I graduated!

Whee! I'm all done with school, forever! Er, that is, until I go to grad school...

But I'm done with college! Hurray! I graduated on Saturday, and it was awesome. My parents flew out from California, and one of my best friends from high school stopped by on his way back home from DC, so I had a bunch of people there with me.

So now I'm home in California, still jobless, still living in my parents house, still all of those things. Apparently graduation wasn't actually the key to "real adulthood" like I kept hearing... But hey, I'll figure it out. I'm actually only planning on being here (California) for about six to eight months. After that my boyfriend and I are going to move to some other place so that he can get his Ph.D in English. We don't know where yet because he is still sending in applications and stuff and we won't hear back until February at the very earliest. But he applied in Chicago, New York, and Boston, so wherever we end up, it's going to be awesome!

I also applied to grad schools in the same place (gonna get my MBA), but most schools want MBA candidates with 3 to 5 years of work experience, and according to them I have 0. I feel that's slightly unfair cuz I've had some really awesome and totally relevant summer internships, but apparently those don't count. Oh well. So, if I don't get in anywhere I'll just work for a few years and then reapply. Should work out great... I think... hopefully. Nah, it'll be fine.

So the plan is to hang out here in California for the holidays and do absolutely nothing. I've already sent out some feelers for some techy jobs around the bay and am hoping to hear back once people are back at work after the holidays. Then hopefully I'll be working for about six months, and then moving across the country. Whee!

But seriously, the next three weeks? Relaxing! Totally. It's not like I have anything I have to do. Except decorate the Christmas tree. Help my mom cook metric tons of food. Unpack three suitcases and seven boxes of stuff. Organize said three suitcases and seven boxes of stuff into the HOUSE FULL of stuff I already had here at home. Find a job. Find health insurance. No, really, it'll be cake!

Ok so I'm gonna ignore all that stuff for a while. The Christmas tree at least is decorated, so maybe not the next three weeks, or even the next three days, but the next three hours will DEFINITELY be relaxing! Yay!

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Warning: Sick People!

Everyone in our apartment is sick! Stay away! Or actually, Erin is not sick... YET! But she was gone this weekend, and her sister was sick, so she might be in the early stages of it.

JonMarke has been coughing up a lung for a little more than a week now, and still refuses to see the doctor. He seems to be a bit better though. Doug got sick Friday afternoon with apparently the same thing JonMarke had, but Erin had already escaped one hour earlier. And then Saturday morning I went from completely fine to feeling like I was dying within the space of about fifteen minutes. I could feel the sore throat coming on, and then ten minutes later I didn't even want to breathe it hurt so bad.

Unfortunately the NYU application was due the next night, but I wanted to get it done. Luckily, the essays were pretty much ready, so I submitted the application and then went to bed at like 9pm and didn't wake up until noon on Sunday. Also luckily, I had mostly written the term paper that was due today at 11am, and had only left a basic concluding paragraph that still needed to be written. And, no one wanted to work over the weekend so we did the group project that is due on Tuesday after class on Friday. So that just needed to be put together into one document. So I spent the weekend in sweatpants and a sweatshirt watching TV, but it was all ok because I got my homework done in advance.

And actually, I woke up this morning feeling pretty crappy, but now my sore throat is mostly gone and I just feel all sorts of stuffed up and headache-y. Maybe it'll be gone tomorrow. (But I'll still have to fend off JonMarke and Doug's long-lasting cough stuff. Bleh.)

The semester is still relaxing though. I have a 6 page Spanish paper, a 10 page Spanish paper, a final report for Strategic Management, and a few final tests, and that's basically it! The two papers I can easily get done during Thanksgiving break (which thankfully is next week!) and the rest of it can be done anytime before the last day of finals, December 17th. I've got tons of time.

I've gotta get all my stuff packed up and shipped home over break too, so that hopefully there is very little to do when my parents show up for graduation!

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Now it's relaxing!

So I finally got around to having a relaxing semester! Every year I think "Oh this semester will be fine, I only have such and such classes, and two of them are such and such, and the first one starts at 11am, etc" but then I'm always wrong. There is always something or another that I just completely didn't expect or plan for and somehow taking six classes is actually stressful!

Well I did it again at the beginning of this semester. I thought "I only have four classes, only one on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it starts at 11. This semester will be cake!" Well I forgot about grad school apps, and of course those were insane! But, I've gotten to the point in the semester where I'm more than halfway done with grad school apps, and my classes are actually really easy this semester. So while all of my friends are freaking out ("We only have three weeks of class left!") I'm actually feeling pretty relaxed.

I'm almost done with my third application, which is due November 15, and then I just have one more to do, but it's not due until January 6, so I've got time. The most stressful thing I have to do right now is figure out how to get everything I own from Tulsa to California before I leave here for good on December 20th! Luckily my parents will be coming out for graduation so we'll have six suitcases worth of space to put stuff in. But that doesn't help for things like my mini fridge and furniture. That stuff will probably just have to go to a good home here in Tulsa.

And then I get to re-move all of that stuff across the country to either Chicago, New York, or Boston at the end of the summer so that we can go to grad school. Whee! But that's stress for another time. Right now, I don't have to deal with it. And it's been in the mid-70's all week, so I'm happy!

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Aaaahhh!

I found three long silver-grey hairs on my head yesterday! And I've only finished one out of four grad school applications so far. Crap, I'm way too young for this!

On the plus side, I am getting close to having my second application finished, and the other two aren't due for another month so I will have a bit more time to finish those up.

Luckily school hasn't been super duper crazy. It's busy, cuz it's school, and that's what happens, but it's seeming mostly manageable. I even find time to do some fun things every once in a while. Tomorrow my friend Elizabeth and I are going to make sushi for a bunch of friends and have a little dinner party. We went shopping last night (in the freezing cold rain, yes, winter has come early!) so that will be a nice break from grad school apps and paper writing for my Spanish classes.

JonMarke is diligently working away on his study abroad applications, but it seems like the world is against him right now. His transcripts are on hold because one of his scholarships hasn't come through yet, his adviser is on sabbatical this semester so he's having problems getting his class list signed off on, and he's also very busy with school because it's about time for midterms, which for an English major means a bunch of ridiculously long papers. So hopefully he'll be able to pull it off (I would love to go visit him in Ireland!), but it might not work out, which would be too bad. We'll see...

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Grad Schools!

So I'm back at school (have been for just over three weeks) and everything is going kind of crazy! I had all of these grand delusions of having a peaceful and relaxing semester because I only have four classes, and none of them are MIS classes. Hah! Not true...

I decided that I am going to apply to grad schools this year instead of working first. So my boyfriend and I and our friends Patrick and Karissa drove up to Chicago (yes, from Tulsa) over Labor Day weekend under the premise of looking at grad schools. Or at least, grad schools was the cover story we gave our teachers so that they wouldn't yell at us for skipping class on Friday. It was also about having fun! But the trip started out pretty disastrously. About three hours into the drive we were in the left lane on Route 44 when someone merged into us! JonMarke was driving and to avoid being hit full on by this car he was forced to swerve into the ditch between the two directions of the highway where we spun around and skidded for about a quarter mile before coming to a stop. Luckily, no one was hurt and the car wasn't damaged at all! Like, no cosmetic damage either! It was a pretty scary experience all in all, but the rest of our drive was fairly uneventful.

The rest of the trip got steadily better from then on (I mean, how could it not!). We spent Friday visiting grad schools (University of Chicago and Northwestern), we walked all around downtown Chicago on Saturday and ended the night at an improv comedy club, and JonMarke and I got to have brunch with my cousin Alison and her husband Kirk on Sunday. So all in all it was really great. We loved the University of Chicago and the city itself, and we really liked the Northwestern campus but unfortunately the admissions woman who did my info session was having a bad day or something. I was really unimpressed and she seemed very haughty and uptight.

The visit got me into the 'grad school mode' though and I have spent the entire week since being back working on applications. I've started writing essays, which is by far the hardest part for me. But luckily my boyfriend is an English major so at least for "englishy" type things he is super useful. And my mom has looked over a bunch of stuff for me too which is really great.

Unfortunately the first application is due on October 1st, which is just two weeks away, and I found out today and yesterday that all of my classes are at the point where large projects and tests are coming up, you guessed it, within the next two weeks! So it's a bit hectic trying to get my essays finished in time to have my mom and teachers and friends look at them before submitting them and study for tests and research industries for Management class and try to have a life all at the same time. But I'm sure I'll figure it out!

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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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