Productivity Bonanza - Monday

Unpleasant mornings have begun to become ordinary.
I woke up yet again for breakfast, and had to sleep until 12pm because of a high pulse and chest pains.
I'm sure somebody reading this is thinking, "You're probably a fat lard-ass and you don't know why you're having heart problems?!? LOLOLOL"
...except that I'm 5'4", female, and 120 lbs, which is a perfect weight for someone my age/height/gender.
So yeah, I really have no damn clue what's going on.

Well, after waking up to Jon returning from class (he came back super early), I ate lunch and took a refreshing shower.
I wrote my blog entry, and then got to work.

When I organized my craft supplies, I found all these blue beads that I didn't even know I had.
Not sure where I even got them from.
I knew I had to do something with them, along with all the UV beads I purchased a couple years back but never actually did anything with.

Since my fish fiasco on Friday was a bust, I decided to do something with the rest of the pawprint cane slices I had made, once again, a couple years ago.
I started to string up some beads and designed a pretty snazzy bracelet, and then proceeded to repeat the whole process 4 more times until I ran out of the tiger's eye beads.

I'm pretty proud of the finished result, and I even glued the ties together for extra strength.

RECAP:

• Wrote blog post
• Made 5 bracelets with a possible value of $10 each

Not too shabby for a shortened day's work!

I just really wish I could feel better in the mornings though.

Productivity Bonanza - Friday

Yes, I'm late with this entry, but for good reason.
Something is really not right with me.

I've been waking up with Jon like I'm supposed to, but when I do wake up I have chest pains and my pulse skyrockets up to 90-110. It usually abates after a while, but for some reason it was really bad yesterday.
I slept almost 16 hours yesterday and had a persistent headache. Really unpleasant.

Anyway, enough with my continuing health issues. (Can't I ever get a break, though?)
TIME FOR PRODUCTIVITY!

So, on Friday I had a bit of a difficult morning. Once again, chest pains and a high pulse...
...so I decided to sleep until 10am again.
Well, things didn't want to work out that way. My high pulse lingered and kept me awake, so I gave in and decided to give myself until 12pm. Thankfully I did manage to fall asleep, and waking at 12pm did help me a bit.

I had a small lunch, washed up, wrote my blog post (Thursday's), and then got to work.
My mission was to make some things out of some scrap clay I found.

At first, I was pretty much set on using some salmon-colored clay (I mean the color of real salmon, an orange... not the so-called "salmon" color) to make some fish. While organizing my supplies, I found a ton of blue-colored beads, so I thought making some small fish charms would be great for creating some bracelets.
Well, turns out making fish is a boatload (hahaha) tougher than it seems.
When I tried pinching near the tail, I'd warp the whole fish. No matter what I did I could not get that darn fish shape. Finally I tried working on a larger scale and managed to make a fish that could only be a necklace charm, which of course was not what I had intended to do at all.
I stopped trying to make fish after that.

Frustrated, I decided to go much simpler, and make some oranges for post earrings.
Well, okay, maybe making the orange itself is easy, but those little leaves were a pain.
All I could think as I pinched off microscopic bits of green clay and formed tiny leaves was "I hope nobody quit their day-job for something like this."
Being a crafter is fun, but most of the times you're really not paid based on effort.

After making a random pair of peach earrings too, I switched to making my famous (not really) wacky birds. I only had enough time to make two of them before Jon showed up and we ran off to get pizza. (Mmm, pizza.)

So, let's look at what got done...

RECAP:

• Thursday's blog entry written
• Approx $47.50 worth of clay goods created (when finished, of course. I still need to bake, glaze, attach to earring posts or whatever, and actually put them up in my currently non-existent shop.) 

Maybe not as much as I wanted to get done, but it's still a lot more than I do on a regular basis.

All I know is that this stupid health issue needs to resolve itself, or I... well, I don't know what I'll do. I guess I'll go to the doctor. Again.

Goddamn it.

It's upside down and I'm too lazy to flip it.

Productivity Bonanza - Thursday

So, Thursday was my first day of following the game plan set out for me by my therapist.
(If you're confused, read the previous blog entry, it won't kill you.)

Thursday morning I woke up confused and half-asleep to Jon's phone alarm. I really didn't want to get up, so I told him to go take a shower first and wake me up when he's about to eat breakfast. He did exactly that, and I deliriously ate some Cheerios.
When it came time for him to leave, I said goodbye, and then realized how awful I felt. I was getting dizzy and it seemed like my heart was about to burst out of my chest. Thankfully my dad has one of those blood pressure checkers, so I tested myself.
I had a pulse of 93, and I didn't do anything so that was definitely abnormal. My blood pressure was also slightly elevated from normal.
I concluded that I had to go back to sleep, at least until 10:00am, so that's precisely what I did.
When I woke up I proceeded to shower, check my phone, and change into actual clothes rather than PJ's.

At approximately 11:45am, I officially started my day.
First thing I did was attempt to fix my glow-in-the-dark glass gauge that I stupidly wore into the shower a week back.
(It had fallen from my ear once it got wet, and one of the tips shattered. I managed to find a little shard of glass, and after being absolutely confused where the other bits were, I felt a sharp pain in between my toes. Yep, there was the piece I was missing.)
I took out my jewelry glue and started to work, but the first piece was slightly off-center.
Oops, too late, this shit is like super glue.
Oh well, it's back together but it's not perfect.

After I had finished the repair (if you can even call it that) I walked into my room, pondering what I should do next.
I thought about doing some clay work, but then I saw a lonely box on top of the piles of school crap littered around my room...
...THE SCRAPBOOK.
See, about two years ago (perhaps even more) Jon and I had purchased a scrapbook from Michael's Craft Store. We thought we'd start a scrapbook documenting our adventures during our relationship, and eventually be able to chuckle over it when we're old farts with false teeth.
That was all good and fun to think about, but once we bought it neither of us really got around to doing anything with it. It just kind of sat there until I randomly decided to make the cover drawing and first page, and it never really progressed any further.

I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to not only give Jon a nice surprise when he returned home from a long day interning at the police department, but also do something that I'll be thankful for years from now.
I grabbed my laptop, the box of supplies and photos, my set of markers, and a Snapple Iced Tea (diet lemon, of course) and plopped myself on the deck table under our umbrella.

4 hours later, and just as my glue-dot roller was running out of tape, Jon came back home. He was tired, but seemed genuinely surprised and glad to see the scrapbook finally coming together.
I only managed to get through about half of our freshman year together (we have a shitload of photos) but it's a start.

The rest of my day consisted of watching episodes of North America, eating dinner, and screwing around of World of Warcraft.

RECAP:

• Repaired my gauge (kind of)
• Completed 11 pages of the scrapbook (That's 44 photos glued, 44 captions written/decorated)

I'm pretty damn happy with that. Here's to a productive day today!