Things I want to change in 2010

I want to be more organzied and tidy. People who are, are sucessful and happy and I would like to be those things. I hate how often I show up late for commitments (aside from school or work) and people just expect that I'm going to do that anyway, so they are never even mad at me about it anymore! That's horrible!! I'm embarassed to have people ride in my car because it is just a junk container on wheels, but I am so lazy that I don't even feel like cleaning it out. That's disgusting!! My back pack has everything I need for school and I know I always have it, but where exactly is it? My life could be so much simpler if I just made some tidiness changes.

I want to start eating better. This is about 90% my choice and 10% the other person I live with. If I insisted on the changes in our diets, I'm sure they could be made, but she is kind of old school. Suggesting that we cut out red meat all together is blasphamy to her. And she doesn't even like it! She just thinks she is supposed to eat it. Anyway, I can actually feel the difference *inside* my body when I'm eating well and when I'm eating crap. I am so much more tired when I'm eating poorly and I hate it.

I'm doing the Weekend to End Women's Cancers 2010, so I need to start training. I'm really excited about getting back on the exercising train. I was so close to being in a routine, and then the math unit hit and that put the brakes on. Excuses, excuses! There's another change! I don't want to make excuses for my behaviour anymore!

This following change I think is the most important one. I don't want to date next year. So far it hasn't been getting me anywhere and I am not feeling very much for the guys who are around. As for the ones that I do have some feeling for, they are unavailable for various reasons. One of my... I guess you could call her a friend... posted on her facebook status that she was going to spend the following year focusing on herself. I thought that was a fantastic resolution and I intend to do the same thing. Until I can be my best self, I don't think I can be very selective about the guys I will be with and I think that sucks. I should be able to say to billions of guys that I am so fantastic that they can't come near my greatness. I don't yet feel that I am in that league and I can't get to that place without some hard work alone. 2010 is ALSO the year of Jamie! A new decade for my young adult life. Yes, I called myself an adult and maybe at the end of this year I will believe that I am an adult.

Clothing Swap

A couple weeks ago I went to a clothing swap which was organized by a girl I go to school with. There were about 15 girls and about 100+ items on the living room floor. I brought 3 and left with 10. Some girls brought 10 and left with none so there were still clothes on the floor when I left. It was a lot of fun and a great way to meet new people and get new (to me) clothes for free. I have spent very little money on new clothes this year. I have bought new underwear, new safety boots and a new pair of jeans. Everything else has been either a hand me down, thrift store or I got it at the clothing swap. The mall actually scares me. I don't enjoy going into a store with pushy or judgemental sales people and feeling uncomfortable while trying clothes on. I don't know if this is a particularily ADD feeling or not, but I often think that the sales people must be thinking 'what is a girl like HER doing in THIS store? She's so grubby.' I think it's true that people with ADD are more sensitive than other people. The truth is though that I don't know a lot of people who are confirmed as having ADD.
Anyway, I just wanted to get on here and spread the word about clothing swaps and how great they can be. The more women the better because they provide a greater variety of sizes, ladies!!!

The pointless doctor's visit

I've had a sore throat and a painful cough for a few days, a runny nose and sometimes a headache as well. I've had it for about 4 days and today I decided to leave school a little early and go to the doctor just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately I got there just before the doctor was about to take his lunch. I waited 2 hours! In this time I heard the woman behind the desk be yelled at for not having the H1N1 vacine available and not knowing when they would have it. I heard her be yelled at for giving a wait time that was shorter than she predicted. I heard her yell at people who were coughing and not wearing a face mask. It was the most eventful doctor's office wait I have ever had to sit through. The hysteria of some of the people in that office was amazing to me. "Well I have diabetis. I need the vacine!" "We won't know until Monday next week. Please *call* at that time." "Do you know anywhere else that is giving the vacine?" "No." "Well, I hope I don't get the flu in the next week!"
The woman behind the next was not very nice, but I don't think I would be either if I had her job.
After all that waiting the doctor confirmed my original thought - I have the common cold. I waited 2 hours to learn that I have the common cold. Woo hoo!

I had a good week!

For the first time in several weeks I finished off my school week feeling good about school and myself. I finished the projects that I had fallen behind on and was proud of myself. They weren't perfect, but they looked reasonably like everyone else's projects. By Friday I had nothing left to do. Our instructor went to a conference in the states and left us with someone who is probably going to retire this year and didn't bother giving us real lessons. He did give us one lesson this week having to do with circles and layout which I found very valuable! I saw flowers. What you do is you mark a line with your straight edge (a ruler, whatever). From that line you scribe your first circle. From that circle you can mark as many other circles to pass through that circle to make whatever you like and all of it can be perfectly symetrical. I used that lesson to make flowers. I scribed them in some scrap metal, cut them out with the plasma torch and took them to the belt sander. It was at that point that I realized the importance of a steady hand in this kind of work. There was a lot of slag build up on the bottom of one of my flowers and it was very hard and wouldn't sand off easily. This, however, didn't upset me the way it might have if my regular instructor had been there this week. His opinion means a lot to me and he doesn't give compliments. Anything he does say is usually criticism. If he says nothing about my projects or my work, I take that as a good sign.
Coming back to the positivity. I left there on Friday feeling like I had enjoyed my week and was excited about working with metal again.

Thinking about the near future

I'm really not doing very well in my program. I have failed a lot of tests and my work in the shop is very weak. A lot of people are telling me that I'm being to hard on myself and it's too soon to say, but my instructor is the final say on weather I pass or fail this course and he has been pretty closed lipped about how he feels about it. I am feeling very discouraged and all of the creativity is drained right out of me. The last thing I want to do these days is go down to the shop. All the apprentice classes are down there and take use of the welding machines for the full 6 hours of the school day. But even if a welder was available, I can't think of something I would like to make. The first thought that comes to my mind is "it would be a waste of good metal and I would just wreck anything I make." I start to think about what I will do if I fail... will I take it again? Do I WANT to take it again? Will I try to look for work anyway? Who would hire me if I fail? I wonder if I could find work in the city that my sister lives in as a failed first year steel fabricator?What if I pass? Will I move out once I find a job? Will I still travel? I have the funds set aside. That was the original plan when I started the course. But now things are different and I don't know if going away right after graduation is such a great idea. I might want to start working with the little knowledge I will take away from this course.
When I was little (maybe 3 or 4), my Mom took me ice skating for the first time. I thought that I would just go out on the ice and look like the figure skaters on tv right away. I stuck my leg out behind me and fell down on my butt. I gave up then and there. I am older now and have a very little bit of wisdom, but I am still like that. I think that I should be able to go out into a steel fab shop and be perfect right away. And if I'm not, I don't feel like doing it at all. I'm going to finish, but I'm not sure that it's what I want to do anymore. I want out of this funk and I don't want to be at square one again! There's a guy in my class who is 26 and he's had 6 false starts on a career. He has a lot of debt and he is kind of old looking and cranky for his age. I don't want that to be me.

I love metal. Why doesn't metal love me?

Metal is such an amazing material. You can do anything with it. Metal can be cut by breaking it, sawing through it, cutting through it with FIRE and PLASMA (cool, i know) and metal can be shaped by bending it or heating it up. Metal unfortunately had a bit of a mind of it's own. We watched a video at school which featured a mascot to illustrate points about distortion. The mascot's name is Mr. Shrink. He'd get in there and twist the metal in all sorts of ways. Metal in a lot of ways is very durable, but it is also fragile. If you bend or form it with it's grain direction (which means that when metal is formed at the forgery into sheets, the grain direction is the direction in which it was rolled out flat) it could break! It could just crack up.
Because metal is so versitile, there is a lot to know about it. Trying to digest all the knowledge being thrown at me daily is truely exhausting. I've been trying to go to the gym/get exercise of some sort regularily but by the time I get home these days, I'm way too tired. Maybe keeping up with the exercise will help with my exhaustion level, but I'm hurting mentally today and somehow that translates to the rest of my body.

I guess I'll try this again

My car is broken. I should be asleep because I have to be up at 5am to catch the sky train to school. Oh well. I needed to read my sister's blog!
That's all for now. I will be more interesting another time.