I'm grumpy - that must mean I'm back in school

I’m back in school and guess what I’m grumpy. I know why I am here and this time around I truly choose to be here. Nonetheless, I’m grumpy.  I don’t mind going to class – to me, that’s the part I like.  The work associated with it really isn’t that bad.  It’s the feeling of having to do it that frustrates me to the point of tears.  The pain I get in my body from sitting still and reading the god-awful textbooks that are boring as hell.  I’m taking an Intro to Cinema course, sounds fun right – well so far it isn’t horrible but the textbook just about put me to sleep. I listened but I didn’t take anything in. I spent an hour listening to my textbook being read to me by my computer. That hour would have been better spent taking a walk in the rain. I sure would have been a hell of a lot happier.

I’m working on effort versus outcome this year.

I’ve been so caught up in doing well (which means getting A’s) that I have lost what an education is. I’m never going to be graded in “real life” with a letter grade; and guess what, I can’t fail “real life”. Yes, that’s right, I cannot fail real life.  I will get as much out of a class as the effort I put in and I am going to choose to be happy with the outcome.  What kills me is that average work is deemed as a “C” grade yet a grade point average of 2.0 isn’t look at as a good grade point average if you are in a competitive field.  In my syllabus for my Professional Communication class a C is seen as “Satisfactory/OK”, a B is “Good” and an A is “Superior”.  I’m trying not to make myself crazy this time around and am aiming for satisfactory or good.  Superior really isn’t going to get me that much farther in my college career.

When I get depressed and feel stuck, which is mostly when I am in school, I dream of all the far away places I would like to be. Right now I am dreaming of what the Peace Corps could be like.  Or how about getting paid to travel and write about it – but I’m talking about the real experiences… not just the best places to go/eat/sleep.  Let me walk the streets of Verona; eat at the hawker stalls in Singapore, walk the wats of Cambodia – just fly me away.

I have a friend in Seattle who talks about “make me smile moments”. Yesterday I had a make me smile moment.  I was at work and I was able to talk to a woman who was going to spend five weeks in and around Bali. She was preparing for her trip and I got to share all my knowledge about my traveling and what I took.  I loved getting to talk about my traveling and being candid that not everything was glamorous but I sure had a great time while I was there. Travel is what I love. No, I don’t love it all the time. And, yes, I love being able to come back home. But when I’m home I dream about all of the far away places I would like to be.

I could have spent the last hour reading my Professional Communication book, but no, I choose to write about my life and what I am learning.

I have no clue how much I will keep up blogging. I’ve been missing it recently and that may be that I’m back in school and I plan to have my feet planted for about the next year or so. For another one of my classes we have started a blog just for the class and that also got me back on my blog.

And finally, I found a song that I have been search for: “Home” by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. Check it out!

Do what you love. Love what you do.

Sometimes life is bumpy but I've had a rocky month

So I was suppose to have my tonsils out on the 1st but had tonsillitis. So I had surgery the next week. Then a week after my surgery I thought I was finally feeling a little better but oh no, things just got a whole lot worse.

A week ago Sunday I thought I was finally healing and that the "scab" in the back of my throat was slowly coming off (as it should be). But around 11 pm, while reading in bed, I thought a bigger part of the scab had come off and instead of swallowing it I thought I would spit it out. Well I ended up spitting out a mouth full of blood. This was not what I was expecting. I went upstairs and got my parents out off bed to help me. After more blood kept coming my parents called 911. The fire department came and checked me out and they called the aid car. For a while the bleeding had slowed down and we were told that it was safe enough for my parents to drive me to the emergency room.

So we went to Virginia Mason. The ENT surgeon had to be call, as did the rest of the operating room staff. During this I was still bleeding and spitting out blood. The surgeon made it in and because I was bleeding so much he stuck his very big hands in my mouth to put pressure on the back of my throat where I was bleeding from. The surgeon wanted to stop the bleeding because I was bleeding so much but also because they needed to put a tube down my throat so my air way wouldn't be compromised during surgery. The surgeon says that in most cases it doesn't look like as much blood as it is. But in my case the surgeon thought that I had lost two pints of blood.

The surgeon patched me up and poked around to make sure that this sort of thing wouldn't happen again. I spent three days at Virginia Mason. Turning 22 was not a whole lot of fun. Because I lost so much blood I am very anemic but because I am young and healthy I was not given a blood transfusion. I am now at home and resting. Doing a whole lot makes me very tired and I have to be careful about how fast I get up... because I can get dizzy easily. I am finally eating somewhat normal food. Soft and bland food got old very fast and I am craving everything I can't have.

When I went to see the ENT about getting my tonsils out in April he told me about that bleeding was a possible complication and that while the chances were 3-5% he had never lost anyone and it was mostly just very scary. Well, I thought that bleeding would happen within the first few days, not a week later. And he was right it was very scary. I'm just starting to process what happen. I don't think of myself as a calm person but I didn't process anything while it was going on. The worst thing for me was how long I was bleeding for and how uncomfortable it was to have the surgeon's huge hands in my mouth stopping the bleeding.

There are no pictures of the ordeal - but pictures of Europe instead.

Check out my trip to Europe! http://picasaweb.google.com/aewdenton

I'm hoping to have an uneventful summer and am looking forward to going back to work in the next week.

Thanks for the love and support!

The tonsils are coming out!

I was suppose to have my tonsils removed on the 1st but funnily enough I got tonsillitis and they wouldn't take them out. I was not happy about this at all. So, I went to urgent care instead and they fixed me up with steroids, antibiotics, and pain meds all through an IV. I felt a whole lot better after the pain meds. Liz's mom, Joey, was in town and I hung out with her for the week. However, I still wasn't feeling great and to make everything worse I got a migraine as well. I went to the doctors again and got a shot for the migraine. It is amazing what medicine can do these days!

On the 8th I went into surgery and finally had my tonsils taken out. The procedure went well (other than the doctor hitting my lip and leaving it fat). So I have a fat lip on top of everything. I have a very low pain tolerance and it is showing. After a night of being miserable we finally have my pain meds figured out... other than a horrible sore throat, throwing up has been the second worst thing. Slowly but surely I'm able to eat more and sleep more. I can't talk over a whisper so I am having fun (not really) clapping to get people's attention and writing things down.

Here is the before picture. I will wait to put an after picture up as to not gross anyone out - plus I can't open my mouth wide enough to get a good shot ;)

I finally got a bigger hard drive for my computer and Terry installed it today so I can look at all of my Europe pictures. They will be going up shortly.

The last week and home again

I am heading back to Seattle and I am quite excited about it (in some ways I'm even excited to get rid of my tonsils). This trip was so different from SE Asia... different reasons for going and a different mind set completely. I had a great time and I am very happy that I was able to meet up with Katie. I've found out, while abroad, I like staying in a place for more than 3 nights and I like being able to connect with the locals. I feel that I really didn't get to do that on this trip. This trip was about seeing as much as possible in a very short amount of time. We were very much tourists were as in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand I was living there for a month so after a while I knew my way around and it became my home (even though I wasn't all that long). Packing up every three days becomes a drag after a while. I managed to take the same amount of stuff with me for 5 months in SE Asia as I did for 6 weeks in Europe... I wish I could have a Mary Poppins’ bag that I could just keep pulling stuff out of, however, my pack didn't do that and I am happy that I haven't killed the zipper on it with all my traveling.

The last week or so of the trip: Katie and I went to Berlin to meet Katie's boyfriend who is taking a 6 week architecture trip with WSU. Katie was very excited, however, because he was there on a class trip we were only able to hang out during the evenings with Evan and the rest of his class. The first day we did another “free” walking tour hitting all the main points – part of the Berlin Wall, Check Point Charlie... In the evening we went to the Sony Center and saw Angels and Demons. After spending so much time on my feet seeing the sights I was really excited to sit in a movie theater and feel that it was okay sitting still for two hours. I think this theater had the most comfortable seats I have sat in, it had assigned seating, and sitting in the back half was a little more expensive than the first half. Day two was spent looking around a little more, we spent two hours in Starbucks where I slept and Katie played cards. In the evening we went to see an Ballet. I had been wanting to see some kind of show and the last three places we had been to you either couldn't see, it was sold out, or too expensive. At the Berlin opera house if you were a student and showed up 30 minutes before the show you could have any open seat in the house for 13 euros! I was very excited and it was well worth it. It wasn't anything Katie or I had heard of before and we made up the plot as we went, but it was good. The next day we got up at 4am to catch our 7am flight to England.

Two years ago my mom, Liz, went on an exchange to England for work where she met Caroline. Then in September, Caroline came to Seattle and stayed with us while she was visiting Liz's work. Caroline and her friend Jan picked us up from the airport and took us out to breakfast before Caroline drove Katie and I to her home in Kent. After recovering from our early morning we drove with her grown son, Nick, to the seaside of Whitstable. We looked at shops and ate an authentic English lunch of fish and chips before heading back. On Tuesday we went into Canterbury where we curled up in Starbucks finishing our books, waiting for the rain to stop, before we ventured out. We did a little shopping and Nick met us and showed us around the town. On Wednesday Katie and I went into London for the day. We saw Buckingham Palace (the Queen was in but we didn't see her), Big Ben, the Eye, walked along the South Bank, took a bus ride, and more. Over all it was a great day for only having one day to spend in London. We even went to King's Cross Station to try and find platform 9¾, however, we couldn't find a good wall to try and run through to get to the Hogwarts Express.

I think that Sicily and Paris were my favorite places. There were no places that I didn't like – Vienna is probably the lowest and that just has to do with how miserable the weather was even though we had a wonderful tour guide, Susi. I was amazed with how many Americans were traveling over there. It made sense, that most of them were just getting out of school after studying abroad but I wasn't expecting it and am disappointed that I didn't get to meet more people from other countries - they were out there but the majority of the people were Americans.

If I had to pick where my next trip would be to I would say Africa or Australia but I might just go back to SE Asia first. There is so much of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia that I didn't see and that I really want to. But first I need to get my tonsils taken out, recover, and spend a little time at home before I start making grand plans about traveling again. This summer I will be working at REI and hopefully taking a few small trips into the mountains. I will post pictures of Europe while I am recovering. I can't wait to see people while I am home!

I have now been home for 24+ hours and am loving the weather! My plane ride was fine other than being too long and for the last three hours I was having a hard time sitting still. Going over Greenland and the Rockies was great because the weather was so clear that we got amazing views! I was blessed by my doctor for surgery and go in at 8:30 on Monday morning.

Prague with lost lots of art

Prague is beautiful and is my favorite for the eastern countries we have been to. This morning we did a "free walking tour" - that is you tip at the end. Our tour guide did a very good job so it was well worth it. After finishing that we had a nice lunch and rested our feet before going to a few places we went to earlier in the day to take more photos. The afternoon was spent wandering around some more and finding a bench in the shade to read. It didn't feel like a very productive day but we saw tons on our tour and my feet hurt because of it. Prague also has lots of interesting modern art!

Katie and I at Lennon Wall.

Me!

David Cerny's peeing men - interesting modern art. If you text some number supposedly they will pee out your message!

Me and creepy no face babies.

More love locks.

Walking to Buda and back

So we have made it to Budapest. If you can tell here my ice cream/gelato is shaped like a flower! It was very pretty until I started eating it. It lasted all of 5 second before it was destroyed. It tasted wonderful but not as good as in Italy.
I have seen this in a few places now and think that it is a interesting idea (sort of cute). You write your initials or names of you and your significant other on a lock, or have it engraved, and then you lock it to a post.
This is a memorial tree at the largest synagogue in Europe. There is a name of a family on most of the leaves.

A view of Pest from Buda. We took a "free" walking tour today and saw lots of the sites. Katie and I both aren't feeling that great... we can't quite figure it out but maybe it was our breakfast. We plan to do a little more wandering around tomorrow and on Tuesday we will take a 7+ hour train ride to Prague.

The weather was beautiful today! We were even able to read in a park for a bit enjoying how nice the shade felt.