Thoughts on the Future

I began my blog stressing out about what I am going to do after graduation. I am happy to report that after three and a half months I have some direction!!! I have decided that I am moving back closer to home at least for a little while. Home for me is South Ga., so right now I am headed to the Valdosta area. I have applied for one job and have leads on a couple more! I would love to get a job in a hospital marketing/PR department, so we will see where that endeavor goes. I feel like things are coming together much more than they were a few months ago. I finally took the initiative and began to get things done. I am happy with my resume, which I thought would never happen!! I am confident that the right job is coming around the corner! Although I am really nervous, I am also really excited!

The Wonders of Construction

Have you ever been woken up by a really loud BOOM? Well, this is something that I get to enjoy EVERY morning of the week and sometimes even Saturday!! It never gets any less frightening or any less annoying! I feel like I am getting robbed and shot at everyday which is a wonderful way to start the day! Right across the street from my house, new apartments are being built. They are less than 20 yards from my bedroom window! Let me just tell you, construction workers DON'T try to be quite! So many mornings I have wanted to go yell! When we first moved into our house, we weren't told that we would have to deal with this aggravation all year! It wasn't as bad during the winter, but then I was being woken up by squirrels in my wall!! I must say it will be pretty nice to get away from this house and back to some peace and quite after graduation!

A Glimpse into An Advertising World

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My Biggest Fear

About 10 minutes ago I saw one of the biggest spiders I have ever seen in my life!! Let me just say I am TERRIFIED of spiders! This one was alive and in my bed I almost had a heart attack! Oh the glories of living on a porch! Not really I am just kidding! My room is a porch that was converted into a room, so it has a brick wall and brick tile floor. Apparently, this is a perfect place for spiders to live according to the Orkin man!! GREAT!! There is no way I am sleeping in there tonight. I don't even want to go in there in the morning to pack up my stuff! I don't know where my fear stems from, but I do know that it is very intense! AGGHHH...

My Last Day as an Undergraduate

Tomorrow will be last official day of class as an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia. I have very mixed emotions about this time in my life. Of course I am very excited to be done with school, but at the same time it is extremely terrifying! I am getting very sad about leaving the friends that I have grown closest to during my college career. In less than 13 days I will be able to walk through the Arch on North Campus and become part of the legend!! Again, it is a bittersweet time for me! I can honestly say that I don't have any regrets from college, and my last two years (both senior years!) have been especially incredible!! I would go back to the beginning and do every year over in a second! In class, my teachers keep reminding us how we will never get this time back, so we better live it to the fullest now! I intend to do just that for the next two weeks! My roommates and I have a full week planned the week of graduation.

1) Show off our karaoke skills
2) Eat at Allen's
3) Float down the Broad River
4) Spend an afternoon at Agua Linda
5) Braves Game
6) UGA Baseball Game
7) Get shirts printed at the print shop downtown
8) Find all the Bulldogs in Athens and take pictures

College has come to an end, and now we must all make decisions that lead us to the next path of our lives. For some of us, letting go is not going to be easy. I think the thing that I am having the hardest time with is knowing that when I wake up in a few weeks I will not be able to walk in my best friends' rooms when I need advice or just want to hang out! It is a feeling similar to moving out of the dorms freshman year, but with a little less relief and a little more grief. This time we know that we aren't coming back together in 3 months because realistically, each of us will be going our separate ways hours apart. For some people this is very hard to relate to because they are not close to their roommates at all. For me, I have been lucky enough to live with my 3 best friends and we have actually remained close and probably grown even closer! In a little over a week we will all walk through the Arch and take our last pictures together as students as we enter the "real world."

Athens Twilight

This past weekend I attended Twilight in downtown Athens. Saturday morning we walked downtown to eat at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which was really good by the way! Once we got downtown we saw vendors everywhere as well as cyclists doing tricks in several different locations. We stopped to watch a few of the guys, and they were pretty awesome!!! Later that night we went to the actual Twilight bicycle race. I have been to Twilight before, but I have never actually gotten to watch the race! We watched the last 45 minutes from right behind the pit crews. While we were standing there, we saw so many guys quit the race and several more had to stop to get tires changed. If you have never gone, Athens Twilight should definitely go onto your "To Do" list! On Twilight, downtown Athens is a very cool place to be; everyone is just in the mood to have fun. There is something for everyone from families who are ready for a day out of the house to college students who are ready to party the night away! If you didn't make it this year, mark your calendars for next spring!

Skiing Adventure

A few days ago, one of my roommates found a video from a ski trip that we took during spring break. We all had a hard time picking skiing back up, but for Jade this task was undeniably difficult. For most of the first day, we just had to meet her at the bottom, which sounds very mean I know, but it was almost impossible to ski with her. The one time that we decided to stay with her on the entire run, 50 yards from the bottom she decided she needed a break. When we told her we were almost at the bottom, she said she needed a break right that second and just fell so that she could "have her break!!" Keep in mind this wasn't the first time or the second!! The next day she went to ski school!! This is just a glimpse into Jade's skiing escapade!

Lily Springs and Naked Ed

As I said last weekend I went canoeing down the Santa Fe River. Halfway through the trip we saw a sign that said "Lily Springs" and the spring was back in a little cove, so we wanted to go see what it was. As we were going we saw signs saying home of Naked Ed and different sayings that he had made, but I didn't think anything of it. I just thought it was probably some guy's nickname. When we got there, we saw a guy sitting behind a dock, so the guys went to talk to him. We noticed that they talked for a second, walked to this little hut, and then walked back to talk to him again. When Mallory and I walked over to talk to everyone, we soon found out why it was the home of Naked Ed!!! He was completely naked!! For the second time on this trip, I almost had a heart attack!! He was very nice and talked to us for several minutes, but I couldn't hardly say anything because I was still too shocked!

Canoeing on the Santa Fe River

This past weekend I went on my first camping trip! It was actually really fun! I honestly didn't know how I would handle the whole experience because I am sort of a wimp when it comes to creepy crawly things and bugs! The first night I did refuse to take a shower at the campground because there was a huge shower in the bathroom, but the next night after being on the river all day I felt gross enough to suck it up! I was very proud of myself!!
On Saturday I went on my first canoeing trip, and I must say it was quite an adventure!! We canoed for 6 hours down the Santa Fe River, but surprisingly it wasn't as tiring as I thought it would be. About 30 minutes into the trip we saw a 5 feet alligator up on the bank! Of course the guys with us wanted to get closer and try to see it move, so needless to say we went closer! Instead of going up the bank like the guys thought it would, the alligator jumped into the water 5 feet away from our canoe!!! I almost had a heart attack!!! This was just the beginning of the events that were to unfold.

This was getting a little too close for comfort!

My reaction when the alligator jumped into the water!

Spring Break Revelations

So while I was sitting at home over Spring Break doing absolutely nothing I realized several things!

1) I am having a major case of senioritis and I am becoming a very bad procastinator!
2) I only have 30 days of class left at UGA!
3) I am going home and will no longer be living with my closest friends in 55 days!

These realizations brought me to several conclusions! The first of which is that I still have a little further to go and there is no point in messing up my grades this late in the game, so I better just deal with it. Secondly, there are still a lot of things that I want to do before I leave Athens. For this reason, I started a "Before Graduation" to-do-lists for my roommates and me. Right now it is relatively short, but it growing daily and I can't wait to start marking things off!!!

Charter is extremely annoying

I have been trying to post a video of my roommate singing to my blog for the past hour, but my internet is being incredibly slow and it will not upload!! The point of this blog was going to be to tell you that we are making my roommate Allison tryout for American Idol, but with my internet being completely retarded I can't really prove how good she is so you will have to take my word for it until I can get somewhere with a better connection. I don't understand how Charter can be our only option in Athens! How many times a day do I have to reset my router for them to understand that our internet is simply not working correctly? It takes two minutes to pull up my email!! I feel like I am back in the days of dial-up, and I am not very happy about it!!

Wow...I feel old!

Last week I turned 23! Whoa... that sounds really old! Last night my friends and I went to celebrate my birthday. I decided that I wanted to go to Agua Linda which turned into a pretty memorable experience! My roommate got them to sing to me, but this was no normal "happy birthday to you"... it was the loud singing/shouting and the sombrero! I was thoroughly caught off guard and a little embarrassed at the same time, but it was fun! We were planning on going out, but the plans soon changed to dinner and a movie. It is very easy these days for us to just throw out the idea of going downtown. We usually try to convince ourselves that it is because we are getting too mature and growing out of that scene, but in reality it is because when we go out we don't know anyone and it makes us feel old!

This would be my luck!

Last weekend I went to a basketball at home and my boss's brother-in-law was there!! I went over to speak to him and we talked for a few minutes about what I was doing and what I wanted to do after I graduate. Finally, he said, "Did you know you called Dill's phone last week?" OH MY GOSH!! I thought I was going to die! I didn't know what to say and he started laughing! He told me that they had laughed about it all week!!! I was so embarrassed! I was really hoping that he would never know who it was, but that would never be my luck! At least he wasn't mad!!

Not a good way to start in the working world!

Of course as I said before, I am beginning to get stressed out about job hunting. Well today I did not make the greatest move along that journey!! I was calling some of my friends to remind them about a party my roommates and I are throwing on Saturday. My boss from the place I interned with this summer coincidently has the same name as one of my friends! I called my boss and proceeded to get agitated when he didn't know who I was because I thought it was my friend!!! I quickly hung up because I was making him irritated too!! I was MORTIFIED!!! So from this I learned another important lesson in getting ready for the job world... put people in your phone's contact list very descriptively!!

How do I even begin to know what I want to do?

     As I embark upon my last semester at UGA, I am getting very nervous about the future.  What am I supposed to do and even more importantly what do I want to do? The short journey to the real world has already begun with time rapidly running out and I am not sure sure that I am ready! I don't know that I feel fully prepared to even begin looking for jobs. Where do I go? Do I have enough experience to get the kind of job I think I may want? 

     I am currently taking a social media class in which we are creating an "online identity" and delving into online tools in order to do this. The idea of my online identity honestly makes me a little nervous, but it became more interesting to me as I began looking for jobs.  There are so many networking tools via the internet. As this semester dwindles by I will let you all know how the endeavor goes of creating my online identity in order to successfully obtain a job.

     There are also career fairs coming up, but I am not sure how promising those are going to be. I have had friends that ended up with really awesome jobs and I have had some with not such great luck.