the rose of kiev

Woosh. It's been quite a long Christmas week. I haven't worked since last Friday, meaning a full glorious 6 days away from registers and managers, and I'm sitting here yawning tonight swearing that I was just at work not even a couple days ago. I'll have to wake up at 6:30 tomorrow for a 7 hour shift starting bright and early at 8am; the first hour or so is slow and allows for a lot of mental downtime and boy do I need the downtime so as to keep processing the thoughts, the memories, the goodness of the past week. For the first time since Thanksgiving I spent a night away from what I now call home; for the first time ever, I spent several nights in a row a bed shared with my sister or splitting (theoretically) a pull-out couch with my punk soon-to-be-step-brother. I was in houses I've called home with no room to call mine; for the first time in my life when my items dawdled on my dad's living room floor I had a fluttering impulse to scoop my things up and at l...

In the past, my dad always used to tease his brother about marrying a high-maintenance woman. My Aunt Susan is classy, organized, always dresses well and is never mismatched. And now, with great glee, my Aunt Susan and Uncle Scott are turning every pun back on my father because he went from a marriage five years ago to a woman more concerned with comfort than class to an engagement with a woman who has to somehow somewhere be in the same gene pool with my Aunt Susan because their similarities are uncanny, to their great delight. Robin always dresses well, especially on days she gets to see my dad, loves to shop, and never mismatches. Ever. And when she does, say, commit a taboo like wearing a white purse with a black-theme outfit she feels the need to call her 19-year-old daughter in disbelief; to which Lauren will, quite seriously, ask if Robin is running a fever. Dad has been with this lady for almost a year now and due to her generosity and fondness of me she has expanded my wardrob...

A girl I've known since I was in middle school called and woke me around 10:30 this morning (trust me, I am living up the Christmas break life for all it's worth) to update me on her life. This was the second phone conversation I've had with her since she moved to southern Ohio with her boyfriend and his family a little before I moved into the girls' house in September. The first conversation was maybe 90 seconds, a brief giddy invite to be a kimono-wearing bridesmaid for her summer wedding. That means she would be married at 20; I looked at myself and realized that I myself am not ready for such a thing and won't be for a while, and knowing my friend I couldn't say that she's honestly ready for such a commitment either, but is going along with the thought because we girls, we like weddings. The presents, the attention, the pretty dresses - we love the whole scene. We sometimes forget that marriage happens after that, and that marriage life is very different...

Just try and pronounce that, I dare ya. It sounds intimidating but it really isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. It's a thyroid condition that kicks my heart rate, rate of speech, metabolism, and energy into high gear while dropping my attention span to that of an ADD 4-year-old. Just before I was diagnosed at 12 I spent a summer doing the craziest things sleepwalking because my body just could not relax in this condition. At summer camp I would try and walk outside into the woods every night, at home I would steal the bath mat and hide it under my covers or randomly wake up on the couch some mornings, never having the slightest idea what happened. Thankfully, my condition's been well-treated by the process of slowly killing off my uncooperative thyroid and giving me a medical supplement in its place, the level of medication finally balanced to the level I need. But there's a side effect I didn't anticipate: apparently the level of supplement isn't enough to send ...

Every morning on school days the first thing I do when I tumble out of bed is check how cold it is on my roommate's computer. The second thing I do every school morning is to look out the bathroom window before getting in the shower to see what the weather is doing and how I should dress for my walk to the bus. Let me say this - walking in the rain early on a Monday morning is not the brightest way to start the week, but at least I'm prepared for it when it happens. After an unnaturally warm November and a dry first week of December I was starting to think I'd be sun-tanning rather than snow-tunneling on Christmas Day. I've wanted snow so bad since Thanksgiving ended, even to the point where I've had more than one dream where I looked out my bedroom window and saw a snowy world of white only to wake up and look out in bitter disappointment to a sunny 65 degree day. This morning when I rolled out of bed my roommate's computer told me it was in the mid-20s, which...

It's 7 in the morning and I've already gotten up, put on deodorant, and jogged more than 20 minutes with some of my roommates. Who abducted my body and is living in mine, because this just isn't something Heather does, especially on days where she has no commitments until work at 2. With every step, lungs burning with that terribly wonderful tingling, I had to tell myself that this is good for me, that I'm earning those pieces of pie back off my body from Thanksgiving, that I'll have endorphins in my system the rest of the day, anything to keep putting one sneaker in front of the other. Thank God for roommates with a sense of motivation else I would never hit that street at a pace faster than a brisk walk to work. And not only do Niccole and Erin keep me moving (my companions this morning) but the majority of my house. There's a high school a block or so from where I live and yesterday 5 of us took advantage of the obscenely gorgeous November day and walked down...

You never realize how much you like your roommates until you realize how eerie your house is without them moving around and laughing in distant rooms. My mom and step-dad drove down from Mansfield so we can all three work in the morning, then commute back for one more day with my grandparents after, and I'm home alone while my roommates are still all gone with family. Even one home aside from me would make the house profoundly less empty. It was a good Thanksgiving, yummy and funny and sad all rolled together. My mom's mom (I have a lot of grandmothers so I always have to differentiate) slaved in the kitchen all day long, getting progressively more flustered as the dishes became done in an amount her two hands couldn't handle. Papa (what we call my grandmother's husband) made a superb turkey, the melt-in-your-mouth kind where even the white meat is juicy. Yes, I prefer dark meat, and am still incensed at McDonald's for discontinuing dark meat in their chicken nugget...