Hi everyone,

Guess what time it is? Back to school time! In fact, I just finished up my first week back at school. My last first week of school - this is my final semester at CCA. By Christmas if all goes to plan, I should have my BA in jewelry metal arts and be on my way to whatever comes after that.

My summer was busy and sad, but that's for a different post. I took a lot of photos this summer so I think I will end up putting together a photo post of the summer, but it might take a little while to put together.

This semester there have been some changes. The biggest one is that there are fewer people in the house I am livening in right now - it feels a bit empty, but I have way more kitchen space so that's nice.

I bought a new desk - it's this one from Ikea.

I moved benches in the studio. - I did this for a lot of reasons. The main one is that out of the two rooms we have for seniors the second one is smaller, and I found that the bigger room with more people and more activity is really distracting. I can't afford that this semester, I have way to much to do.

In fact I have done a lot to cut down on distractions, I put together a capsule wardrobe before I came down to make getting dressed easier. I am loving it, I know exactly whats in my closet and just about every peice of clothing works with everything else! It's possible that I will get bored with the clothes I have, but I'm more worried about caving and going shopping (for clothes I don't need but want) before the semester is over.

I also made to major shifts in the food I will be eating - I love cooking for myself, it's fun, I always learn something, and I feel much more confident and safe when I have made the food. But making all your meals every day is a lot of time and energy. On top of that I often eat lunch and dinner (+snacks) at school at my bench. So I need to make and pack meals every day, it was getting to stressful. I caved and started looking for ways to make my life easier, the first thing was getting a rice cooker - I eat a lot of rice. For the past three years I have been making rice on the stove. I cook lots of different kinds of rice, about three times a week - White, brown, long grain, and music rice are all in my kitchen right now. So I needed a complex rice maker, I turned to the Japanese. I read a lot of reviews and got this one.

It's beautiful, I'm in love. The manual is huge it has 8 different settings, two timer functions, two warming options, and has fussy logic so it can compensate for a cold outside temperature or a "Full" cup of rice.

the second choice I made was to subscribe to a food delivery service, it's called Freshly. they send me six pre-made meals every week for $69 dollars a week. - The first week is only $30 and I'm really glad they had that promotion because what if they were horrible? Well, I got my first box and had eaten my first two meals and decided it's not horrible. It's not great mind you- they do have flavor, but it's all a bit muddled, and I feel full but not really satisfied like they are missing something. I can live with that - the time and piece of mind it's giving me is huge. They are also very healthy, lots of protein and no gluten in any of them so I am just screening for eggs and dairy. Besides I still am making food just not as much. In a few weeks, I will re-evaluate how freshly is doing and maybe write a more formal review.

here are four of the six meals - I already ate the other two.

I also have a subscription to Nature Box. The snack subscription box that comes monthly. I have had this for about a year now and this too provides good snacks that I don't have to shop/make - I will be keeping this as well.

So here's to a productive semester!

Talk to you later - Katie