I'm Mallory, a 23-year-old girl recently graduated from UCF. Here you'll find my journal and my portfolio. This journal is for my family to know what's going on in my life. 
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
So, I had to manually update Wordpress because the automatic updater didn’t want to work. So everything right now is messed up and I’m getting pretty damn pissed. Half my crap is gone! I want to scream at my hosting company. Just expect this site to be messed up for maybe a few days while I try to straighten everything out.
So, a while ago I was listening to NPR (because what else do I listen to when my truck has no CD or tape player?) and there was a piece on a guy who was paring down his possessions to only 500 things. I thought this was a great idea. However, I know I have waaaaay more than 500 things, prolly more like a couple thousand things. Hell, my sewing stuff alone is prolly over 500 items. But anyway, I took this idea as “More is less” and since then I’ve been aggressively reducing my possessions. So, at the moment I have a huge pile of boxes and bins of stuff I want to get rid of. Luckily there’s going to be a community garage sale soon! April 12th to be exact. So, hopefully I’ll be able to get rid of a bunch of my junk and make a small profit rather than just sending it all away to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. I’m hoping that soon my room will look like those in the magazines, not cluttered and very simple and elegant. Right now it’s strewn with sewing and crafting projects.
Since Rob has been working late every night, I’ve been going through my things. It’s a little haphazard since I don’t have a specific plan. I just kinda go “Hey, that looks messy, let’s go through that!” So, I’ve done my medicine and bath products as well as my computer accessories. I found like 2 unopened boxes of floppy discs. Floppy discs! I’ve also gone through my clothes and found quite a few things I’ve never worn and will likely never wear. You have to be a bit brutal when going though your stuff. You need to ask yourself “When have I used this? Do I absolutely love it? And will I ever use it again?”
The hardest things to throw out are gifts. You feel a bit guilty when you come across something at the bottom of a drawer or the back of the shelf that someone gave to you with the best intentions. You hang onto it for the longest time, worried that they’ll ask what happened to it, or you just feel bad about not liking it. But really, if it sits in the bottom of your drawer, they’re not going to see it. And if they ask to see it, they’ll feel just as bad if you have to dig to find it. Or you have buyers remorse about something you bought because you loved it at the store but became disappointed when you got home. I get that a lot. Mostly because I let people talk me into buying things. Like clothes. I have a lot of clothes items that I’ve never worn and will probably never wear, but at one point someone said they looked good on me and I bought it.
So, in conclusion, I’m happy to be getting rid of some of the clutter in my life. But it’s a little sad too. I’m really looking forward to the garage sale!
Oh, and I reaaaally want to do some sponsored posts, but there is literally only one available to me. Paintball? Why would I write about paintball!? Ugh! 
So, I figured out that it wasn’t Wordpress that lost all those entries. It was my hosting company! They were moving some servers and I lost some data from that. Pretty much anything from November till now was gone. That included Eelpoutart. I had to re-upload everything for that website. I’m now wondering if that lost data will magically re-appear and everything I’ve done in the past few days will be gone. Ugh!
I’m re-designing Rob’s website. Giving it a snappier cleaner look. Or rather, the old layout was making me gag and I just had to redo it. There will also be a gallery system, which Rob is excited about. It’s pretty much taking the default gallery output of Adobe Lightroom and hacking it all to bits, creating something much cleaner in the end. I mean really, they put a link around a div. I’m almost done with everything. I just need Rob to give the final OK for launch.
MegaCon is coming up this next weekend! I have to decide what to wear. One of my costumes isn’t going to work out. I bought a jumpsuit in a small, and when I got it, it was bigger than Rob. So what, an XL could be used as a slip cover for the sofa? So, we have a lot of reconstruction to do on it before it’s wearable. I’m hoping Sasha will finish my Hell Girl costume for the convention, but if not, it’s ok. It looks like I’ll be wearing gothic lolita the entire weekend. I finally have a versatile enough wardrobe that I can create a few outfits out of a few pieces. That doesn’t make it any easier to decide what to wear though. I have to wash some of it too.
And my dad may be visiting sometime in the next week. Gotta clean up some of the stuff around here! 
