Purposeful Living

You can live each day only once. Even easier you can sleep, eat, work through each and every day. Harder to do something with your day and discover the world around you. Even harder to purposefully do something special each day. To learn something new each day, discover something new or explore a new place-- even to just read a new book. When I was little I had no trouble spending my days exploring and discovering, reading and solving mysteries. Everything was a mystery and the world seemed much more daunting and spectacularly big and mysterious. Now the world still has its mysteries, but it is easy to fall into the pace of living like everyone else. Letting the mysterious pass me by with a simple gesture of I'll do that later or an excuse that there are many more opportunities to explore that will come my way. I have decided my life isn't worth excuses or living each day just to sleep, eat and work. I'm going to do something with my days to make my life different-- to actually live it. To learn, grow and discover.

Today, I will show glimpses of what I have done this year so far.... and hopefully I will be able to become more consistent in actually taking on something new. Or doing something fun.

Goodbye to the Desk...

Goodbye to my room... Goodbye to my beautiful apartment... Hello to two more great roommates :D Bethany and I are happy to be welcoming two new roommates to our apartment and be switching to a three bedroom apartment to accommodate the change! Julia and Deborah will now be living with us and I am excited for what the change will bring- how I will be challenged and how I will grow through the little sacrifices I'll have to make now that I'll be sharing my spaces once again :) I'm really excited about that though! I know I won't have my room to myself anymore and get to hide my messiness in my bedroom, but that will teach me to be more organized and neater with how I keep things. I think it will be a wonderful growing experience and I have always loved sharing my room before... I used to always choose to share a room with Anna whenever I visited the Northwest :)

So because the space will be limited in the new apartment and room I'll be sharing with Bethany-- I decided that my free project should be thrown out. I realized after having it for this week that the smell was not dissipating as I had hoped and all the "treatments" I had given the desk of cleaning to rid the odor had only helped my room smell a bit better... so I'm moving on without the desk and I'm gonna focus my energy on other things such as working and cleaning and packing!

Bethany and Julia both helped me disassemble my desk and carry down the drawers to start the demolition job. Getting the desk into the dumpster was a little more difficult task since it had to be tilted through the small opening on the side of the dumpster. Julia helped by climbing to the top of the dumpster to open the lid so we could angle the desk just right to drop it in :)

Free Desk

This weekend I was perusing around on craigslist and found a desk in the free items! I decided to give it a go and try to salvage this desk that looked really beat up. Once I picked it up off the curb and took it into my room I soon began to realize a peculiar odor coming from the desk. I decided some cleaning was in order so I began by wiping down the entire desk with rags and vinegar water. That accomplished getting most of the grime off. Next, Julia went to the store to grab a few more cleaning items so our cleaning frenzy could get some more intense cleaning done. Now, this free desk has gone through clorox wipes, febreeze, baking soda, pledge and several other regimens to restore the desk to a proper smell. Now with all the chemical canvasing I'm pretty sure I still smell something odd. I figure this was a free desk so if all else fails it can be chopped up and thrown into the dumpster-- which at the mention of this Bethany started getting excited and making party plans for all our friends to gather to destroy this antique. I am however up to putting some more work into the desk if anyone has any ideas to help clean the desk.

I'm happy to be back in Nashville and I'm ready for spring! You can see in the top photo of my desk my avocado seed that has rooted and is starting to sprout :)

I really enjoyed my trip to the Northwest seeing family and enjoying many fun activities :) This is a picture taken at the Oregon Zoo with my fellow Tennessean sister :D I love that we both live in this beautiful state-- and hopefully I'll be able to make a road trip to go visit her soon!