Micro Gardening

No job, car, friends or lover on a Sunday in France is a boss level in keeping occupied. Everything is closed, TMI is gone to the South for a three week internship, the cafe is closed, and my tiny pool of friends is dispersed, hungover, or distracted with a new girlfriend.

So! What can a girl in a tiny studio apartment do?

1) I'm fish sitting a blue fighting fish named Johnny. I spent an alarming portion of my day putting different cups and bowls in his tank to watch him pick fights with / explore.

2) Cleaning. Vacuuming, taking out the recycling, beating the rug, etc.

3) And finally, the most fulfilling: micro gardening. Little succulents are a great choice for a city apartment life as they don't need a great deal of.. well, anything. You can lock em up in your bathroom, leave them in the sun, forget to water them ,ect, and they hold up pretty well. Plus, they're awfully cute little guys and very space efficient.

A few days ago I bought some and, inspired by the jars I was discovering while taking out the recycling, repotted them and decorated the more dreary corners of my apartment.

Just remember to stick a piece of burlap or a layer of stones in the bottom to help with filtration so they don't get to saturated. 

Fashion-Sense Cardio

Welp, I've discovered yet another way to waste time. 

Small town island girls understandably have some 

trouble holding their own on the streets of French 

cities when it comes to fashion savoir faire, so 

I've embraced polyvore. Users can create "sets" of 

clothing articles and accessories and browse the 

sets of other users to get inspired on their daily 

dress up. I'm terrible at it! But it seems like a 

good exercise in beefing up the fashion sense, which 

TMI had told me is.. lacking, so here's my first try. 

Good fun!

Spring in Dijon by foxomatic 

My Life and My Love are on Opposite Sides of the Planet Earth.

It's kinda weird that even after 14 months since this blog's birth and my plunge into Europe, I've neglected to address my most prevalent problem in my franco-phonic home away from home. Loneliness. While there have been some notable names who've dropped in an out of the picture, I've found the language barrier and lack of employment and/or physical student body have left me, for the most part, pining away in solitude in my attic apartment. Wondering at a loss what places I have to go, people I have to see, etc. Since meeting and falling in love with TMI I've become uncomfortably dependent on his company; passing my days waiting for him to come home, languishing alone and without motivation.

Certainly, things have got to change. TMI, no matter how much I love him, can't be worth spending my life waiting around. I know I should go back to Hawaii or the West coast and start a life there, I know it.. But leaving TMI would be like slowly chiseling through my own arm with a pocket knife- like that guy who was stuck in a ravine with his arm pinned under a boulder for several days. How do I do that?! Sack up and take the ouch, or stick it out for love? I wish option two were the answer but honestly I know I couldn't go another month, let alone nine, as we've been planning, like this. So I should go. But the little voice inside me yells "no, no! don't do it! He's the one you idiot, don't give him up for anything!!"

If only he'd made the compromise I was counting on and taken an internship in the Napa valley, these questions wouldn't be writhing around in my brain. Well, granted, at least I have something to think and complain about, and instructional videos on how to be lonely.