a hand to hold

i appreciate that the massive delay volunteering life updates may be leaving all two of you feeling out of the loop lately. I have been so busy and stressed that writing formally about my problems has taken a back seat to texting about them, to the point my autocorrect has been rewriting "xmas" to "xanax". 

i am home alone right now drinking a beer, trying to come up with a plan of how I can rationalize opening and consuming the entire bottle of cliquot in my refrigerator at 4:02pm on a Monday. Usually I do work, but today I was off because I had an exam. I am 34 years old and still taking exams and there is no sign of them stopping and I think I am disappointed with my career and life choices.

There is something rustling in the walls of the laundry room. I'm certain it is a rat.  I have been ignoring these sounds for months because my subconscious preferred it that way, but recently there was this tiny hand poking out from under the crack of the water heater cabinet and now I'm finding it hard to ignore the evidence. How festive considering I didn't get to see the Nutcracker this year!

Did you get any nice gifts over the holidays? I got my period for Christmas! I also got anemia ! Treated myself by eating a year's worth of spaghetti bolognese and lasagne over the last few days because i started hormone pills to calm down the anemia and now i can't resist all things carbohydrate or fried (WHY CAN'T I GET A HOT DOG ON A STICK AROUND HERE?!).  In addition to a £400 gold plated Dyson hair dryer (i am so embarrassed) I also got some 20's stuffed into an envelope from my darling mother, so decided to splurge on some hair balm after receiving a free sample of this miraculous coconut scented splooge from SpaceNK. I was confronted with a bit of a battle online when I tried to buy it and couldn't figure out if this was the same product I'd massaged into my split ends, or if this was actually a shoe horn? Door stopper? loose IKEA part? lightbulb? JBL's Creature Speakers?  i don't know. I didn't study marketing but i'm just not sure this is the best image to help consumers understand their purchase.

I have learned my mother is a boss at Jenga, though she attributes any increment of my own apptitude to having previously played the game and "knowing which blocks to choose" as well as having "glued in" other blocks to sabotage her attempts at winning. best part is the way she stacks the last block in the final video. 

In other news, I recently went to Jordan which was amazing save for the fact I lost my favorite comb at the dead sea and as a result had to buy a new emergency brush from a convenience store which cost me 75¢. It hardly feels right juxtaposed with the £400 gold plated hair dryer but I LOVE THIS BRUSH. The only thing is that every time I aim to detangle my hair and my hands are wet with the coconut splooge, all the metallic pink comes off on my palms and stains them along with anything else i touch, forever. That includes my clothes, my computer, my sonicare toothbrush, my dresser, all the doors in the house, etc. All Jordanian Convenience Store Pink now! Here's some pics from the other stuff though. Nice , magical place. Good hairbrushes. you should totally go.

My final days days of 2018 were spent fishing my smartphone out of a hospital toilet filled with wee after it fell out of my scrubs during an on-call shift. it's all just one giant metaphor to my dismal existence. 

hope you all had a merry xanax and a happy new year.