Without further ado….pictures of my new car, which has saved me after the untimely demise of my Intrepid.

So, for those of you who wondered, I did not drop off the face of the Earth! I have, however, had an exhausting time of things lately. Since Lovey’s gotten settled, we’ve been trying to work out a schedule for me to run errands for her while balancing out the errands I need to run for myself. Ricardo has been helping out when I’m tired, busy, or just feeling too frazzled to deal with the madness of the grocery store or the pharmacy.

For the last week and a half, I had a temporary assignment at a place where I was doing some data entry and later on helping out with other things. This job itself was nice, and the people in the workplace were nice, too. To make things more interesting both of the Fridays that I worked at this place, I had to make time in the mornings for an interview for a permanent job. For the first week, I only worked Wed, Thu, Fri – so I just worked an extra hour once I knew about the interview. For the second week, since it was a full week and I knew about the interview Monday, I took half hour lunches and worked a half hour late each day to total up things to 35 hours by Thursday, and only 5 hours left on Friday to have a full-time schedule. This resulted in a couple 9-hour workdays, plus about an hour to get home in traffic, so I’ve been too exhausted to post anything once I made it home.

Today, while on an errand picking up a prescription for Lovey, I got into my car and it wouldn’t start. >.<

While sitting there, at CVS, waiting for my Ricardo to show up and help me out, the only thing I really could do was check the oil (since the battery is under the air filter, it’s harder to take a look at that). Turns out my car was totally out of motor oil. Yeah – that hurts… Since I got my car the oil light has flickered every time the RPMs drop below 1,000. So, you ignore it. It never came on as a steady signal so apparently it was more than a glitch, it was just totally broken. Hence, my not checking the oil when the light was flashing at me (because, as usual, it only came on and flickered when my car was idling below 1,000 RPMs).

CVS does stock motor oil, so I got my work gloves and a funnel out of the trunk and added 4 quarts of oil, after which the car started. Unfortunately, the engine didn’t sound as healthy after that as it had before.

It seems like there was some oil in the engine on the drive to CVS, since my engine wasn’t fused into one massive lump of inert metal, but now the RPMs are dropping from just below the 1,000 mark to around 500 when it idles. Bad, bad, bad.

Ricardo and I are taking the car to the shop tomorrow, and he seems to think it could be something relatively straightforward – like the fuel pump, or the timing chain – causing the real problem…so let’s hope we can get it fixed. Ricardo does have a “spare” car, if it comes down to that, so neither of us will be completely reliant on one vehicle for transportation, but I love my car and I’m hoping it can be fixed quickly (and cheaply!!!).

Also…I should hear back tomorrow about those interviews – so cross your fingers and hope that I get some good news on Monday!!! This one is a job I reeeeeaaallly want!

So, the apartments that we’re planning on for Lovey needs a TON of paperwork done to prove that she can get the apartment – because it’s income-restricted. The recent sale of our house makes that really complicated because they have to count the proceeds from that sale for two years. The lady that was working with me on all the paperwork explained that she thinks it’ll all turn out fine, but the catch is this: by law she has to tell us it’ll take two weeks for the paperwork to go through. In practice it could be less, or more, but we should expect it to be two weeks.

Since Lovey has to be out of the house by next Tuesday, that means she’ll be bunking here until all the paperwork is settled. For the place and the prices it seems worth it all, but I know it’ll be hard on both of us to share my apartment because it’s not set up for the disabled in any way. The threshold is sort of high, the doorways are narrow, the microwave is above the cooking range so she can’t reach it…the list goes on. All these things can be worked around, but it’s hard on her. I’ll be rearranging my apartment as soon as I know she’s coming so we can fit her bed in my living room for the time being. I’m going to try to find some way that we can do that and give her some privacy…maybe I’ll end up hanging a sheet from the ceiling?

I’m frustrated by the whole process, though thankfully the lady that’s giving us all the paperwork has been wonderful about explaining it all, letting me fill out as much as I can before we mailed it off, and she made sure that I knew that either Lovey or I could call her at any time with questions. It just looked like we were going to get a quick move in date since the apartment is already prepped, and I’m disappointed at the delays.

I am finally out of the woods with this wisdom tooth business. It turns out the extra days of pain were from dry socket. They took the medicated gauze for that out yesterday, and now I’m pain-free! What a relief!

The Rose Garden:

The Conservatory

The Japanese Garden

Botanical Gardens

For those of you who tried to visit this blog in the past few days, you may have had the experience of loading a completely blank page. This was a disturbing error for me, too, because I couldn’t so much as load WordPress to edit whatever had gone wrong. At this moment, I’m still not sure what caused my blog to spontaneously white itself out. Fortunately, Ricardo came to my rescue. All my posts were saved, which I’m not sure is a great boon for posterity, but my WordPress themes and many other elements were lost. Essentially, we had to migrate everything from the old nickyhicks.com database into a new one and any questionable files were not part of the migration. For details, ask Ricardo, the WordPress/MySQL/FTP/webpage hero of the day. What makes it interesting for me and you, dear readers, is that I’m having to find new themes so you may find for the next few weeks (or however long) that this page will look different every time you visit. I’ll try to settle on something soon, but I make no guarantees since I’ve seen a lot of interesting themes out there!
Another error is that, for whatever reason, I can’t unzip the file of Ricardo’s pictures from the Dallas Audubon so I can’t post those until I figure out how to fix that. I’m more tech savvy than a large number of people, but when I’m stumped I either end up taking quite a bit of time to figure it out, or running to my fiance for help. In the meantime, I do still want to post some of my own pictures from my trip to San Antonio to celebrate graduation and my birthday. I will schedule those for a post tomorrow.
As for the third part of my title, the wisdom of teeth, it’s no big secret that I had my last wisdom tooth pulled this past Thursday. Unfortunately for me the level of pain took a turn for the worse yesterday and I’ve gone from thinking I’m almost better to knowing that if I don’t have some painkillers and a bag of ice handy I may just hurt someone. I think the complication is the same as when I had my last wisdom tooth pulled. The tooth was on the bottom, which left an open extraction site in the back of my mouth close to where all my food goes. Since I’m not willing to either starve or take nutrition through a tube, that means I probably managed to get food into the extraction site like last time. I’ve been rinsing daily and chewing carefully, but somewhere I must have messed up. I can’t tell from looking that I have food in there, or if it’s dry socket because it’s all hidden nicely by the tooth that’s right in front, but that’s my best guess. I will probably be back to the oral surgeon’s office soon, asking them to fix it for me. I am, for the time being, being careful to eat soft foods and trying to keep them all on the left side of my mouth. I’m so glad this is my last wisdom tooth. I absolutely hate being down sick for any reason and I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself at this point. Blah.
The silver lining to all of this is that it happened after my graduation, after my birthday, and before I had started really working at a permanent position. I did however, miss out on a pretty good temp position because of this and that has made me extra bitter about this whole ordeal. Not only would I like to have something to do all day, but I need the money and I like feeling useful.
Right now, I’m not feeling useful.
Fortunately, I do know that this is temporary and I’m doing pretty good (present rant excluded) at looking at that fact.
I also seem to be making progress on helping my grandmother move – I got a call today from an apartment locating service and the woman there told me she’ll email me a list of places later today. I discovered through trial and error that finding a handicap accessible, reasonably priced apartment is not an easy thing to do and doing it with only about two weeks to find it is nearly impossible. I’m hoping the service will find something soon. So far all I’ve managed to do is get my grandmother on the wait list for a really ideal apartment, but since that could take months before an opening it’s best not to pin everything on that. With any luck, she’ll be packed and ready to move in time, and with lots of luck we’ll be able to move her straight into her own place rather than making do with moving her in with me until something suitable becomes available. (It’s not that I would mind having her here with me, but she needs the independence, we both need the privacy, and it’s not easy for her to get around in my place!)
Anyway…look for pictures in the next post, and prepare yourself for frequently changing themes on this page!

To start with an aside, it sounds like my upstairs neighbor is busy running around rolling a piece of heavy furniture and it bothers me. A LOT. Almost as much as the yappy Yorkie from hell.
Now, back to the point: I just finished writing one of my final papers! Yaaaaay! It’s not due until Monday, but I have a friend that’s coming in from out of town this weekend and I decided to get this paper out of the way as soon as possible so I’d be free to hang out on Saturday. (The alternative was to be about halfway through my paper on Saturday saying “Dear God, please kill me now. I’m never going to finish and I can’t survive the humiliation.”) I’m so glad to be done, and several days early, too!
I have two more papers due May 3 and 4, which means next week I’ll be working on them both. The task is made slightly easier by an insightful professor who canceled class next week so we can work on our research papers, and by the fact that one of those two papers is a revision. Granted, I need to do a lot of revising, but at least I’ve got someplace to start from. It’s much harder to build a paper from scratch.
With this one paper down I feel much more confident in my ability to get the other two done well before last minute crunch time.
Also, I finally decided to buy my cap, gown, and tassel for graduation in May. I have been holding off out of the (probably irrational) fear of falling flat on my face (metaphorically and in terms of grades) at the end of the semester. Now…that bag of goodies is hanging on the doorknob of my linen closet, staring me down. I HAVE to do this now.
That being said…I can give myself tomorrow and Saturday to relax. (If I can make it that long without compulsively looking for sources in the library’s online catalog.) Wish me luck, people! Next week is the last full week of classes and it’s crunch time!

I’m taking a break from working on a paper and decided I should update on wedding stuff. We still haven’t set a date, but I have ordered my dress. It seems weird to order a wedding dress when we don’t have a date set, but it was on sale and from what I’ve seen it can take two months or more for the dress to come in…then it has to be altered…and stuff. Besides, it was on sale and I didn’t want to pay more later for the same dress – or worse find that dress gone and have to pay more later for a different dress.
So…Ricardo was kind enough to drop me off at David’s Bridal today so I could order the dress (my car is in the shop) and I walked out a little poorer, but with the dress on order and a veil, which thankfully did not feature beading, sequins, inordinate amounts of lace, or weird ribbons. I’m sure the woman helping me thought I was insane for getting such a plain (and frankly, cheaply priced) veil, but it suits my taste.
Anyway, I’ll post a link to a picture of it if anyone is interested in seeing what I picked out. Ricardo hasn’t seen it, but as long as he doesn’t see me in it before the wedding, it’s cool.
The Dress courtesy of theknot.com since David’s Bridal won’t let me show a picture without revealing the price, which seems tacky. I was torn between that dress and another in a similar style, but honestly…this one is what Ricardo and I referred to as the “crying dress” because when I tried it on I got all teary-eyed. I’ve never had clothing make me want to cry, but that just about did it.
It will have to be hemmed. I swear they deliberately make those dresses a foot longer than they need to be just so you have to pay for alterations. I had the same problem with the bridesmaid’s dress I wore in October.
Anyway, I’m happy with it, and I’ve got the veil, too, so that part is out of the way. The rest can wait until we set a date, and that can wait until after I graduate.

Ricardo asked me to marry him yesterday, and I said YES! I’ve told most of my family and friends, but I feel so happy right now that I *have* to tell the world, via intarwebs. We’re engaged!
And, by request, here are some pictures of my engagement ring:

The Engagment Ring - in the box

My engagement ring - on my hand!

the picture from online - the bridal set

Yay! We’re engaged! (Have I said it enough??) Yay!

So, one of my friends from back home has recently moved to Arlington for college. Now, Plano and Arlington aren’t that close, but we’ve both agreed that – since both of us have experienced leaving home and consequently losing some ties – we should see each other as much as our schedules allow.  We’ve only gotten together a couple times, but it has been a huge relief and a ton of fun to have one of my friends from back home here and understanding exactly some of the things I went through when I left home! I think it’s also helped her that I know exactly what she’s going through and I’m here for her.

So…last night I decided I should take her to the House of Blues in downtown Dallas. It was a Sunday night, but the House of Blues was open until 10pm according to the website and since it’s one of my favorite places to go, if a little on the expensive side, I thought it would be fun.

Well, folks, I was WRONG. I have never seen that place so dead! Not only that, but the “menu” we got – due to the fact that they’d sent most of their kitchen staff home – was very sadly limited. None of my favorite foods were on their tiny menu. It only listed about seven appetizer-like dishes, some desserts and that was it!!! They also had the Saints game on all the tvs in the place, so any noise we heard was loud (and probably drunken) screaming from the few people left in the place anytime there was a good play. If it hadn’t been for the good company and former experience, I would have decided that the House of Blues completely sucked. I also feel bad for trying to show my friend “downtown atmosphere” and ending up at possibly the most suffocatingly dull place to be on a Sunday night in Dallas. In retrospect, I should have realized that it was Sunday night and chosen someplace like Cafe Brazil near SMU, which is almost always open, packed, and serving a wide variety of delicious food for much less than H.o.B.

Fortunately for me, I was in very good company with someone who is probably one of the best and most intelligent of friends I’ve ever had and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations, our jokes, and having the chance to talk with someone who knows exactly where I’m coming from on a lot of issues as well as what it’s like to be in a new place coming from Odessa, TX where the enironment is so totally familiar and “safe”. For example, we’re both baffled by how in this area (DFW/Arlington/Plano/etc.) you can be perfectly good friends with someone at school or work, and yet you will never see this person outside of that environment. They won’t go out to lunch with you, go see movies with you, or just hang out. It just doesn’t happen. And, much to her dismay (and my relief, lol) people here don’t hug. Hugging as a friendly gesture is like a foreign concept here. For me, that’s good because I’m not touchy-feely, but my friend shares hugs with her friends. Here, that just doesn’t happen…strange cultural differences, I guess.

So…it’s been a blessing and a relief to see her again – and I won’t name her on the magical intarwebs because her privacy is her own – but I have to say that without her, the House of Blues on a Sunday night is the last place I would want to be, and with her, it’s an ideal spot to hang out (and make fun of screaming drunks watching football).