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Things haven’t been that great for me lately. Things are amiss. But when I think my day is beyond crap, I look at photos of my Bean, and everything seems to get a little more colorful. Can’t wait to see him on Saturday!

I don’t know what got me to thinking about this, but I started reminiscing about stuff I used to do as a kid, when life was simple. Some of my favorite activities as a kid included making mud pies, playing barbies, and putting on a ‘circus’ show for our neighbors.

The mud pies had an entire kitchen set up. I remember dragging the picnic table underneath our huge tree in the back yard, and setting up a kitchen. I ripped off mom’s old pots and pans, spoons, etc, used the wagon as the other half of my kitchen, and pretty much set up shop. I put rocks and mud in pans, stirred it around, and sat it out on our well cover right in the sun to bake in the eight hundred degree Kansas summer afternoon. The side for this dish, of course, would be a salad/soup mixture. I’d fill a bowl with water then put a little dirt (I think this was to resemble pepper) and grass in it, stir, complete. Pretty awesome.

Playing Barbies was great. Ken and Barbie always slept together, NAKED even, teehee, and they had a kid, Skipper. I had the mansion, corvette, etc so these folks were living in style. One of my fondest memories was when our family would go vacationing in Colorado. We’d do it every summer, so my barbies would go on vacation, too. This of course meant they got to go on a big camping excursion. They’d drive their corvette to the woods (aka my back yard) and they’d camp underneath my big tree (same one my kitchen was at), in tents. The tents were craftily (is that a word?) constructed with my dad’s red work rags and sticks. They stayed out there all night and day, for weeks. I remember many summer afternoons, playing Barbies in my back yard.

Okay, the circus. Good Lord, I can’t believe I’m about to bust this out. I managed to convince all the neighborhood kids to do a circus for the parents. I was obsessed with circuses when I was a kid. I desperately wanted to be a trapeze artist. I’ll never forget when Loren, the neighbor boy, climbed up our tree and rigged up a make shift trapeze from a branch out of rope and a broom handle. He thought he’d test it out and fell about eight feet. Snap! So the trapeze thing didn’t work out, so we did little routines on our picnic benches, as if it were a balance beam. We did floor routines, too, in my back yard. Ghettoblaster + extension cord blaring some form of classical music in back yard for floor routine = hot times.

I tell you all this because sometimes I think we lose sight of simpler times. There are days I just want to go back and have the luxury of an afternoon playing without worries. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible as an adult, and I think it is. Just gotta figure out how to get it back.

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I don’t put things together. I have to admit that I’m a typical chick that way. I don’t do screwdrivers, power tools, or anything of that nature - not because I don’t want to… well. Sort of because I don’t want to, but I never had the experience of doing so, until today.

I put together a vacuum cleaner, y’all.

I’m kind of proud of this fact! Jenn + screwdriver = whipass vacuum that.. well. Sucks! It sucks really hardcore, too. I’m not even going to tell you how much grossness came out of my living room after one pass. It’s enough to make me run to my toilet and dry heave for the next fourteen hours.

Putting something together on my own was actually sort of fun and I felt a slight sense of reward when I was done. I should do this more often. Better watch out. I’m going to turn into my dad, the tinkerer. I say that with love, of course.

I’m so glad tomorrow is Friday. Good Lord. This week’s just been insane, between work, work, and oh, more work, plus trying to find an apartment, amongst other things.. I need a break. Some good things transpired this week, though: I wound up getting the apartment I’d been holding out hope for, with amazing landlords I dealt with before. Oh, and tonight, I did my taxes, and I’m winding up with double what I thought I’d get! Yay!

My company is hosting a photography competition. The winner walks away with $1,000. Of course, I’ll be competing with a ton of other people. Regardless of whether or not I win, I think it’d be a really good experience. So this weekend, I’m going to try to take some shots of what I feel ‘community’ means. They left it vague for a reason, community of course, being the theme. I have two weeks to take the photo(s) and get them sent off to the appropriate party, so we’ll see what happens. Wish me luck!