Hi everyone!  I just wanted to let you know Randomness has moved to a new blog.  It also has a new name and look.  Check it out and change your bookmarks to http://apples4tots.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

Hello again,  I hope that you have not been on the edge of your seat in anticipation of my next blog post.  Silly readers, you should know by now that it takes me a very long time to even remember that something interesting happened in my life that I should blog about.  In all reality, I don’t think my life is nearly as interesting as that of my other friends’.  Seriously, you should check out their stuff.  So funny!

Anyway, the purpose of this post was not to bore you out of you mind with an introduction.  I wanted to keep you up to date on the confusion with my job hunting.  After the principals conference last month, I had a few more, well, minor options, but nothing stood out to me as much as the position in Memphis TN.  This was all well and good, but I was hoping to have more than one place to choose from.

Then, out of the blue, I got an email from a friend in Australia.  She was explaining that she is coming back to the states next year, so her teaching position would be empty.  Well, I would love beyond everything to go back to Australia sometime.  So, this seemed like the perfect opportunity!  I talked to several people here, my parents being the most important of those people, and it seemed like everyone was giving me the okay to go.  So, I emailed out my resume and references and waited.  And waited. And waited.  And, did I mention that I waited?  I didn’t hear anything back from the principal there.  Now, I understand that things go slowly in the Land down under, but not that slowly!  Finally, I emailed the principal again, just to check that he had gotten my information.  He wrote me back, apologizing for not replying, and that he would be considering me along with any other people that applied for the job.

While all this was going on, the principal in Memphis called me.  He said that he wanted to fly me out to see his church and school, and seemed to be wanting to talk contracts!  Unbelieveable!  I thought for sure that Australia would be the answer, but Memphis seems like such a great place too.  Now you can see why my title is what it is.

Well, I will be flying out to see Memphis the first week in April.  I’m very excited about that.  As for Australia, I don’t know what will happen.  Right now, I’m doing a lot of praying and researching about both places.  Hopefully, I’ll have an answer soon.  It would be much better than being in a state of confuzzlement.

Thanks for reading.  More to be posted soon, I hope.

Okay, well for all of you who are my devoted readers, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for not posting anything since Thanksgiving.  I just don’t have anything cool going on I guess.  Anyway, this post is all about the stresses of finding a job.  In just a few short months I will be out of college and looking for somewhere to teach.  Where?  I have no idea.  All I know is that I want to teach.

Tonight I’m going to a special job fair at school called the Principal’s Recruitment Conference.  I’m going after I have supper at a friends house.  STRESS!  Well, I have a few schools that I plan on talking to, but none of them are in AZ.  I really wanted to go back home, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to work out.  *Sigh*

Right now, I have a possibility in TN, and I’m going to talk to some schools in NC, and other southern states.  I don’t know though… it’s a long way from home.  I just hope I can find some principal to take me in.  hahahahaha.  I know I’m a good teacher.  Just give me a chance.  (wow, I sound like a homeless puppy). hahahahahahaha.  Well, until next time…

Hello to all my readers.  Well, this year, I was stuck at school for Thanksgiving break.  Actually, it wasn’t that bad.  I hung out with some of my friends that live in town, and it we had lots of fun.  The only times that I went stir crazy was Tuesday night and Sunday.  Maybe I’ll be so tomorrow (on Monday) too before everyone comes back.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I came up with a crazy idea.  I decided to make up a list of 25 ways to entertain oneself while one is stuck in the dorm during Thanksgiving break.  I’ve put this list below and I’ve included a picture to go with each one.  I hope you enjoy my randomness, because after all randomness is what this blog is all about!

disclaimer: I didn’t have time to do everything on this list, believe it or not.  But, I’m sure if I had more time, I would have stayed busy doing these things.

25 ways to entertain yourself in the dorm over Thanksgiving Break
1. Go to Wendy’s and get a chocolate frosty!

2. Listen to music that is turned up very loud…only checkable music right?…. Ha Ha Ha… Um… sure.  If you say so.

3. Talk to your roommate on Meebo, even though she left only 2 hours ago.

4. Do some pleasure reading.  That’s what you’ve wanted to do all semester isn’t?

5. Eat the caramel corn out of the popcorn tin you got at Wal-Mart last week.

6. Come up with your Christmas presant list for your friends and family.

7. Send your stuffed animal through an adventure through the dorm and take pictures of it.

8. Write the story to go with the pictures above.

9. Play with your beta fish, Zerxies, and the pen he likes to chase around the bowl.

10. Draw the floor plan of your dream house.

11. Search the Internet for your dream furniture, colors, and accessories for you dream house.

12. While you’re at it, choose your dream car.  Mine’s a Camaro.

13.  Update your blog for the first time in a month.

14. Work on homework, but only as a last result.

15. Catch up on Sleep, especially if you catch a cold like I did!

16. Play your flute that you haven’t touched since July.

17. Clean and sort through all your stuff.

18. Decorate the room for Christmas, so it will be ready when your roommates get back.

19. Make a random trip to Wal-Mart to buy Christmas decorations, food, and other random things.

20. Email your friends that live in town and find times you can spend times with them out in the real world.  The less time in the dorm room, the better.

21. Go shopping on Black Friday!

22. Go make a Starbucks run.

23. Search Amazon.com for interesting stuff, even if you’re not going to buy anything.  Add stuff to your wish list while you’re at it.

24. Call your family and friends on Thankgiving Day and tell them you miss them.

25. Make a list of 25 ways to keep yourself entertained in the dorm over Thanksgiving break, and take pictures of each thing.

Well, I think I’m starting to see a pattern here.  I’m starting to get to the point where I post once a month.  I humbly apologize to all of my wonderful readers.  I know I’m terrible about keeping up on here.  Look at it this way.  I’m like one of those amazing authors (that I only dream I could be) that keeps you waiting for months for the next book to come out in a series.  But, when that book comes, it is amazing and was so worth the wait.  Okay, well maybe my posts are not as good as an amazing book, but hey, bear with my illustration okay?

Anyway, this is all about Christy’s “Fall party.”  Or, for those of you who don’t care if I use the word… It was a Halloween party!  This is the second annual said party that we have had, and it was amazing!  Emily and Christy planned for weeks in advance, and they did a great job with it.  I almost wish I wasn’t graduating this year so I could be at next year’s party… hey, I did say almost.

Everybody had great costumes this year too, and we had a special visit by our wonderful friend Rachel Odum!  We were all thrilled to have her back for the weekend.  I’ll start with Odum’s costume and then show off the rest of the group.  I hope you have fun with these pictures, and get a good laugh out of them too.

Rachel Odum was the Gothic rebel of our group.

April was a human whoopie cushion.  It was awesome!

Jamie was Judy Garland, complete with Ruby slippers.

Beth and Jessica came as the Phantom of the opera and Christine.  They were for sure my favorite costumes of the night!

Christy was our not so wicked witch, and Andrea was an Egyptian princess.

Emily was our Japanese Anime girl.  Sorry if I slaughtered that spelling, Emily!

Judith was our lovely gypsy of the night.

Rachel Feinberg was Harry Potter, complete with lightning bolt, and wand.

I was whatever my mom could find in our costume box back home. I think we finally decided I was either a serving girl or a prairie girl.  It worked.

Oh, and Jen was there too, but I don’t have a good picture of her fairy costume.

Here is the whole gang.  Yes, the dogs had costumes too.

Below, I’ve added a few other random pictures from the night for your enjoyment too.

A typical phantom pose… don’t worry, they are sisters! ha ha ha

“Oh Madam Ju, what do you see in my future as an Anime cartoon?”

“Somewhere, over the rainbow…”

 
“‘Tis an honor to polish the boots of the Phantom.”

Me and my buddy Winston

Well, I’m sure you can see we all had a fun time.  I have a lot more pictures, but it would take forever to get them all on here.  I think I picked the best ones for you to see.

Thanks to all my faithful readers who put up with my not posting for months at a time.  I appreciate your willingness to keep up with me.

So, I always have an amazing time on my weekends.  Weekend means freedom for those of us in the dorms, and with my friends, it means crazy freedom.  We either go to the mall, or the pet store, or walmart, or Christy’s house.

Two weekends ago, our group decided to go to the mall.  We walked around for a while, and I ended up with a new board game called blockus.  For those of you who have never played the game, it is amazingly fun, and you have to try it!  Christy went to Brookstone and got a cool lime green lapdesk.  That was cool.  I liked looking around at all the cool pillows and beds and such.  I wanted to get a back massager too, but I couldn’t aford one.  Oh, well.  I don’t remember what everybody else got, but we had fun.  We finished out our time getting carmel apples from Rocky Moutain Chocolate Factory.  Oh!  Those were amazing!  Each of us got a different kind of apple and then shared it all.  We tried, oreo, which was our favorite, m and m, cheese cake, reeses pieces, and milk chocolate.  All of them were good, but like I said oreo was the best.  Each of these apples was covered with caramel, then a coat of white chocolate, then another coat of whatever candy or cookie.  Amazing!  We finished out the adventure with supper at Subway.

This weekend, yes I skipped a weekend because all I did was work, we went downtown.  That was heaps of fun.  Christy, Rachel, April, and I ate supper at this amazing pizza place.  Oh!  Wow, we all had calzones, and they were so good. (I think I’ve said amazing at least three times now.  Oh well.)  Then we went down to the waterfall park and walked around.  That was fun.  We had some random photogapher take our picture while we were sitting on a swing.  Random!  Oh, well.  I guess we’ll end up on some random website somewhere.  Anyway, after walking around we went to spill the beans.  It’s a really cool ice cream and coffee shop.  All I cared about was that they had wireless.  I can check facebook there, and that makes me happy.  Although, I do like their ice cream, and we couldn’t leave without getting some. ha ha ha.  When we were done, we ran up to petco so Rachel could get more dog food.  We walked out of there with a toy for each dog and the bag of food.  Not what we planned but, at least the dogs are happy.  Right now I’m at Christy’s house.  I love it here!  I love hanging with my friends.

I hope you enjoyed reading about all of our adventures.  Keep checking back, and I’ll try to be more consistant with posting.  ha ha.

I’m having a great time at a teachers’ convention in Myrtle Beach!  It has been a great experience to be here.  I’ve already learned a ton of information, and I can’t wait to go to the sessions tomorrow.  It has been well worth the money.  I came here with four other bju students and two of my teachers.  This was my first time to go to a convention and also the first time for me to be at Myrtle Beach.  It is really pretty here!  We are staying right in the convention center/hotel, and I think this is the first time I have ever been in a hotel this nice.

The only downside has been the weather, we are in a tropical storm actually.  Currently, I am watching the rain gush down the sides of the glass roof at the hotel.  It makes for a pretty picture, but not it’s so much fun to be in.  Actually this is my first time ever being in a tropical storm.  We were out shopping in town, or trying to anyway, and it was fun until the rain came.  I didn’t feel much like shopping anymore when I was soaked, had my umbrella turn inside out three times, and I was freezing cold.  It made for quite the adventure.  For now, I’m quite content sitting here in the hotel watching the rain fall.  I could get used to this!

So, I had the most random fun this weekend at my fantastic friend Christy’s house.   It all started when I got the random urge to cook.  I asked Christy if I could come over and make supper for everyone in our group.  She was all for it, so I started to make plans.  Well, it all came about this Saturday.

It took me a long time to decide on a recipe, and the first one I picked, I wasn’t thrilled with, and neither were some of my victims…I mean guests who would eat my food.  So, I finally decided on making Impossibly Easy taco pie.  Actually it really was impossibly easy after I stopped flinging ground beef everywhere.  More on that later.  I also made a strawberry salad, which was amazingly good, and my mom’s wonderful cookie/brownie things.  I don’t know what they are called, but they are good!

Well, I started cooking around 3:30.  I wanted to be sure to have everything done on time, so I started on the dessert first because it took the longest to cool and what not.  While I was in the kitchen, I heard a lot of noise coming from the other room.  I poked my head around the corner only to see a mass of bodies.  Here’s what I saw…

Yes, we are adults, and yes, wrestling is fun.  Somewhere in that pile is Christy, Rachel, and April.  Don’t worry.  This is a very normal occurrence when we get together.  You don’t need to contact a psychiatrist.

Well, I decided there was nothing I could do in the other room, and besides I know my boundaries.  I would have been on the bottom of that pile!  So, I went back to cooking.  Everything was going well.  Emily my wonderful friend who owns pumpkinsdon’thaveankles (go check it out!) came in several times to give her professional cooking opinion, and Andie came in to take pictures.

Oh, I forgot about the meet flinging!  Well, Emily was teaching me how to brown ground beef, and I was stupidly trying to do all 2lbs of it at once.  The pan was big enough, but it was hard to stir it all around for even browning.  Let’s just say that I ended up cleaning up a lot of little beef chunks off of Christy’s stove top by the time I was done.   At least Emily and I had fun with the meet flinging!

I would now like to pause this regularly scheduled cooking description to tell you what else went on while I was in the kitchen.  Emily was making a ransom note for a friend’s birthday.  Don’t ask…there’s too much to explain.  Here’s Judith and Jessica looking at it with Emily.

And here’s Emily with the finished product…

Let’s see, well, once the wrestling stopped, there wasn’t much else going on.  Supper was finally ready, and apparently I did a good job.  Everyone was quiet, and with our group, the only way to get people quiet is to feed them good food. ha ha ha!

After supper we played a game of imagine iff.  I hadn’t played it before, but it is a great game!  We also sat around, talked, gave each other back massages with this really cool vibrating massage thingy, and watched a dvd.  Oh, and we checked Facebook!  Yay for Facebook!  Overall, it was a great night.  Here are a few more pictures just for your enjoyment.

Judith is all smiles.

 Wake up sleepy head…

This is Rachel’s “No I won’t be in the picture!”  “Fine, since I’m trapped between you, I’ll be in your stupid picture, but I won’t like it” face.

“No Christy, you pushed the wrong button.  Here, just let me do it for you!”

This is April’s evil smile.  I get this alot when she’s plotting against me.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skys are gray.”

The epitomy of cuteness.

It was a great night.   I’m so lucky to have such amazing friends.

So, I got a car this year and brought it back to school with me.  It’s been great so far to have a way to get off campus whenever I need to, and I have already used it a lot.  But, it was quite and adventure getting the thing across the US, let me tell you!

My Dad and I started our trip on Monday of last week, although it seems like forever ago now.  We headed up I-17 to I-40 and were on our way.  We drove for hours, and we were almost to Gallup, New Mexico when… POP… Phillip (my car) got a flat tire.  (yes, I’ve named my car Phillip, and that is NOT weird!)  We were only 10 minutes outside of the town, I’m not even kidding.  So, here Dad and I were pulling all of the stuff out of the trunk just to get to the jack and donut so we could drive into town to get the tire fixed.  Two hours later……… we were on the road again.

Our trip was relatively uneventful after that, but it took us another two full days to get to South Carolina!  I am so sick of being in the car, let me tell you.

Okay, so now we skip ahead to this week… The other day I took my blind friends out to lunch, and we had a ton of fun.  The adventure part of it was, that we had four of us girls and three seeing eye dogs in my little Saturn!  These aren’t toy poodle size dogs either.  There are two Black labs and one Golden Retreiver, so we were very crunched.  But, it was a great time, still.  We plan on going off campus together many more times, so I’m sure that Phillip will be stuffed with people and furry friends again.  Phillip will be ready for it all.

Well, that is my first report on my adventures with Phillip.  I’m sure that there will be many more adventures for Phillip, so stay tuned.

Last night some of us from my college and career group atchruch got together as a last hurrah before some of us left for school.  We went over to one of the girl’s house and just had a random night of fun and games. 

After a supper of Little Caesar’s Pizza, we played hide-and-go-seek in the house, but with all of the lights off.   That was fun.

Then the guys got the bright idea to do a three man push up.  That was interesting. 

Finally, we made a human table.  What is a human table you ask?  Well, a human table consists of four chairs set up in a square shape.  Then, four people sit sideways in the chairs, one in each chair.  With feet firmly planted on the floor, one person lays back on the knees of the next person, and this continues all the way around until everyone has their feet on the floor and their back on the knees of the person behind them.  The final step is that someone who has been observing up until now, begins to pull the chairs out from the human table, one at a time.  As long as the four players have their feet on the floor, the table will stand with all the chairs pulled out.

Thankfully, I just got to watch and take pictures…and laugh.

The last thing we did was play catch phrase.  I love that game.  Well, it was all a very random night, but it was heaps of fun.  But, hey, if the party hadn’t been random, it wouldn’t have ended up in my blog.