Families

I like to think that I have a few different families. Of course, first and foremost, I have my my actual family. The ones that I know from birth and I believe even before that. There's my dad Mark, my mom Annette, my brother Nate, my sister Felicia & my sister Amber. These people are my family and I love them dearly, but I've recently acquired another family that's become very, very special to me.

This family I refer to as my gal pal family. I've always been blessed with really great girlfriends, but they've changed over the years & this particular set of girlfriends have become very special to me. I hope Andrea doesn't mind that I stole this picture from her - but it's probably the only photo of us all together.




Pictured is Andrea (back/left), Mindy (front/left), Elyse (back/right), and of course myself. I met these fantastic set of girls during my time at the UVU Review this last year. We've been through a lot together over the past two semesters and we've all grown really close. We've become a family. We talk on a daily basis. We help each other through all our crap. We're there for each other late at night - even when we're being pissy with each other, we still show up & talk it out. We call each other out on stuff & work through things together. These girls mean the world to me and I'm so glad they are in my life & that we're a family.

Andrea, Elyse, & Mindy - I love you all!!!

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The bus

So if you hadn't gathered it yet, my internship with KSL.com is in Salt Lake City. I have to be there two days a week & originally, when I began a few weeks ago, I was there from 10 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. (primarily because the sports guys generally don't come in till late morning because they work evenings), but I was having to drive because the bus, which I had planned on taking didn't work really well with those hours.

So I have just been driving. Bad idea. There went my savings in just a few weeks thanks to fuel prices.

I was starting to get worried about it so I spoke to my internship supervisor and requested to do 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. so I could take the morning and early evening express bus. Otherwise if I would have remained on the 10-7 hours and rode the bus, my time on the bus each day would be close to 5 hours. Yes, I said 5 hours. Are you freaking kidding me?!! However, if I can catch the express bus both ways, it cuts my time to under half that - which really isn't bad & not that much more then I was spending driving each day.

My internship supervisor was completely ok with the new plan & was very understanding. So I am now a bus girl & I get to ride the bus with Andrea one day a week, which will rock. I'm sure we'll have plenty of funny bus experiences over the next two & half months. Right, Andrea?

By the way, the bus smells. I know you were wondering.



Me waiting to board the bus to come home tonight.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad & I was on the bus when I posted it cause they have wifi!

Dream Book

*This post references some info from the previous post, so read it first if you haven't yet*

So a week or so ago I got some of the best advice from a friend that I've ever received. This advice was simply, "Now is your chance to achieve your dreams." I love this, so much! I have so many dreams that I feel I am so close to achieving. Some are literally within arms length, as if I could reach out and grab them. Others are still years down the road, but will require the ones I am so close to achieving.

After this friend told me this, I kept thinking to myself that I needed to write that down or something so I would remember it. Then as usual, I got busy. My usual ridiculous busy & I had pushed this advice to the back of my mind. A few days later was my birthday & I had plans with my amazing girlfriends. I met them at dinner & this particular friend who gave me the advice a few days prior walked up to me & handed me a book. At first I glanced at it & realized it was a book with blank pages, like a journal (oh I hate that idea) or sketch book of sorts. It looked hand made, that's how cool it is! After thanking her & then looking at it more carefully I realized what it said on the front. See picture below:




My friend had put on the front of the book the saying "Now is your chance to achieve your dreams," along with part of a cool billboard we had seen when we were in New York in March. This seriously was the coolest thing ever! This isn't going to be a journal or a record of my life, but a record of the dreams I have now and all the ones that I will stumble upon in the future. What an amazing idea! My friend is a genius!!

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The day with the panic attack

I had a little bit of a panic attack today. Actually that's not entirely true. It was a big panic attack.

I got up this morning, went about my usual morning routine and was driving to work thinking about the way things are for me right now. For the most part I'm happy with how things are, but there were a few things I started to think about that gave me a major panic attack.

It all started with me thinking about my age. The 'age' thought popped into my head because I turn 28 on Saturday & I won't lie, it's freaking me out!! Thinking about turning 28 scares me for a few reasons.

First, it's only two years away from 30... and I think we all know what I mean by that.

Second, there are a few things that I wanted to accomplish before I turned 28, but alas those things did not quite happen yet. These things are personal so I won't share them, but although I haven't accomplished them yet, thanks to my great friends talking to me today, I know I still have the abilities to accomplish them.

The third thing that very much increased the panic attack was thinking about my near future and how unknown it is right now. I'm completely in love with my internship and what I do for KSL.com that it really has confirmed my choice to be educated in Communication and pursue a career as a journalist.

The unknown part of my future is that following my internship, finding a job, a real world job, is scary and frankly, shares the shiz out of me. Although I am scared, some great advice from a friend today helped me realize that the unknown is very exciting. This great advice came in the form of a text and said, "Now is your chance to achieve your dreams."

So, despite the ridiculous panic attack I had today, my new mantra for this summer & my near future is simply this. Now is your chance to achieve your dreams.

Obsessed!

So I purchased an iPad. Yes, a freaking iPad! It came in the mail yesterday. And I'm completely obsessed. Completely. Obsessed. I've wanted one for quite a while, but I will admit that there was a time when I thought they were completely pointless. I have a MacBook, so my excuse for never needing an iPad was simply that my MacBook will do everything that an iPad does. And that's still true, plus more, but come on, they are ridiculously fun. And my friends are all jealous now. Hey guess what Parker, Andrea & Mindy, I'm blogging from my iPad right now!

So far my favorite iPad app is the Twitter app. I have Twitter on my iPhone, but it's a whole different experience on the iPad. Andrea, you would love it! Second favorite thing so far is reading the paper in the morning on my iPad instead of trecking across the parking lot to grab the actual paper. Yes, I am lazy.

Some other cool things: Words with Friends is board game size. Lil' Pirates aren't so little anymore. And this just in... how cool is Plants vs. Zombies!?!

One downside though... The iPad puts my iPhone to shame. Seriously though. After I had played with my iPad for a while last night, I switched over to my iPhone to catch up on some texts & it was just sad, if that's possible. If you know me well enough you know that I am completely dependent on my iPhone, so to say that something puts it to shame is very big of me.

There are so many great things you can use these for & I'm super excited to utilize it in every way possible.

Wait, what? I worked how many hours this week?

Whew!  What a week.  Besides the 22 hours I put in as an intern this week, I also put in 38 hours at my paid job - bringing the total worked hours this week to 60 hours!  I don't remember ever working a 60-hour week.  Isn't the work week suppose to be 40 hours? - That's how I've always understood it.  I'm not complaining, well maybe a little, but really, it wasn't terrible - other than being really, really long and I felt like I could sleep for a week when I got home last night, it wasn't terrible.

I wrote five stories for ksl.com this week - on three days in the intern role.  Each week I am up at ksl.com twice a week and then I go to each Real Salt Lake home game - some weekends there is one, and some weekends they are on the road.  This week they were in town.

Here are the articles from this week.

Monday: RSL

Thursday: RSL, BYU, RSL

Saturday: RSL

From rough semester - to grad - to intern

The two people that never stopped supporting me

So I did the whole graduation thing.  It's so weird being done.  So, so weird.  I worked for six years and went to two universities to acquire my undergraduate degree in Communication with an emphasis in Journalism.  Graduation didn't even set in till about a week after it had happened.  The week & a half after graduation I found myself lost.  Lost, because I really didn't know what to do with myself.  I kept thinking to myself, "What homework do I need to do tonight or put off till tomorrow so I can just go to sleep tonight?" - but there wasn't any homework to do.  Really, there wasn't much for me to do at all besides work & I did a lot of that, a lot!  I was also so lazy that week and a half after graduation.  So lazy!

This last semester was by far my most difficult semesters in classes.  This was completely my fault - classes that I kept putting off and putting off because I dreaded taking them all fell into the last semester & they kicked my butt!  There were so many times that I just wanted to quit.  I was so busy.  I was working on the student newspaper as the sports editor, I was still managing the UPS Store in Orem & I was doing some freelance work for another company - all on top of the 15 credits I was taking.  I made it through, but not without many, many nights where I just cried myself to sleep.

Besides the hard course load, this semester was full of other rough times.  Two friends of mine pulled me through this semester.  I spent many days & many nights crying to them, complaining to them, eating pizza and drinking Diet Coke with them and taking in their advice.  We fought over stupid crap, we made up, we fought some more and we worked things out.  These two people know who they are and I hope they know I appreciate every moment they spent helping me.  These two people are my best friends right now & I love them dearly, despite the rough semester all three if us had together and individually.

So, I'm an intern now.  So, so weird also.  I have been given the unique opportunity to intern with KSL.com as their Real Salt Lake beat writer.  I kind of fell into this internship by a random chance.  About a year and a half ago in a class I was taking, the KSL.com news director came and spoke.  I happened to get his contact info and had spoken to him briefly about internships.  I never thought about it again until early January when I realized I needed to do an internship during the summer in order to actually get my degree.  One night, off of a whim and probably hopped up on way to much Diet Coke, I emailed him and stated I was interested in a summer internship and wondered what KSL.com had to offer.  He emailed me back, we set up a meeting, we had a meeting - and just like that he offered me an internship.  Because it all happened so quickly and I honestly was not expecting them to just offer me an internship I didn't accept it right away.  I first consulted a few journalist friends to see what they thought and after much deliberation I decided it was the right fit for me.  I accepted the internship and now here we are a few months later - the internship started last Saturday as I covered my first Real Salt Lake game.

My job as their RSL beat writer is to not write game recaps, but write the story within the story of the games and other things going on with RSL.  It's challenging and a different writing style than I've mostly done, but I accepted the challenge and hope to stand out in my internship and really show them what I can do.

I've written two articles for them so far.  The first is here & the second is here.  From here on out, I'll try to post most of my stories or at least links to them - and will blog throughout my internship so you can all experience it also.