I formed some awesome friendships. I actually kept in touch with two of my pen pals from Australia for quite some time and still am friends with one from South Africa and one from Israel on facebook. Cool, huh?! So, I emailed the lady in charge of creating the groups to see if the pen pal exchange was still going on and she said that it was and put me in a group! I got the list of people in my pen pal group yesterday. They are all girls (not that I was expecting any guys). One is from California, New Jersey, Pennsylvannia, and get this... the last one on the list was a girl named Ashley... from... none other than Menasha, Wisconsin. What are the odds of being put into a group with someone who not only has the same name as me, but who also lives only an hour(ish) from where I live?! Cool, no?! I thought so. I was so excited that I wrote them all letters last night. I am hoping to gain some wonderful new freinds out of this experience and honestly, who doesn't love getting something in the mail that isn't a bill or another credit card application. Yeah, that is what I thought!

Oh and guess what, because I am continuing to write this as my day progresses and I have a free minute here and there between patients, I finally got my tablet to hook up to the wi-fi system in the building. I don't know why it wouldn't hook up in the first place, but it works now, although my phone continues to have sucky reception! I suppose I will survive... haha!

CIAO! LOVE ME!

{won’t be doing that again}

One would think that because I use my camera A LOT that I would be a little smarter than I was on Saturday when it comes to wanting to use said camera. We took a little trip to a place in Waupaca on Saturday for the sole purpose of me to take some photographs. No, I did not have a photo shoot, this was purely for myself. I had heard about this place and looked it up online and it looked pretty neat and I want to take some nature pictures there. As a family, we head out of the house and venture to Waupaca (which is about a half hour away). The weather was phenomenal for this time of the year and I couldn’t wait to capture some pictures!

Enter in my stupidity! We get to our destination and I turn on my camera and wouldn’t you know… it displays… NO CARD! *$%(#$*$#%(#$ almost came out of my mouth and would have if I used such words on a regular basis (I try hard not to swear). I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten my SD card in my computer! Because I am using my camera a lot more frequently these days I am uploading my pictures to my computer a lot more and I have a bad tendency of putting my card back in my camera right away. I was SUPER sad that I didn’t have a card to take pictures with (my camera has no internal storage). But I wasn’t going to let the trip be a waste and I got out my phone and started taking pictures with that. 8 megapixels should give me some decent pictures and it did.

Just as I was getting ready to tell Jay and Ayden that I had had enough and wanted to leave I checked one of the pockets of my camera bag (the only one I didn’t check the first time around because I had forgotten about it) and wouldn’t you know that my other SD card was in there. OMG, I was SO happy and I started snapping picture after picture after picture. That turned my WHOLE day around and we stayed for probably another hour walking around. Ayden had a good time playing in the snow and water and Jay was okay with it.

I couldn’t believe that I was so dumb not to check my camera before leaving the house. I should say that I am VERY careful about checking my camera before photo shoots of people. I check my camera the night before and charge my battery and make sure I have both SD cards. Safeguards to make sure my clients get the best experience they can from me.

Here are just a few pictures from both my phone and camera of our adventure!

Well, before I show you those pictures, I have to share a picture of me and my new hat (courtesy of my cousin)! My cousin made me this amazingly cute crocheted hat and I am in LOVE with it! It fits perfect and matches my coat!The place that we visited was called the Red Mill in Waupaca, WI. Me pouting because at this point I thought I wasn’t going to be able to use my camera and had to ‘settle’ for my phone to take pictures. I wasn’t happy, haha!But, we made do with the camera on the phone and I got some pretty good pictures with it. Me and little man enjoying being outside in the beautiful weather!And needed a picture with my main squeeze too! Apparently I have a bad time looking where I need to when taking a self picture with my phone, lol! Oops! It looks okay though! This one is better! Thanks to little man who took it for me and for my honey agreeing to be in the picture because according to him I had said that we weren’t going to take pictures that he needed to be in. And then when we got home you could see the moon really good and I was able to get a cool picture of it!And then today I made another project with the sewing machine and it turned out pretty awesome. It definitely isn’t perfect, but it is darn cute! it is a Kindle cover/case!Tomorrow it is back to school and once again I have been highly unproductive when it comes to doing anything school related over the weekend. Oopsies! Maybe next weekend, ha! Off to watch the Super Bowl halftime show now!

CIAO! LOVE ME!

{contortionist}

When you continuously see someone contort their life to fit perfectly with someone else's over and over again, how do you tell him or her that you do not agree with how they live their life? Correct answer: you don't. Ashley answer: you don't, you hold it in, and then when you can no longer, you blog about it in as subtle terms as you can, ha! Okay, maybe I shouldn't blog about it either, it isn't fair to the person with whom I do not agree.

Case in point, I just got done telling someone that they need to care less about other people's lives and concentrate on their own instead. Make the most out of your life and quit bitching about other people and what you think they should be doing. Heed your own advice dear woman... you think I would be able to do that, but no.

So, maybe instead of bitching about how I think other people should be running their own lives, I am doing to just take a step back from these particular situations and try and take my own advice. People who are not me and not connected in my daily living can do whatever they please whether I agree with it or not. I'm sure, wait I KNOW, I've done many a thing that people have probably not agreed with. Case in point again... getting pregnant in high school (whether or not it was something I actually intended on doing).

Okay, needed to get little rant out. Think I'm good. Think I may finally need to do what I've been telling myself to do all along, but just can't...

CIAO! LOVE ME!

{another month}

I am in awe of the fact that it is February already! Where in the world did January go to?! I cannot complain that it is already February though because February, March, and April (and one or two weeks in May) and my last semester on campus is OVER! Time will fly this semester, I am sure of it!

It definitely helps that the weather we have been having is GOREGOUS and totally unexpected for this time of year. If you know me at all, you know I am NOT a cold weather person. I am ALWAYS cold in the winter and so these mild temperatures have been my saving grace. From the current forecast, it looks like it could be pretty mild for the next few weeks and that just means that much less of actual Wisconsin winter weather. Smiles all around please, haha!

I have been a bit busier this week with clinic starting. I have to say, I think I am going to love my placement. Actually, I already do. It is exactly the type of patients that I want to be seeing. After the 'hiccup' of my B+ clinic grade last semester, I was coming into clinic a little less confident that I should have been. But after my first two days, I am feeling right at home. I think it helps that the audiologists at this place have been teaching students at their facility consistently for the last 5-7 years so they know what to expect from a student stand point. At my last placement, they had had students before; however, it was about three years since their last one. That is not to say that I did not enjoy my last placement or my supervisor because I did, I just don't know if she expected more out of me or what. Anyways, I've already spent too much time analyzing why I got a B+ for my clinic grade and getting no where... enough of that!

I am so behind on laundry at our house that it isn't funny! Ayden has been digging through baskets of clean clothes all week for socks and underwear! I have three clean loads that need to be folded and put away and at least three or four loads that need to be washed. Oops! That is what I get for not doing any wash last weekend after I got home. Oh well. My goal is to get caught up on it today after lunch. Or at least to start it.

Jay made some super yummy homemade chicken noodle soup for supper last night. Seriously, the BEST homemade soup I have EVER tasted! So delicious that I could have probably eaten seven bowls of it last night. I stopped myself after two though. I think roast beef is on the menu tonight...

I met with my capstone advisor this week and it looks like my project is right on track. Actually, I think I am ahead of the majority of my classmates who are doing a capstone project right now. I know that I have a lot of work in front of me yet, but I'm not too worried. My classes are progressing smoothly and at this point in the semester I see no reason why I shouldn't get an 'A' in both classes.

CIAO! LOVE ME!