Favorite Things...

I am doing one of my favorite things as we speak. Sitting in the sun room, listening to music, and blogging with the sun shining in through the windows. The only thing missing is a tall glass of water with a twist of lemon or lime. It doesn't take much to make me happy obviously. It's the little things in life that counts.

Maybe you knew that I just had a birthday a few days ago. I am 19 and I feel pretty much the same. Is that how birthdays go from now on? If it is thats fine with me, I like any reason to entertain, eat cake, put on a dress, and hang out with my favorite people. I had big plans for my birthday party, I wanted to get fancy light other fancy things. None of those bigs plans played out and it didn't make a single difference. Pretty much everyone that makes an effort to see me and I make an effort to see them came to my party. My mom grilled food and we ate outside on our new deck. It was great except for the bugs, which I guess is just life. The tiki torches didn't really seem to bother the flies, they feasted on my party food regardless. The funny thing about this year's birthday party was that babies, families, and weddings were a hot topic...at least for half of the crowd. Emily brought her baby Declan and her husband, strange. And Misty and Kyle are getting married Saturday! Slowly weddings and babies are going to be a big part of my life I think. Theres still some time before I will be going to weddings every weekend but it is going to be in the near future.

I figured out why I was feeling a little down for awhile. Exercising really brightens my mood, a lot. It's true what they say. I had quit going to the gym since my instructor went on vacation but I started doing "INSANITY" with Marc and Evan the other day. It is insanely hard, I'm sore, but in such a good mood. It's time to get back to the gym, Kim should be back from vacation now. So for those of you who are a little down in spirits, try getting active. Just a little exercise makes a difference. Do some stretching, take your dog out for a stroll, I'm not a big believer in treadmills or cardio machines anymore. It's much more fun to do other things than stare at the calorie counter. I have also noticed that I can't really handle eating junk food anymore. It's too hot to eat heavy food and it's just not a good feeling afterwards.

I miss taking pictures. I really need to replace my camera that I dropped in the Walmart parking lot somewhere in Massachusetts a few months back. I don't have a single picture from this summer. I look at Rae's Facebook pictures and I just want to die. Whoever would like to contribute to my new camera fund, please let me know, I would appreciate it greatly.

That's a piece of what's running through my mind lately, until next time...

Long Time No Blog

Hello all, I apologize for not blogging lately. I wish I could say I was just way too busy but that would be very false. I actually have had extended amount of free time. Just over a week ago I got the opportunity to go to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to go to a NACA Concert Management Institute. It was great. The Mindiola's returned the favor for staying at my house for a week by meeting me at the airport and taking me to where I needed to be as well as pick me up and drop me off at the airport for my departure. We stayed at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I met some great people, learned some extensive things about major concerts, got to tour several different concert venues, and go to Summerfest (the largest music festival in "the world") courtesy of Johnson and Wales University. I even got to see the lovely Katelyn Spurr. Katelyn is doing her internship in Chicago at a talent agency for the summer, so she drove up to meet up with to at Summerfest. There weren't any bands at Summerfest that I was just dying to see but it was very fun going from stage to stage and people watching. There are some freaks that attend music festivals, there could be a whole blog just about music festival people. Coincidently the people that I had been hanging out with at the institute, a few of them had gone the year before and were friends with Kate too. Another coincidence was that my suite mate, Jamie, is the new main stage coordinator at Quinnipiac Univerisity in Connecticut who took the place of Meg Doyle, Katelyn's roommate from the institute last summer. Key highlights from Wisconsin would be: scavenger hunt, The Fonz, Pabst Theaters, drunk people on the way, at, and coming back from Summerfest, Noodles & Co, frozen custard, and Alterra Coffee.

On the plane back I did some extensive amount of thinking. Due to a crazy thunderstorm at home, the dinky little Delta Connection plane was in no hurry to get me back to Oklahoma. I have some big plans for UIB next year. I would like to re-brand UIB, make our posters simpler, less graphics, and straight to the point. I would like to advertise and reach out to other students who major in other things besides Hospitality to get involved with UIB. We are in need of some Business and Technology students, they're major plays a big part in UIB, it's more than event planning. We need some advertising and marketing students to effectively reach the student body and we need some tech students to make some more promo videos and maybe an UIB App in the future. I need to get that message out clearly to everyone this coming year. As for Wahoo, I am interested in getting some sponsorships, 1) they mean free stuff or 2) they give us more money to get a bigger name performer to appeal to our painfully mainstream student body.

At the beginning of school last year, I signed up to be a campus representative for TOMS Shoes in hopes of starting some sort of TOMS Campus Club, fail. Elise from TOMS shoes has contacted me letting me know that the Cultural Life Committee has gotten Blake Mycoskie (TOMS Creator) to speak at JWU this coming fall. This would be a great way to spread awareness on our campus about TOMS shoes. It is definitely not as big of a deal in the northeast, TOMS shoes that is. Of course out of the 5 or 6 campus reps at JWU that received the same email, 2 of us emailed back expressing interest and excitement. Great, I needed another responsibility to take on! Hopefully I can get some support and hopefully someone else more capable than me and head this one. I love TOMS and would love to do an internship with them one day, but I'm afraid of spreading myself out too thin. I have an education to get on top of all my extra curriculars too.

So much nothing has happened at home since I've been back from Wisconsin. My life pretty much consists of gym, class, wedding talk with Misty, watching The Bachelorette, Secret Life, Gilmore Girls, Arrested Development, Mad Men, and Pushing Daisies, and some working at the restaurant is sprinkled into the mix too. I am enjoying my time off, but you know me, I get restless and a bit depressed due to lack of activity, I must get it from my mother. Sorry for the long post, I'll try to get back in the habit of blogging more often so I can keep them brief.

That's all for now! Until next time...