Ho hum

Sometimes when I’m reading friends blogs on Blogger, I’ll hit the “next blog” button and eavesdrop on random people’s blog.  It’s a cheap thrill to read what other people write, little hints of who they are through one blog post.  Sometimes I feel so inadequate when I write my blogs.  There’s nothing special about them – just my ramblings.  I’m not a particularly good writer, and I don’t write philosophically.  Just whatever comes to my mind usually, which is usually nothing too deep.  I wish I could write like my cousin.  (See her blog here. )  But I just don’t think like that and I didn’t go to school for writing either, and she did.  It is definitely her calling.

A lot of blogs have AMAZING pictures in them.  Most of them have obviously been photoshopped.  I wish I knew how to use that program.  We have one of the harder versions of Photoshop and I would love to learn to use it, but I just don’t have time to sit down and spend hours messing around with it and figuring it out.  Maybe when Abbie gets a little bit older I’ll have more time to figure it out.  There’s a beginners course online that my friend Emily told me about and I’d like to take that once we get to Italy and I can take notes and stuff and not lose them in the move.  I have such a beautiful little subject to practice with, so I think that’d be fun.

While I’m learning Photoshop, I should probably learn to use my DSLR to it’s fullest potential.  I’m slowly figuring it out, but I wish I had taken a photography course to learn how to use it.  I probably should have thought of that before I had a baby, and I actually did, but never had the time.

Another thing on my list of things to learn to do is quilting.  I would LOVE to be able to quilt.  We went to the AZ State Fair this summer and I could have spent HOURS looking at all those amazing quilts.  But that would require me to get a sewing machine that works more than 25% of the time.  And I’m not even sure my sewing machine will work in Italy because of the wattage difference.  Hopefully it will.  (Along with my digital piano.  I’ll be REALLY bummed if that thing doesn’t work over there, even though I really don’t play it all that much here.)

Thanks to Facebook I’ve gotten in touch with a girl who was an exchange student from Poland during my senior year of HS.  She has a baby girl, Hana, who is 3 weeks younger than Abbie.  I am completely amazed by her ability to speak (and write) English.  She’s more fluent in English than most Americans I know, me included.  It just makes me feel so inept that there are people like her out there who speak 2+ languages easily.  I wish I had learned Spanish in college, and taken it more seriously in HS.  I really, really want to learn Italian while we live in Italy.  I’m taking a course online right now and also bought a travelers crash course through the online program, but it’s slow learning.  I probably should have started this last January.  Good thing we found out we were going to Italy a week ago…  LOTS of time to prepare.. Not.

Anyway, that’s my wish list for now.  I’m hoping to accomplish a lot of this stuff while we live in Europe.  While Mark’s deployed I should have lots of time, or maybe I won’t have any time since I’ll be chasing after Abbie.  We’ll see I guess.  Time will tell.