As a freshman in high school I remember being new to Christian Life and only knowing Emily and Kelsey. Kelsey and all kinds of other new people that I had been meeting all asked me if I had a "zana" or "zanga" or "zanega" or something. Sometimes people don't annunciate or spell things out when they should. I needed to find out what this "on-line journal" that everyone else had was. Just when I was going to get onto the (dial-up) internet to make myself a zanga, Rebecca started making her Xanga. Good thing she knows how to spell and figure out stuff like that. Picking a name was torture since someone had already taken the name "alissa," horrible of them, eh? and I really did want something different from my e-mail but nothing else was working. So minivan12381 it remained. Themes, heading, subheading, colors... blogrings and friends. And the blogging. Look at how epic my first post was:
Saturday, 17 September 2005
so I went through all these steps and bla bla bla and now I have xanga but don't know what to write

I was off to a good start wouldn't you say? well since not knowing what to write from my first post on this Xanga has been pretty sporadic. I'm ok with that though. I write here if I want to write here. I don't have to keep people updated anymore. It seems that every time that I'm writing a paper for school the night before it's due I find myself writing thoughts about what I've been thinking about and what I care about (whether I really eventually post them or not, usually not) in order to rebel from writing about what I don't care about. And just to procrastinate of course.

Now, as a freshman in college I look through my highschool's blogring and see that there are maybe 3 people that still use Xanga occasionally. It's been a long time since I've asked anyone in person if they have a Xanga. There are better ways to make people give you weird looks.

College though is great. I love the people, how I can walk down my hallway and meander into anyone's room to say hi or sit outside on the picnic tables to do homework, to know that food will be served every meal time, how there are more than 8, 12, or even like 40 girls in my class and we're not all together all the time (I'm thinking back to jr. high and senior year now), how you can decide what you wanna do and do it, how I'm ~30 seconds away from Rebecca and Carrie, how I have my own space and stuff, how there's all kinds of activities to do, how I get to do Chem labs with fill-in-the-blank lab reports instead of the long typed out ridiculous lab reports I'm now used to (thanks for preparing me for college certain high school teachers, I mean WASTING MY TIME), how classes aren't that much harder but they count for more, how all the people around me have different stories and how cool it is to learn from them, how I'm closer to Emily, Rhianna, Meagan, Nithya, and Leanne, how I'm closer to most of my extended family, how it's just nice here. At the same time I miss Fort Collins. I miss the mountains and trails, people who know what camping is, who have heard of and hiked 14ers, Grace Church, Grace Church songs, Grace Church youth group, my room. It's the feeling I've wanted to deny for a while; I always wanted to imagine driving home to end with getting off of highway 20 onto Hollywood Rd. and turning onto Borchers and onto our lane and I never wanted it differently. I think the worst part of pulling up to our Fort Collins house was imagining driving home and seeing that. Now I keep hoping that it works out to go home for Christmas and I do imagine me turning off of Drake onto our street leading to our house, no matter how many other houses and cars are on the street and how unlike Borchers it is. I kinda miss Emily's house and being in Washington and Belize and all the other places I love to be though. But by "miss" I mean, I think of them with fondness and would gladly be transported there for the day but I still would probably worry about missing classes or an activity or something going on here. I feel like I missed out on the usual homesickness and crying myself to sleep the first week of college and hating my room mate phase. I'm ok with that though. I'm not as insecure as I was as a freshman in high school, and even though it's a bigger change and it's a bigger place I feel like it's a better transition. I like it here.

*oh, and by the way, I wrote this while I was supposed to be writing a paper but was procrastinating instead. Some things that should change haven't yet.

Not quite, but kinda. Since my #1 priority this summer is to earn $ for universidad that means that I've been working a lot. I'm usually scheduled to work every Saturday instead of working every other weekend Saturday AND Sunday but I was given the opportunity to pick up a shift yesterday evening. The only thing is that I was already scheduled to work a day shift today, so not only did I work fri and sat evenings, I worked Sunday evening and then came back Monday morning to get the people that I'd put to bed last night up for breakfast (I helped one lady to Supper, down after supper, up before breakfast, then to lunch, then down into her chair after lunch...) It was kinda crazy because yesterday and today I was kinda shuffled back and forth from upstairs (where I'm comfortable) to downstairs (where there are more people right now but more of them are independent and I don't know any of them and I also don't know the other ppl that work down there either). I'd be upstairs and they'd call and tell me to go downstairs and do stuff but then it would get busy upstairs and they needed me to help out but then they'd make me go back downstairs... "Why'd you go back upstairs?!" "Wait, you're leaving us again?" "Can you help with So and so before you go (up/down), please?" It was a little frustrating b/c I was "officially" supposed to stay downstairs because it was a really busy day for them and all the rooms were full and stuff but then I'd ask all the other aides what I could do to help... "well, just So and so and answer some call lights otherwise all I have to do is charting" so I'd just be hanging out waiting for a call light to go off downstairs while I could've been helping feed or do other things upstairs. It all worked out fine though... well until the tornado warning!
Around 2 o'clock when day shift was finishing up and evening shift had already come in the weather alarm radio things started going off and said that there was a tornado warning and there was a bunch of hail (but we've been getting some hail every day for like 8 days now) and a tornado warning means that we had to get every single resident into the hallways near the middle of the building away from the windows (and there are windows everywhere!) it was pretty crazy! at least 2 shifts of people were there so it went pretty fast, most everyone had already laid down after lunch though so that stinks for the evening shift cuz they had to lay everyone down that day shift already laid down. So an hour after I was supposed to leave I left to drive through hugely puddled streets with rivers flowing down the sidewalks wiping rain and the gathered hail of my windshield. I really want a nap but since it's 5 I think I'll just stay up a few more hours and get an awesome night of sleep. Tomorrow is one of the 4 off days I have left in June! Yay hours! My next paycheck I'm thinkin will look pretty good since it'll be the first one where I'm almost working full time in instead of only 12hrs/wk.


Enough stuff about work... this summer has been great so far! I've had a little time to run, read, draw, pain, play guitar and piano, hike, I went to the pool once, and I even applied for a couple scholarships and have kept my room from getting TOO messy. I got a bunch of cool paints and painting supplies from someone from my church who moved away and I'm pretty pumped to use them, I don't know what exactly to paint next though... and I want to go back country camping some this summer!


What I want to do this summer:
work and earn money for college
run
read
paint
draw
take pictures
practice guitar
play piano
hike (all over RMNP and I want to hike ALL the trails at Horsetooth Mountain Open Space and go to Lory State Park and climb a 14er for sure!)
swim and relax at the pool, once again, READ
keep applying for scholarships
take CLEP tests to get out of gen-eds
go through clothes and other stuff I have and get rid of a bunch and clean and organize....
pack up the rest of college stuff
shop w/ the gift cards I got as grad. gifts!
disc golf
wade in plenty of streams
put more of the CDs we have onto my computer
listen to music (like this great Jazz that I'm listening to right now... free Amazon samplers! I like having some jazz on hand!)
do other stuff that I feel like...