Jovers

Nancy commented on one of my last blogs about how busy I always seem to be, and man, I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes being busy can be good – I’m constantly seeing people so I’m not lonely, I always have something to do, and I’m being productive with my time. But other times, it’s just so exhausting and stressful to always be going, going, going. I’ve been feeling like the latter as of late, and I really just need a break.

Fortunately I am on spring break, yet so far, I probably wouldn’t call it a break. I’ve worked three of the five past days, which is a lot for someone who hasn’t had a job before. I worked with my mom yesterday cleaning one of her houses. Her doctor said that she was allowed to clean one house a week, so I went to help her on her first day.

Today my youth group worked on this lady’s house to raise some money for our mission trip in June. We scraped and primed the shed, working from around nine to three. I only stayed until two though, because I had an appointment to (finally) take my senior pictures so I had to go home and get ready for those. (Out of curiosity, is this just an American thing? Where your senior year you have a bunch of professional pictures taken?)

I don’t consider myself a photogenic person and I always feel awkward when I know someone is taking my picture, so having an entire session of just that was a bit weird at first, but I knew the lady that was being my photographer so that made it better. I flipped through some of the shots really quickly and I was pretty pleased with them. Whenever we actually get them, I’ll share a few.

Tomorrow my youth group is going to finish working on that lady’s house, but I’ve decided I’m not gonna go. Call me selfish, but it’s my spring break and I think halfway through, I deserve a break. Plus I have to work tomorrow night. Ugh. I’ll talk about work some other time. Work is just work, and I don’t really want to think about it until I’m there.

Every spring break, I have this really nerdy tradition to watch all of the Lord of the Rings movies. Last year, I got Becky and Andrew to join in on the tradition. This year, though, we’re having a difficult time getting times together. All of us have jobs now, so combined we work every night this week. The logical thing would then to watch them in the afternoon instead, but we’re still having a hard time getting together to even do that. Me and Becky wanted to go Prom dress shopping and mine and Andrew’s two year anniversary is Thursday. It’s just a lot to squeeze in.

For now though, I’m going to finally start enjoying my break and stop working myself so hard. As I’m writing this blog post, I’m watching Chopped and eating strawberries and cheez-its right out of the box. I don’t even remember the last time I sat down to just watch TV.

I’m so excited to sleep in tomorrow morning. Normally I like to get up at a reasonable time in the morning, but I don’t even care. I can sleep in until three pm and I’ll be happy because I finally can get to sleep! I need a lot of sleep. I never understood how some people can go on five or six hours of sleep every day and be perfectly fine, not tired or sleepy. To be fully functioning and focused during the day, I need about nine hours of sleep. I hardly ever get that much, but it’s nice when I can.

I’m just trying to look a little more at the positives at the moment when all I want to do is pull my hair out, and sleep is definitely a positive! Sleep makes a girl like me happy.

I went in for my first day at the Holiday Inn for work, and it was overall an alright day. I didn’t do any training mainly because it’s a lot to take in at once. So I mainly just shadowed people, watching what they did and taking mental notes of little things about the hotel. The only thing that I really did was occasionally file a paper or two. It was a short shift, only three and a half hours, but there wasn’t anything I could do yet, so I was fine with that.

I’m scheduled to work again tonight from six to eleven, so what people would call a normal shift, haha. I’m pretty nervous because tonight they’ll start training me and it just all looks so confusing. The workers that I met the other night were nice though, so I think it will go alright. I usually can catch on to things pretty quickly, so I’m hoping that this will be one of those occasions too.

I woke up this morning at 9:30, thinking that it was Saturday and that I had to babysit. I have today off of school (marking the start of my spring break), so that threw me out of whack a bit. It wouldn’t be such a problem, but I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been having some trouble sleeping, so I’ve been really tired lately and just need a good day off to sleep in. Which would’ve been today.

Not to mention I saw the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games last night.

I wasn’t nearly excited for this movie as I was for the Harry Potter movies, but I was still pretty excited. I think it’s always a bit weird reading a book and imagining in your head what you think everything is like, and then watching what someone else viewed it as on the big screen.

Overall I really liked the movie, so I’m going to insert a mini-review here (no spoilers, I promise!). Most of the things that I really did not like were not plot or acting related, it was more with the filming of the movie itself and the camera angles. In the beginning, when the movie was showing the Seam, the camera was extremely shaky. I realize that this was intentional and that it helped set the mood, but it just annoyed me. I just wanted to somehow be able to stop the camera from shaking!

The way that the fighting between the tributes kind of annoyed me too. The camera was zoomed real close in so that you couldn’t really see what was happening. You could just see a glimpse of a punch, part of a knee in the stomach, and the rest very blurred – again with the shaking camera. :blink: I was talking to Andrew and my friends about it afterwards and we all agreed that if it would have showed everything in the fighting scenes, the movie probably would have been rated R for violence. But, I thought that they could have perhaps shown a little bit more – but I’m an action kind of girl, so I guess that’s just me.

Other than those two things, I really loved the movie. It stayed very true to the book and the things that they did omit I thought were minor and were necessary for the sake of time. I’m glad they didn’t split the movie into two parts. A lot of movies have been doing that which is a bit annoying and seems just another scheme to make more money.

A couple of people I know were complaining that it did not stay true to the book, but they also read the book within the last week, which is rather stupid. There are going to be differences between book and movie, and I learned my lesson after reading one of the Harry Potter books the day the movie came out. I just sat there and critically viewed it, noting every single thing that was different, and I didn’t enjoy the movie because of it.

The casting for the roles and the acting itself was done very well. All of the characters came very close to how I pictured them in my head and my favorite would have to be Haymitch – Woody Harrelson was spot on with his portrayal of his character. The Capitol people me and Becky joked all just looked like a bunch of Lady Gagas, but I thought they were excellent as well.

Overall, I thought the movie was fantastic and I really hope that they are going to make a movie for Catching Fire, too. If you hadn’t read the books or seen the movie, I would recommend both! The Hunger Games are right up there with my other two favorite book series, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

My Bed is Calling My Name

May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor