Staycation! (Long post)

      What do you do with an extra week or vacation and no burning desire to go anywhere? Clean, of course! Ok, ok, I know that's not everyone's answer, but that's what we decided to do. We have a 10'x10' storage unit that we've been saying for a while needs to be gone through, and over the winter, things had sort of piled up around the house, so we blocked off a random week to deal with it. 

     For once, I remembered to take before shots of the mess to be tackled, and it looks like a pretty typical storage unit, full of just stuff. 

     We packed for a full day excursion, and arrived Monday morning at 10am, set up a table, and started pulling stuff out. That weird thing in the middle that's wrapped in plastic is a weaving loom my mother got me quite a few years ago. It is absolutely my retirement/"when I have time and room" plan, but I'm not ready for it just yet, and we can't stack anything on top of it. 

Lesson learned

     Many years ago, I took a Russian 101 level class in spring, then immediately went to Russia that summer. Glossing over how that was a horrible idea, I was faced with two options for class in Russia: repeat the absolute beginner class, or skip the 102 level class to join the second year. Being the ambitious person I was, I chose the second option, and regretted it the whole time I was there. The 102 class I'd skipped had some incredibly vital lessons, such as how to conjugate verbs and noun/adjective declension - things you were (obviously) expected to have mastered by level 2, where they piled on the vocab to fill in that framework. Without that base knowledge, I struggled a lot with new concepts and just generally had a horrible time. 

     Fast forward a lot, and now I'm learning Japanese just for funsies. A local community college offered levels 101 and 102, but nothing past that. I looked around a bit and found a regional society that offers many, many more levels of instruction and even uses the same textbook for beginning levels as the community college classes. Sounds great, right? Naturally, there's a catch... the community college covers four chapters in the book per class, while the regional society only covers three. So my options for moving forward are:

• Review two chapters I've already done and have one new chapter in level 3; or
• Skip one chapter and move ahead with all-new material in level 4. 

     Ironically, the one new chapter in level 3 is... conjugating verbs, and noun/adjective agreement. And this time, I did not hesitate at all; I signed right up to repeat two chapters and give those verbs and adjectives all the attention they need. My dad has a saying he uses often - nothing you learn is ever wasted. I'd like to think I got more out of that horrible trip to Russia than just not repeating a language-learning mistake, but hey, if it helps me now, I won't complain too much. 

Silly sketch - Mooooood

      I miss making sketches; my perfectionism got in the way and made it a chore. So here, without excess fussiness or explanation, is a silly sketch. Enjoy.

Self-storage woes

    For a while, I worked for a self-storage company. One of the perks was a free 10x10 self-storage unit, which I very definitely took advantage of. The company was eventually bought out by another self-storage company, and we were told that the owners had negotiated some sort of deal where they couldn't immediately charge us full rate for our 10x10s, which was pretty nice of them. For the last several years, I have been paying less than $10/month for my space and trying to keep as low a profile as possible, so that no one noticed and did anything about it. Sadly, it seems my luck recently ran out. 

    In December, I got notice that my rent would be increasing to $60/month come May. Sucks, but in light of the heavy discount I'd been enjoying, I figured I'd just suck it up. Until I get a reminder that my February rent is due - I was pretty sure I'd paid a couple months ahead, because why not? I log in to check it and NOPE! I owe almost $100. What? They'd upped my rent to $117 without (I'd thought) giving me notice. 

   Naturally, I wanted some clarification here. I'd resigned myself to $60, but almost double that felt like a gut punch. Got on the website with their oh-so-helpful chat function and, after wading through the automated responses and getting assigned a real live person, was told that they couldn't do anything, I'd need to call this number. Which, of course, closed 7 minutes ago. Thank you, very helpful.

Intentional (plant) killing

      I have inadvertently killed a lot of plants in life. Sometimes it was hubris (see: orchids, cinnamon tree, etc.), sometimes it was neglect - ok, a lot of times it was neglect, because I'd get caught up in something else and forget about plants. A couple times, it was even legitimate disease/illness of the plant, like when a cherry tree contracted a fungal disease in the main trunk. Generally speaking though, I've tried to keep the plants in my care alive and thriving as much as possible.

     Last year, I met a woman at work who had a whole line of plants on the windowsill near her desk. She taught me a couple things about taking care of plants but the lesson that stuck the most was when one plant started really struggling despite no change in care, so she just picked it up and dumped the whole thing in the trash. I was floored. Seeing the expression on my face, she shrugged and said something like "It was old. It'd had a good life. Potted plants aren't forever."

     What a wild thought. It made me realize I have a tendency to want to hold onto things forever, even when it's pretty clear they should just go. 

     On a related note, I bought a houseplant a while ago that looked pretty, nice white and green streaked leaves, but was SO. DRAMATIC. Like if I was a day late watering it, it would literally droop all its stems over and act like it was horribly neglected, but then spring right back up once it was watered. Might be melodramatic of me, but I don't need that guilt in my life, so I made a conscious decision to kill it. I watered the plants around it, but not that one, and it slowly fell over and skeletonized without much fuss. 

     And you know what? I feel fine. I'll get something else to replace it eventually, but for now, it's just nice not having drama.