Where Oh Where?

First and foremost, I owe you all my deepest apologies! I fear that I have abandoned this blog in the past two weeks. It won’t happen again! I promise. Now, let me catch you up on life.

I fell down some stairs and bruised my elbow. This was about a month ago and it has just stopped hurting. Here’s me all goofy with my lovely sling.

I turned 21 on May 31st and have yet to show you photos! Here are just a few from my birthday picnic. It was such a fantastic celebration. All of my lovely friends brought food and we sat on blankets and ate delicious dishes and talked and laughed and twirled in circles and generally had a good time (which may or may not have been influenced by the sangria my lovely friend Ada brought).

21 candles on that cake!

My best friend Katie and her husband Brendon!

You know Katie&Brendon and to their right is my little sister, Nadine, and her boyf Luigi (his real name, I swear)!

The boys (Spencer, Korey, Matt, and Matt's roommate) have deep discussions. Haha.

The whole picnic event was organized by my darling boyfriend, Kenneth. He did all the work and I just got to show up and have a fantastic time. Isn’t he wonderful? I celebrated for three days, two cakes, and one (or four) giant daiquiris! I wish I could tell you about all the bars I’ve been to now that I’m 21 but honestly, I’m saving my pennies right now. I leave for London in less than two months. Yikes.

Passport photos!

So far I’ve received my new passport and am about halfway through the visa process. I hope to send in the paperwork for the visa tomorrow. It should take about a month to get my visa/passport back to me so the sooner the better! I bought my plane ticket a few weeks ago! I leave September 1 at 6:40 pm and arrive in London on the 2nd at 7:05 am. I am so excited and so nervous. Rest assured, there will be a post dedicated to study abroad in the future. Plus, I’ll be blogging from London all fall (stay tuned for cool giveaways).

The other day I did something I’d never done before! I walked across the bridge to Georgetown!

ph. Rainier Heredia.

My fellow ambassadors (Jefferey, Kay, and Rainier) and I, walked from the Rosslyn Metro station across the bridge, through Georgetown to the Foggy Bottom Metro station. It was so much fun to walk across and see the kayaks. I’ve lived in the area my whole life and I can’t believe I’d never done that. I highly recommend MU students to put that on their ‘to do’ list. Plus, once you’re over the bridge and in Georgetown there are a ton of awesome shops (American Apparel and Annie Creamcheese) and yummy places to nom.

I’m going to wrap up this post with some Fourth of July photos. Luckily, living on campus means there are fireworks (literally) in your backyard. The golf course right next to Marymount hosts a firework show ever Fourth. Kenneth and I had a little picnic and watched the fireworks right on the back porch of the Main House.

Cheese and cider. Yummy!

My fireworks date!

Kaboom!

How was your Fourth?

See you soon!

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The Beginning of a New Chapter (cliche, eh?)

Here in Arlington the summer has begun, although you can’t tell from the weather. The past few weeks have been rainy and cold, not normal May weather at all. Then again, it kind of fits seeing that this May has been all sorts of unusual. For one, I’m spending the summer living on campus because I’m working as a student ambassador (come tour Marymount! I could even be your tour guide. Awesome!). Living on campus means that once finals ended, instead of stuffing all my shit into boxes and moving home, I got to party with my friends.

Nearly all my friends are seniors (no exaggeration, like 90% of my friends graduated this year). This is another strange thing. Normally I know I’ll see my friends in the fall, if not over the summer. This year everyone kind of realized that this was it, the end of college. There are going to be no more hour long dinners with insane tangential conversations. There are going to be no more 90s dance parties; no more Chat Roulette parties; no more stumbling home from Cowboy Café. There are going to be no more all-nighters in the lounge where half the group is working on papers and the other half is playing cards. We realized this and we made the most of senior week. We had long dinners and long lunches. We went to bars and stayed for hours talking and making plans for the summer. We made sure to visit all our friends over and over.

Now, I’m not graduating this year, but I feel like this was my senior week too. Next year there may be a few of us graduating, but, of those few, most of them live off campus. I’ll probably spend most of my senior week moving (either home or to an apartment of my own). I know I won’t be celebrating as much as I did two weeks ago. I won’t be as happy as I was two weeks ago. I won’t be surrounded by as many awesome people who are all happy about the same thing. I’m glad I had this chance to celebrate with my friends. I’m glad I was able to stay on campus so I could be there to celebrate their graduation.

To all of you: Spencer, Sara, Ada, Emily, Kaitlynn, Matt, and Korey, I’m proud of you guys! Since we don’t get yearbooks in college I’ll take the time to say it here, KIT & HAGS. To Kenneth: I love you, but you already know that.

To the prospective and future Marymount students: I have been told that I will be able to continue blogging over the summer (rockstar). This summer is going to be filled with awesome visits to free places in DC, my 21st birthday, planning for study abroad in London, and a million other adventures. I’m glad you’re here to come along for the ride.

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In Which You Catch Me In a Lie, But You Forgive Me (aka Springfest!)

Hey kids! I know in my last post I said I’d probably never write about campus activities again… well, I lied. But I think you’ll forgive me for this one because you get to hear about SPRINGFEST (and see pictures, of course). Today was the annual Springfest at Marymount and the theme was luau; which meant no burgers and hot dogs (at first I was disappointed). Instead we were fed a delicious, flavorful chicken that we ate out under the sun! Food is better when it’s eaten outside.

Oh yeah, you could throw pies at Res. Life. I hope they have this next year.

The weather today was perfect for an outdoor event. It was sunny, 84 degrees, and as the party went on it cooled until it was the perfect temperature. I spent the first hour or so with my friend Katie (she’s a commuter but a member of the fashion club so she had help set up and decided to hang out with me). Katie had submitted a design to the t-shirt contest where the winner had their design printed and received $100, which she should have won (there were sea turtles, dammit!); the t-shirt design that did win was pretty cute, even if there were no sea turtles. The first thing Katie and I did was pick up our free Springfest tee (our class received white t-shirts seniors had blue, I think underclassmen had green).

Inflatable things everywhere!

We wandered around so I could to take photos for you guys! There were so many inflatable things (what do you call them?) on the grounds! One was a pirate themed obstacle course where you raced a friend. There was a “surf” thing where you tried to stay on a moving surf board. That one was fun to watch because the faster the surf board spun, the farther the person riding it flew when they finally lost their balance. The one I really wanted to try was the rock climbing on a giant Easter Island head (google it). Unfortunately, I wore a dress—but Marymount has had a rock climbing wall of some sort every Springfest that I’ve been here so I’ll try next year (that means you get to try too)!

Have you ever climbed a giant head?

At the bottom of the hill there were water activities! There was a water slide that I was going to try but it cooled down way too fast! There was also a dunk tank. After Katie left, Kenneth and I and some friends headed down there and saw that it was abandoned. Our very brave friends Tim and Matt decided to be dunk tank dunkees for us to play with! I’m happy to say that we made the dunk tank popular again. Haha. By the time Kenneth and I had left a crowd of twenty or so had gathered to try and dunk people. Kenneth got the first legit dunk on Tim (he had previously been dunked by Samantha because she pushed the button you’re supposed to hit with the softball). Oh, sorry no photos–I’d already taken Frank (my camera) back to my room.

My friend Emily flying off the surfboard.

In addition to the chicken and sweet potato fries for dinner there were delicious treats. There was a smoothie company that handed out delicious smoothies with little umbrellas! I loved the strawberry so much that I went back for a second, only to find that they had packed up. Boo. There were also snow cones and a pop corn machine. Ada was running the cotton candy machine, which means I got the biggest bunch of cotton candy ever. It was devoured immediately and I swear-I will be hopped up on sugar all night. All in all, it was a delicious afternoon.

Spun sugar! Yum! Mine was blue though.

The only downside to my adventures today is that I didn’t go to math class. For some reason I kind of assumed that Friday evening class would be canceled for Springfest. Apparently, the University administration does not agree with this logic. I have no idea why I, as a junior, would not realize that classes were still on. Drat. Oh well. I had a really great time and it was the first time I’d actually spent more than thirty minutes at Springfest. I’ll defiantly wear shorts next year so I can actually do activities! You should, too :).

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