Seven, Seven, Oh Nine :)

It's just unfathomable to me just how quickly summer is slipping by. It's only the "beginning" for me, but I realize soon enough will be the middle of July. Then it's only a few weeks til August, then September. I feel like I need to scramble to accomplish all of the ideas that have been swarming, spinning around in my head. So, like any dutiful blogger I'll go all out and list the things I want to do, right here in plain sight. That way, if I allow myself to fail to do them out of laziness, I'll have to shamefully inform you all that's what happened :P. Eh, just a little motivation I presume.

SUMMER PLANS.
* Educate myself better on the things they don't really teach at school. I want to research more about government and the economy, but I'll take a class on that next year. I still want to understand it myself, first. As Hannah was saying, as the next generation, we must be informed. Or we're doomed to epic fail. Also, I want to learn about different places, master geography, and just pick up on whatever interesting information I can. I want to learn about mechanical things too, so I can actually comprehend how things work.

* Purchase a laptop and internet. In doing this, I plan on being a smart shopper, not just getting what "sounds good", but I really need to understand about the processor, how much memory I should need, and what isn't going to screw me over. Plus I don't want to spend a fortune. Then I need to protect it an anti-virus program, a really effective one. Any suggestions for that?

* WRITE. I claim this is my future career. I'm so sure I'm going to publish books, yet I don't even write in my spare time. It makes me feel like an imposter. Just because I can rip through essays for school, always earning a mark high in the 90's, or a 100, doesn't mean I'll be a writer. I need to get creative, really own what I love. I think I'm afraid that if I try now, it'll turn out disasterous. But oh well, I need to do it anyways. I have an idea for a story, it's about a girl named Josephine. I just need to start it on paper.

* Finally get the Spanish language through my head. I can never separate the different tenses and their endings. This summer I'll put an end to that, so I can really understand spanish, and hopefully progress to teaching myself new languages. I want to eventually be multilingual :). I plan on travelling when I'm older, and when I do, I do not want to receive the "dumb tourist" treatment. I want to know how to speak, listen, and navigate my way through the beautiful countries in Europe. England will be a piece of cake, hahah.

Those are my "set in stone" kind of plans, the ones I really hope to accomplish, atleast to an extent. Otherwise, I really just want to enjoy my summer. I love seeing my friends pretty consistently, it's good to feel like there are people you can always call up and find something to do with. I've also been trying to better my health lately, eating more natural/organic products, trying to balance things back out from all of those appetizing graduation party foods I binged on. And I've been walking daily with Candy, whenever I've been home. If I don't take her out, I feel like I'm letting her down, and being "mean" :P, so that gets my butt outside. I want to go bicycling more too.

Time to recap :).
I really enjoyed my little trip out west. As in west, I mean the western part of the state, hahah. But it was nice. I actually like long car rides. I could look out of the window for hours, and I did. Plus I listened to my ipod, and let my mind just wander. Driving and having to pay attention to the road has made me forget the pleasantness of just riding, I always felt most insightful while I tuned everyone out, sitting in the window seat of a car. I finished Impossible by an author named Nancy Werner, I think. Something like that, Julie has the book or else I'd look. It was a nice little fairytale-esque story. With a modern setting. I thought it was a little stupid at times, but it was pretty okay overall. Now I'm reading On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. I've heard good things about it, and it's a pretty reknown piece of literature in history, so it's worth a shot. I'm liking it so far. Some of my absolute favorite books, like Water for Elephants, are told back in the early 1900's. On the Road is more towards the middle of the century, but still. I like reading about that era. Back when you could hop on railroad cars, and it was normal. When hitchhikers weren't assumed to be evil molesters/serial killers. Back when we had an ounce of faith in humanity.
The house we stayed at was nice. A log cabin on the lake, with a yard for the guests to pitch their tents on. We put outs up near the hottub. We spent alot of time playing games with eachother, the younger ones :P. Most of the people there were adults who all knew eachother. So Julie, John, Amanda, Julie and John's cousins Jack and Maggie, and myself played Palace, Kings in the Corner, Yahtzee, Mancala, Scrabble, and then some. I never knew how to play Yahtzee before, but I won the first time ;D. Pretty cool.. haha. I desperately want to teach myself how to play chess. I always knew checkers, but noone ever taught me chess. Unfortunately, LuLu didn't own a chess board, or Jack and Julie would've shown me.
It was freezing cold for the beginning of July. We expected to spend alot of time out in the water, but that didn't quite happen. It was a beautiful view, I'm awful for not taking more pictures of it. We did go swimming once, and it was fun. We jumped on the water trampoline and projected ourselves out into the dark blue abyss. I'm not a good swimmer. That's another thing I need to work on. Sure, I can manage, and keep myself above water. But if you dropped me in the middle of a lake, I probably would die :P. I guess it depends on the size of it, and adreneline would come into play. But point is, I need to swim more.
Being out in the woods persay, made me long to go camping or hiking. Being in someone's backyard doesn't constitute as the real thing, and I've never gone camping, for real. I think I'd like it though. I've hiked before, but not recently. I want to go again. I told Tom that, and now we're hopefully going to go one of these days :). I like adventure.
So the trip was good, the food was mainly organic, and delicious. And the people were all fun. It was basically a gathering of past/current hippies, alot of which used to go hiking together as a group called the "Sapper Knackers", hahah. I thought that was a cool name. Of course they used to do the typical hippie stuff :P, but I still think it was a cool idea. Being there made me think about friends, and how we'll be in the future. I honestly hope and believe we'll still be close, atleast my closest of friends, and I hope we have little camp out get togethers when we're older. It's nice to see examples of people who haven't lost eachother over the years.

My Independence Day wasn't too crazy/exciting. The night before, Lulu have us glow in the dark jewelery and wands, haha. But on the fourth, we went outside for awhile, and it was just too cold. So we went inside and watched Wall-E, hahah. It was still a nice time. We could see some of the fireworks through the window to the loft.
I was home Monday, just in time for the first load of hay! In case you don't understand, as farmers we mow and bale our own hay, so when they square-bale it, it's flung into huge wooden wagons, and we have to manually move it from these wagons into the barns for storage. Tom always helps with this, so he came over and together we tackled 4 loads, I believe. I'll post a picture of exactly how big these wagon loads are, eventually. Let's just say for now, it's alot of work. It was nice being able to hang out with him though, after not seeing him for awhile.
Tonight I'm going to go see The Wallflowers in concert, with Julie and Shayla. We're buying tickets at the door, I hope they won't be sold out. I'll tell you all how that goes in the next post :).

Pay it forward!

This is incredible overdue, but I just wanted to publicly thank the lovely Hannah over on Sixteen Going On Seventy..., for her wonderful gift :). She held a contest awhile back, and I entered and was selected, so she sent me this wicked nice journal. She has great taste, doesn't she? :D. I'm actually planning on using it to start the story I was talking about in the beginning of this post. So thank you, thank you, my dear Hannah :).
But anyways, as the contest goes, I'm the next one up to give a gift of my own choosing. So if any of you are interested in entering, just drop a comment saying "Count me in", or something indicating you're cool with being in the drawing. If anyone signs up for it, I'll probably put names in a hat or something :P. If you're not okay with the whole address thing, or you know your parents woudn't be, it's cool. I'll have you know I'm not an old man, and I lack the energy required to stalk someone, hahahah. Kidding, but really. I'd only use it to send you your gift.

So I guess how it works is I pick 3 names from the draw, although I'm not really expecting many enterees, because I don't have a huge following or anything, but I'll choose the winners at random. Then once you receive something, you then go and do the same :). Ta-Da.

Well, off to see The Wallflowers I go!
Have a wonderful week & such.
♥ Olive