I can’t believe my summer is almost over! Looking back it seems both really long and really short. I feel like I’ve been home forever and working at Fireman’s Fund forever, which is really cool. But I remember thinking “Oh I’ve got months until I go back to school” and then “I’ve got weeks” and now I have only 6 days! And I haven’t packed… Woops!

I’m finishing up my internship, so these last couple of days have been spent getting ready to hand off all of my responsibilities to other people so that they can maintain them once I’m gone.

And I’m starting to think about school again. Not only my next and last semester of undergrad, but thinking about grad school as well. It’s time to start applying, or at least thinking about applying. And also, I’ve been talking to a lot of people at work and a few of them strongly suggested that I work first before getting my degree. I had already sort of decided not to do that, but now that the idea has been brought up again I’m re-thinking my previous decisions. I realized that I don’t really have a strong feeling or reason to go to grad school now or to go later. I just want to go eventually and the timing doesn’t matter so much. I think what I’ve decided is that I’ll just sorta see what happens. I’ll apply to some schools, and apply for some jobs, and see how it goes and what I get offered. I’m pretty sure I’ll make the best out of whatever decision I make, so I’m not super worried, which is nice.

Some friends and I are taking a trip to Chicago to visit the University of Chicago and Northwestern University over labor day weekend. Those two schools, as well as Columbia and NYU in New York are the main schools I’m looking at applying to, so it will be great to have a little bit of information about at least the Chicago schools before I make any decisions. It should be a lot of fun. A lot of driving (we’re driving from Tulsa to Chicago), but a lot of fun also!

And Nana’s memorial service is this weekend. Grandpa is here to go to the service, and my boyfriend is up here too, visiting some family in Sacramento. So we’re all going over to her house tomorrow to start getting things set up for that. We’ve been going through all of the photos that we found in her house. It’s amazing how many pictures of dogs and plants we found! I mean seriously, there were like boxes and boxes of photos without any people in them. But it’s been really fun to see all of those old photos, and we’re going to try to get some of them together to display at the memorial.

And I have to pack!

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A lot of thinking

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently. (Not that I don't think a lot at other times, but I've been more conscious of it recently I suppose).

Nana passed away eleven days ago. I don't really know what else to say about that. I think it just finally caught up with me yesterday. For the first few days it all just seemed pretty surreal. Like "Oh Nana's just away, not at the house, on a trip, or something". But it's been eleven days and she hasn't come back. And I think it's finally real for me now. We went to lunch at Easy Street Cafe yesterday, and I think that was partly it. We haven't been to Easy Street in 14 years, since 1995 when Papa passed away. It was his favorite cafe and we used to go there all the time when Kyle and I were younger; I think Nana just never wanted to deal with the memories of going back there after Papa wasn't around anymore. It just sort of seemed like a very real sign that Nana wasn't around anymore.

But it's made me think a lot about Grandma. Oddly enough I had been thinking about her a lot this summer already. My boyfriend's grandmother passed away at the beginning of the summer and he says it just didn't really hit him for about a week until one day it did, and he realized that we would never get to meet each other. I had been thinking that about Grandma recently too. I think she would have loved JonMarke (and she would have been so happy that I had found a nice Christian boy who made me happy!) and it makes me sad that she isn't around to meet him.

And I've been thinking about Papa for mostly the same reason. We've found the greatest pictures in Nana's house from years and years ago, and it makes me sad that Papa's not around anymore. JonMarke reminds me a lot of him, with his love of English and debate. Luckily Nana did get to meet JonMarke and I know she really liked him, which is really comforting.

(I figured out what else to say about Nana passing away...) She had been diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 84 after almost 70 years of smoking. So we at least had some sort of warning. She had gone through radiation treatment which shrunk the tumor, but not as much as we had hoped. In a very selfish way I am in no way ready to not have Nana around anymore, but it really was for the best that she passed away the way she did. She hadn't started to get sick from the cancer. She passed away peacefully in her sleep, in her house, with her dogs, surrounded by her garden. It was all exactly as she wanted, and so for her sake it really was the best.

My parents and I have been over at Nana's every day for the past eleven days, dealing with her house and her things and all of that. She was a huge collector (she and Papa both) and we've just been amazed at how much stuff is in that house. Eleven days later we've got most of it at least looked at once and we've figured out what to do with most of it, even if we haven't quite gotten around to doing it yet. But it's time for a break. Last week was insane at work what with finishing up a huge requirements project that was due to be signed off on by Friday, finishing up our intern project which culminated with an executive presentation on Friday, and a huge potluck for the IT department on Wednesday which I had been volunteered to help plan. All of it put together just sort of threatens to make me insane, so I came straight home today after work instead of going to Nana's, which I think was the correct choice.

So now it's time to stop crying (for tonight at least), and get some food in me. Hopefully that will help.

On the bright side, I'm taking Friday off from work and flying down to Escondido on Thursday night to visit my boyfriend. We're going on a date to Disneyland this weekend! It should be nice and relaxing, which is exactly what I need right now.

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