Screw Vanilla!!!

Persuant to my last post, I've decided that vanilla, though tasty, is not for me at all, and thus, I must put away the vanilla and bring out some chocolate and cinnamin. Okay, okay, maybe not chocolate and cinnamin, but at least some real vanilla bean and a touch of butterscotch to see me through my vanilla days in the interim. Plans for less vanilla are being made even now . . .

Despite the abundance of work projects at home (bedroom walls, the 10 projects in that same room that need to be addressed, blah, blah, blah), and despite the need to work a teensy bit more to get through a reporting crunch at work . . . I find myself thinking about adding more to my life. Not necessarily more projects--I have enough of those!!--but frankly, I come home from work, I do stuff at home, I sleep, I go to work, I come home from work. That's it; that is the summation of my daily life. And there should be more than that!!

I need to expand my horizons, expand the playing field, break up the monotony!! So, even though I JUST NOW posted that I'm in some kind of 'normal' phase, a bland vanilla existence while the events of Next Year are queueing up, and I'm up to my eyeballs in obligations to myself (and my landlords, lol--the bedroom!!), here's what's really going on behind the scenes of my vanilla life these days:

1. I gave up (temporarily) the idea of starting my very own web gallery for local artists and instead am persuing starting an online 'store' with ETSY--currently putting my feelers out there for some name suggestions since I'm bored with the same themes/ideas I keep coming up with. Although, having said that, a store name I suggested on the fly last week (and completely unlike anything I had come up with before) seems to be one of the favorite front-runners . . .

2. There may be some collaborative effort involved with some friends who were a little intrigued by the etsy store idea . . .

3. My sister has been working toward a nursing degree and (to flesh out her resume) has also been volunteering time with a local fire/rescue squad. It's made me a little nostalgic for the medical studies I decided NOT to continue years ago, and I've been kicking around the idea of doing some EMT work myself . . . something that was underscored when I found out one of my co-workers is also a volunteer firefighter and is aiming for emergency rescue services out on the AT.

4. My neighbor Meg finds herself in somewhat of a vanilla existence between work and home these days as well and looking for a bit of civic activity. She has a friend in the Winchester Rotary Club that suggested she/we look into joining. The annual dues are a little daunting for us both--and the concept of hanging out with the 70+ Saturday Morning Breakfast Club is not pleasing--but the younger set of club members are coming into their own and bringing about some changes. I believe there was mention of a street party, possibly blues-ish and bbq-ish--I could totally get down on some southern blues and bbq in Winchester!! My inherent duty, should I join, will be to ensure that southern sweet bbq is as readily available as that weird Carolinian vinegar-based stuff (ew), and the sweet tea will not be served with a lemon wedge!!

5. My sister and I are planning to start donating plasma to the red cross on a regular basis--we can't give blood too easily (darn stuff clots in the tube on the way down!!) but we want to assist where there's a need, and while it may not be a pint of blood, a half-liter of fluid and platelets is what we can give. (Dang platelets are superhuman, I tell you!! You get our stuff on an operating table and I guarantee you the doctors won't need half the sutures and glue they thought they would!)

6. Meg proposed the idea of a 'household' team for the '09 Relay For Life. I am a little reserved about this one, since basically a lovely cure for multi-cancers is working its way through bureaucratic red tape for the next several years, but the money still goes to help in other related care and treatment areas, and I'm okay with that. We hashed out some Relay-related ideas and dished about everything from special t-shirts to an all night tent party at the relay (schweet!).

7. Meg and I are also kicking around some ideas related to the house, namely an exterior 'communal' area, like a seating or reading area for the tenants. Of the 5 leasees at the Gables, we're two out of four of the long-timers--ones who are definitely sticking around for a while and would like to help keep the house up and the grounds inviting and easy to maintain for our landlords, who are really sweet and perhaps slightly overworked with the house. We've seen a need or 'possibilities' in some areas that we know we could help with . . . but we're just hashing about these things right now.

Here ya' go, one Vanilla Life. We're out of chocolate right now, but would you like that with butterscotch or strawberry sauce?