Sylver did indeed come over, and we pow-wowed on ideas on how to conduct the perfect handfasting.  Ideas in her head… I love them.  She’s always full of great ones.  So we chattered on that for about an hour and a half, where “ideas” would’ve turned into actual “planning”, which ain’t quite where we’re going just yet.  Just ideas and information.

So we spent the rest of the night doing energy work.  Sylver had the idea of working with vortices, so we grounded and drew up a basic energy vortex.  Dropped it, and started drawing elemental vortices, and we both found a very strange thing… our weakest elements were the easiest to draw, and our strongest elements were the hardest.  I can draw water and fire very easily, but when I drew a fire vortex, it was very, very hard to control.  Water didn’t want to come up at all… one side kept falling, so I had to strain to pull it up and keep it all level and cycling.  So it was very interesting, but very frustrating to have my “easiest” elements be such a bitch to control.  But rather cool that ones I have the hardest time connecting with were the easiest to work with.  I’d always been kind of skittish with air energy, and earth was next to impossible to tap… now that I know how to tap them, I feel much better about them.

There are more parts to the exercise that we didn’t even get to try… gonna have to keep working with those difficult vortices before we even dare attempt step-two or step-three.

Now that we have a newer level of work, I really need to finish writing up our first set of exercises.  I’ve had step-one of exercise-one written up for months now, but never started writing step-two, or exercise two.  Work work work.  I might have to consider putting those up here somewhere, once I get them finished.

Well, that was an interesting night.  Not only did I have a round of sleep paralysis, but I also had a dream that one of my good friends committed suicide, I was thrown out of my home, and also chased and shot in the back by a pack of angry young neds.  I’ve sorted out what the last one means (I’m still more terrified of my ex — his influence over mutual friends, and the ability to misuse things I’ve told him in confidence — than I’d like to admit… not that he’s a ned or anything).  And the first one is just anxiety about the friend’s situation (they’re okay!).  I can’t figure out the second one though.  It was the most unsettling, though.

Fun night.

To brighten the mood for today, however, I had been having loads of anxiety about my financial aid situation.  I knew being an independent-by-age would help land me some extra money for tuition and such, but I wasn’t sure if it would be enough.  I thought that maybe I was putting too much stock into the whole idea of “finally being 24″.  I come on to check the system for which awards were available now that I got the last of my paperwork turned in… and I landed a big, fat, juicy grant (enough to make up the bulk of my fees), and enough in loans to cover the rest with maybe enough to cover books.  So it is a very Good Thing™ I changed my mind about campus housing, because I wouldn’t have had enough to cover that anyway.  But I am rather pleased that the tuition itself is covered… especially pleased that most of it is in grants.

So… yes.  Project Transferring-to-UK is a success.  Education is go!

Finally got someone to answer their phone today, and it seems I have somewhat of a consultation tonight.  Sylver is dropping by to help me with information on handfastings.  I have a book, Handfasting and Wedding Rituals by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartzstein, and it is a really good resource so far, but real live advice from a real live person is always helpful.
And can I just say I’m still amazed that Project Handfasting was green-lighted?  I had resigned to the idea of only being allowed a handfasting if I were stuck with some spacey pagan nutjob who hadn’t touched on reality since reading Buckland’s Big Blue.  But no… here’s yet more proof that I am The Luckiest Girl On Earth.