You know that blog I posted about it being difficult to do homework when it’s beautiful outside?
It’s currently 84 degrees and straight blue sky.
And it’s Dead Week.
This might be one of the greatest challenges I’ll ever have to face.
Must… do… homework.
Must… not… play… duck… duck… goose… on… Brandt… Center… lawn.
Here’s the thing.
There are 14 days of school left.
36 class sessions.
Which means two things:
1. SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER. I get to go home and see my family for the first time since Christmas! I’ll be home with them for six weeks, then head back to Nampa to start gallivanting across the Northwest as a member of Witness. Witness is an NNU travel group of six members that goes to churches, camps, nonprofit organizations, you name it, and acts as gamers/actors/camp counselors/NNU promoters/do-whatever-needs-to-be-done-ers/ general fun creators. T’will be a BLAST.
2. This week is semi-normal. Next week is Dead Week, when everyone has so much homework, so many papers, so many presentations, that everyone lives in their rooms or the library. There is more collapsing on the floor than is typical. For more info on Dead Week, scroll down to my post about it from first semester! Dead Week is followed by, of course, Finals Week, which is obviously a tough one. All of these things are factors adding into the general consensus that the end of this school year will be HARD. But all the important things are, right?
While I’m obviously excited for the coming weeks, I’m also soaking up each moment of each day. Only 3 more weeks with NNU’s community and my friends before a four month parting! Summer will come in time… there’s life to be lived right now!
P.S. I am currently writing this while donning a red and black polka dot romper, Cindy-Lou-Who pigtails, the brightest blush, the reddest lipstick, and a sash reading “Dolling up Dooley”. Needless to say… we were RA initiated last night. Nothing like being blasted awake at 4:00 AM by six exuberant current RAs and “the Circle of Life” song filling your dorm room, then being blind-folded, dolled up (pun intended) and taken to breakfast. Good good good times.
I am currently sitting at a picnic table outside the Perk (well… I was when I originally wrote this… now I am typing it on my computer in my room…) writing on good old fashioned notebook paper (…see previous note) drinking a blended cocoa coconut tea latte (try it, it’ll change your life) and doing Human Biology homework (I should probably quit with these parentheses… they’re confusing).
Wow, I should probably try to avoid writing sentences like that. Anyways. Lovely NNU students are walking to class in T-SHIRTS. Not giant sweatshirts, t-shirts! Granted, that clothing decision may be a bit premature since it’s only low 50s outside… but spotting the sun has been such a rare occurrence, we’ve got to embrace it while we can.
OH MY WORD. A man just backed a trailer into a parking stall forty feet from me, and in the trailer is… a lawn mower. Soon the air will be full of MOWED GRASS SMELL. HALLELUJAH.
I love the transition to spring. Just like I love the transition to summer, and fall, and winter. I love the newness and change and fresh possibilities. It’s invigorating. But, with the grand, colorful and double door-worthy entrance of spring comes… dum dum da dum… SPRING FEVER. Spring fever can basically be summed up in this example sentence that may or may not have directly run through my brain before:
“I COULD do my Philosophy homework… OR I could eat a popsicle and play kickball in the great wide sunny world!”
Don’t get me wrong; school is extremely important to me. Spring just becomes an intricate blancing act of getting things done with as much skill as I can… and soaking up as much Vitamin D as possibly possible.
Wish me luck.
P.S. Some Nampian is currently having a BBQ and the smell is making its way into my open window. It smells like country music and summer nights. I am happy.
B B B B B B B B BLACK TIE!!!
So yesterday evening my sister (who is a Sophomore at NNU) asked me if I wanted to go hang out with her. We went out and got Starbucks and had a jolly good time, but in the back of my mind I was thinking “….hmm.” I’m a pretty good lie detector (which frustrates people when I watch crime shows with them…), and my sister would rarely choose to use gas to go get something as silly as Starbucks… my spidey senses were tingling.
For good reason, as it turned out.
When we returned to NNU, my sister started to walk toward MY dorm instead of her own, spouting off that she wanted to get something from my room… RIIIIIIGHT. Well, it took me a good three and a half seconds to see the writing on the wall… the literal writing on the wall. Someone had written “SAM, BLACK TIE??” on ALL FOUR STORIES of Ford. Wowza.
Upon entering my hall, I saw a roll of toilet paper with my name on it . I followed the stand all the way to my room, where I was greeted by flowers and a black tie with my friend’s name on it and… well, you see the picture!
I guess it would probably be beneficial to explain what Black Tie is! Black Tie is a wonderful NNU formal event put on by SGA that involves getting dressed up, taking pictures, spending time with friends, eating delicious food… all kinds of good stuff. You can go with a date, a friend or a group.
And now I get to go with my wonderful friend Spencer! HOORAY! But don’t tell him I’m going to say yes… it’s the duty of the girl to come up with some clever and creative way to respond to the boy. The wheels are turning!
This is my wing.
My wing mates are lovely and I love them a lot.
We have fun. Lots of fun.
Our RA, Stephanie, is an absolute joy. At the beginning of the year when we were all scared little new kids, she made up dorky and fun games so that we could get to know each other. Our weekly wing meetings quickly moved from crickets chirping-ly quiet to absurd amounts of laughter, thanks in large part to my hilarious roommate. I always look forward to our Tuesday night meetings; we talk about what’s going on around campus, talk about life, and pray for each other. It’s usually all done around a package of Oreos.
Each wing in Ford (the Freshman girls dorm) has an RA, a peer mentor, a life group leader, and a peer health educator. Here’s what they do:
RAs: everything. RAs do everything.
Peer mentors: buy you coffee and listen to you talk about life. Pretty sweet deal.
Life group leaders: lead a weekly Bible study for all the girls on the wing. Usually snacks are involved (I’m sensing a theme…).
Peer health educators: make sure you’re living WELL and are not completely out of control from all the coffee and snacks your RA, peer mentor and life group leader are giving you.
This picture was taken right before we headed to Olive Garden for a fun night out. Doesn’t everyone look stellar? The first picture we took was of everyone smiling, but I figured this one better represented all of us in our natural habitat.
You’ve probably sung it since the moment you could sing.
“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…” but the world tells me I’m-and you’re- not worth it. So who is telling the truth?
Last week was Winter Awakening, so NNU brought in a special guest to speak at chapel and extra Time Outs. It was pretty wonderful. The speaker, Scott Evans, traveled all the way from Ireland to talk to us about life and have coffee with us and tell us that our stories need more dragons (…you had to be there). He really really wanted us to know that God loved us right where we were at.
The week was incredibly powerful for a lot of people. Here are some highlights of Scott’s messages, paraphrased to the best of my ability:
“People always talk about how God hates sin. I think more important than the fact that God hates sin is the fact that He loves you. I have a friend who lost his fiance to cancer two weeks before their wedding. In a conversation with God, my friend asked, ‘God, why do you hate sin?’ and God replied, ‘Well, why do you hate cancer?’ The friend said, ‘Because it took the one I love away from me.’ God replied, ‘Exactly.’”
“St. Augustine once said something like ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength… then do whatever you want.’ Because if you are truly trying to love God with everything you have, everything you do will glorify Him.”
“Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me what you do, and I’ll tell you what you believe.”
One of my favorite things that Scott said was that what he was speaking was “aspirational truth”… he could believe it for us, but he knew his own brokenness and had an amazingly difficult time believing it for himself. I can definitely relate to that. He said he was going to talk about just how much God loves him, and us, until he believes it.
God loves me. God loves you. God loves me. God loves you. God really loves me. God really loves you.
Let’s repeat it until we believe it. Let’s try to get closer to our heavenly Father and Creator and to who He created us to be, then closer still.
It was the best of races, it was the worst of races.
Well, no; actually it was just the best.
Last Friday night my four teammates and I gathered along with 8-9 other teams at a movie theatre in downtown Boise to compete in the ultimate competition: THE AMAZING RACE. It began with a riddle my genius friend was quick to solve, and we were the first team out the door. Over the next hour we solved puzzles, chugged guava nectar, caught paper airplanes dropped from six stories up, became spaghetti-and-marshmallow tower architects, did a fair amount of smack talking, made quick friends with locals who gave us directions, threw eggs, found a statue of Abraham Lincoln, discovered it was the WRONG Abraham Lincoln, ran another mile to find the correct one, and sprinted to the finish. And more.
My all-Freshman team got SECOND PLACE! Especially considering one of my teammates ended up with an ankle three times the size it should have been… I was very proud of us.
I’m not sure what I had been expecting, but over the course of the night we probably ran three or four miles. OH MAN am I feeling it in my calves. As we were walking back to the parking garage when the competition was over, we spotted a corner of a building where all the rain that had been falling throughout the evening was draining off the roof. It was positively dumping in that one spot. So what did we do? We stood under it and took a picture, of course! Afterwards we literally looked like we had jumped in a lake. Absolutely worth it.
Good friends. Good times.
Wanna know what’s really really beautiful? Snow. Falling, white, spinning, lovely snow. I stinkin love it. And after an entire semester of empty promises that the frozen beauty was on its way, I woke up this morning to an inch on the ground and more falling quickly. HOORAH! By mid-afternoon the snow was several inches deep. It was picturesque and perfect.
WAS.
Just after that perfect mid-afternoon snapshot, the snow turned to rain. Now, don’t get me wrong. I also stinkin love rain. I am a Seattlelite, after all. But when the rain hit the snow, I learned a new mathematical equation.
Rain+snow= slush. LOTS OF SLUSH.
To say there are puddles is a bit of an understatement. To say it’s slippery is a bit of an understatement. To say that it’s absolutely ridiculous would probably be accurate. It’s a fun type of ridiculous; how often does weather like this happen? Might as well enjoy it while it’s here. Soon today will be a story at the end of the semester: “Do you remember that day we walked around in a lake?”
The “NOT OK” part of this message, however, is that the snow is basically not snow anymore. That’s not ok. More snow please, Nampa. You can do it. We believe in you.
On a side but equally HOSTILE note, Tagged started again this week… and I have already been utterly demolished. Let the diabolical plans for capturing my friends begin!
After a marvelous Christmas Break (which included an electricity-less Christmas, my little brother turning 16, a ridiculous amount of satsuma oranges, and watching like 18 episodes of “Lie to Me” on Netflix), we are BACK! Back to watching stellar Nampa sunsets out my fourth floor window, back to early morning classes and late night adventures, back to university life.
My mom sometimes says I was a college student long before I was a college student… I think she’s probably right. I LOVE being at school. I LOVE learning at school. And I LOVE the beginning of a new semester, which is right now!
This semester I’m taking Human Biology (plus a lab), Fundamentals of Wellness (plus a lab), World and the West (non-US history), Intro to Philosophy, Lifespan Development, and Research Writing and Critical Thinking. I’m a little scared of the last one, but we watched an episode of “House” during the class period yesterday so that’s a promising start.
The start of this semester is obviously pretty different from the beginning of the last one, since now I can walk into the Dex and recognize the faces of friends and can walk from class to class with a clue about where I’m going. There is still a wonderful sense of newness though— new possibilities, new adventures. I LOVE change. Variety is the spice of life.
Here’s what I want to do DIFFERENTLY from last semester: Always eat breakfast. Make time to go running. Take advantage of all opportunities.
Here’s what I want to KEEP doing: Being grateful. Not being afraid. Well, learning to not be afraid.
Here’s to a new semester. If it’s half as good as the last one, I’ll be one happy college Freshman.
… that the people who are in my life make it really really beautiful.
That’s all.
