Now what?

It's April 25th, 2012.  Yesterday I celebrated my 27th birthday. In Chicago. With my husband. 21 year old me would NEVER have believed that.  But what 27 year old me cannot believe is that I don't have any homework to do. In fact, today I turned in my very last homework assignment.  Now I won't go so far as to say "ever", because I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'll get the desire to go back to school again sometime...but it's going to be a REAL long time from now.  Either way, I turned in my last homework assignment today. I'm finished.  Of course, I have class tonight at 7, and we'll have "stuff" to do there, but after that, I don't have anything else I HAVE to do.  When I turned in my assignment earlier today I e-mailed it to my professor & said "Attached please find my final reflective essay. Is it weird that I'm kind of sad it's over?"...I am a little sad. I don't know that I can say WHY, because in reality I'm thrilled beyond measure that I can do some of the things I've been missing so much since devoting much of my extra time to grad school.  But it does feel a little sad. So...now what?

First of all, last night while I was waiting for that husband of mine to get out of class so we could go celebrate my birthday, I got into the hunger games. I'll be reading that from now on I'm sure.  Although I bet it won't take me long to finish it. I've got another reading list in the works, which I need to consolidate with the other reading list I blogged over winter break. The moral of that silly rant is that I'll be reading. Lots. Ironically, since now I don't have to read...I'll be reading all the time.

bye bye old bed

Hellloooooooooo new bed!

And of course you know I've got one hundred projects that I want to take on. I'm thinking the first one should really be building our new headboard. We treated ourselves to a new mattress after the wedding, so we bid a fond farewell to my headboard & foot board from my single lady life. I loved that set, and honestly if it hadn't been assembled & disassembled so many times that it became structurally unsound, I would have kept it for future Morgan nugget rooms...but it was past its prime, so we freecycled it. Well now, the new mattress is awesome but we both agree the room would look nicer with a headboard (at least). SO, we've agreed that rather than spend several hundred dollars on a headboard, we're going to try to make an upholstered headboard ourselves! Besides the obvious budget benefits of building our own headboard, this also means that when our design tastes change (& mine do pretty frequently) we can re-cover our headboard & go with a new look. That's why I chose super neutral bedding for our new mattress...so we could update as we please without having to do a complete overhaul. 

We've still got a few things to do on the To Do 2.0 list that I created this past fall, & I've got a LOOOONG list on my DIY Pinterest Board, including a few little crafties for my favorite old lady, Ash Matty & my favorite little lady, Ella Mae. Naturally, I can already think of a list of about 30 more things that I wanna DO now that I have all this spare time, so I'm looking forward to those projects.  

last day in my Chicago garden

Since leaving our little lakeview loveshack last summer, I've really missed the garden that Greg & I started there.  So I've been talking about doing some potted plants & hanging planters for our deck out back. Now that I have ALLLLL of this time on my hands, I can really do some research on flowers & plants that'll last a good long time, look nice, & be low-ish maintenance. I think we'll skip the produce for now, but any future Morgan homes will need to have veggie garden potential...a girl needs her garden.

taken by our sweet neighbor

Of course I'll still be advising the Zeta chapter at Northwestern, and I'm planning on getting more active in the Zeta alumnae group.  As for the rest of my "free time" I'm going to get back into my cookbooks, bake up a storm, keep up with the laundry,  actually be home for dinner, explore Chicagoland & all of its sights & flavors, & best of all...walk my sweet puppies!

Graduately (I know...it's a stretch),
Meggo