Dear Reader,

As you can see, I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I had hoped. This seems to be a horrible trend, if you ask me, that is. Well, that isn’t completely true, I’m actually partially through several posts, it’s just that none of them were finished… hence the lack of posting. If there is one thing I have learned this summer it is that event he best laid plans can be cast aside, dreams can be a bit scary and sometime, things you couldn’t hope for come true…. yup that’s right it’s time for the first installment of my series!

One of my big plans for this summer was to write about everything that had happened since February in my journal, so that in 50 years I can look back and actually sort of remember some of the chaos from the past few months. That however is much more daunting then I had originally foreseen. You see the more I wrote, the more I want to include, and the more I want to include the longer I know it’s going to take, which (of course) immediately makes me tired and I stop writing. This means that I have been doing a LOT less writing than I had hoped… so why wasn’t I blogging??? Well that was also one of those great plans I had for the summer… you know, no job, nothing to do, surely I would write! Right? Of course not. (I’m not Yente, what do you expect?) Unfortunately my computer time is much less than I had expected, it being summer and all, for Lydia and my Dad have LOADS of fun hogging it, so what can I do? Not to mention that every time my Dad attempts to turn the computer on he just about throws against the wall from frustration and impatience…I might never understand. And when I AM on the computer I usually don’t have much time to write, with all of the checking emails, writing to my roommate for next year, checking facebook, the normal activities. The only plan for this summer that MUST be completed is the packing of my room. you see my Dad is a firm believer that with College comes moving out, so while I am welcome back home for the next few summers, I must take everything that I want to keep, but don’t want in my dorm room, and place it in 3-4 boxes that will be housed in our garage. I have less than a month!!!

Dreams, usually I don’t remember my dreams, I usually don’t even remember having dreams. That being said this summer has been a bit different. I had always hoped that I could remember my dreams like “normal people” (Who knows what I meant by that, normal doesn’t exist) and I got my wish… sort of. This summer I have been having the weirdest dreams EVER. People have died multiple times in multiple ways, every time with me failing to save them, I have been lost, fallen off cliffs, you name it it has probably happened. Now the dreams I remember from BEFORE this crazy onslaught of nightmares were far and few between, but they were at least pleasant! Now, while I have dreams much more frequently (but not every night, that would be SCARY!!!,) I don’t even enjoy them. I think I need to go back to a semi-routine life…

Hopes, this is the best part. I love being able to hope things, what always surprises me is just how long you can hope for something, but that isn’t really where I’m going today, so we can come back to that some other day. What I want to write about is hoping for something small and receiving something so much better! Yes, we’ve all had those moments, where we were hoping for that perfect experience, and when it actually happened it wasn’t what you had imagined, but it was better than you could have hoped. I love moments like this. How can you not? One of these “moments” hasn’t actually been a moment but a string of events making me realize something amazing…people actually READ this blog!!! Who could have guessed?!?!?! I didn’t, well I knew that SOMEONE was reading it, because I can see the number of times a page is viewed, but that doesn’t mean that I have regular viewers, so to hear about people I never would have expected to read my blog who HAD read it, and to find out that there were people actually checking my blog to see if I had written has been amazing. Who doesn’t feel amazed when they receive that kind of support? So in some ways I guess this post is a thank you, thank you for reading, and for thinking my ramblings are worth reading, even if this is the first post you’ve ever read, thank you, you are awesome (even if I don’t realize who you are.)

Yet another such experience was my birthday, I was expecting a fairly simple (but enjoyable) evening probably with Gyros (pronounced like “euros”) and perhaps even some time hanging out with Malinda, what I DIDN”T expect was for my friends to kidnap me (literally, they even put a bag on my head, and drove around in circles blasting Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”) it wasn’t long til I found myself eating Chinese food and cake (though not at the same time, that would be gross) hanging out with some of my favorite people on earth. Who could have GUESSED? Well them, obviously, but not me. That’s all for now. While I’m sure that I’ll post again in the future, it probably won’t be nearly as soon as I would like… figures.

Love, Mandi Jo