The Last Bits of Summer

Well, here I am, on the cusp of my final year of my undergraduate work! It hasn't been too long since my last post, but LOTS of things have happened in the meantime! Let’s see…

I left off by mentioning that I would soon be meeting our new team of FOCUS missionaries and was excited to befriend them. I am happy to report that I love our new team, especially my new mentor, Sarah! She is very encouraging, kind, and positive, and I have loved getting to hang out with her during the past week!!! We've had lots of great times this past week, and I cannot wait to see what else awaits us as we go through this year! Another fun happening was that my old mentor, Heather, was still in town this week, and it was her birthday on Tuesday! We had a great impromptu surprise party for her that night! She was beyond excited (and momentarily overwhelmed) by our surprise! For the record, I LOVE surprise parties, so this was right up my alley :) I also had a wonderful time getting to see all of my friends who have gradually started moving back over this past week! Lots of excitement, that’s for sure!!

One of the most notable developments of the past week is that I have secured employment for this semester doing what I love most! No, I’m not going back to the quilt shop (although I would always love to do that :) ), but it’s my definite favorite—I get to tutor again!!!!!! Thanks to my amazing old boss at NOC, she got the ball rolling with the NOC-Stillwater math faculty so that I could essentially fall into a tutoring job here!!! I’ll only be tutoring about six hours per week, but I will also be getting a substantial pay raise, so that makes this good deal even better!!! I am incredibly blessed to have had all of these wonderful opportunities come into my life, and I can’t wait to see what else awaits me in the future! As an added bonus, the tutoring facility is right on the OSU campus and I get a free NOC parking pass, which will keep me from having to buy one of OSU’s ridiculously expensive permits! Blessings all around!

Another fun thing: I have been thinking about buying a bike for various reasons. Okay, that’s not fun, but I was telling my friend from church, Ben, about this, because he’s very knowledgeable about bicycles, and he proceeded to tell me that he and William (his roommate, also from church) had a bicycle sitting in their garage at their house that was left in there from the previous tenant that he would give me for free! What a stroke of luck! Okay, so actually, the bike needs new tubes and a little bit of TLC, but Ben offered to do the maintenance, so I’ll just buy parts and pay him for labor, and we’ll settle up that way! I’m super excited about this!

As I’ve been around St. John’s this past week, the lady who is the director of campus ministry informed me that I was chosen to be the Vice President of the Catholic Student Association on campus/peer minister (they are equivalent titles, actually)! This is my first time being in a leadership position at OSU, so I’m excited all around! I’ll get to help plan fun events at St. John’s and help everything run smoothly. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do this year, I’m sure it’ll be great!

Well, I've had lots of great news so far, so obviously something had to have gone wrong in the midst of this…it wouldn't be my life if it didn't happen that way!! I came home on Thursday night and I reached into the refrigerator to get my Brita pitcher and pour a glass of water. The first thing I noticed was that the contents of my refrigerator were all very un-refrigerated…I figured that maybe I didn’t shut the door completely and that it just needed to be closed up overnight, so I turned the temperature control all the way up and went to bed. I did not sleep well at all because the possibility of the refrigerator going out was weighing heavily on my mind. I thought I’d sleep in that morning, but I finally had to get up and check it to see if it worked like how I hoped it would, so I could quit worrying already! Yeah, no such luck…I opened the freezer and was VERY disappointed to see that my meat was on the verge of thawing and that contents of the refrigerator itself were even worse off than they were the night before. Awesome. Of course, my first instinct was to freak out and find a home in a neighbor’s freezer for my almost-thawed meat. After coming to terms with the fact that my refrigerator had probably died, I called my dad and sought his advice on what to do next. He suggested that I call the trailer dealership and go from there. The general consensus after talking to the nice man at the dealership and my neighbors was that my refrigerator was defunct and that finding an actual RV replacement refrigerator would be WAAAY more expensive than just buying a regular refrigerator and going from there. (Think somewhere in the neighborhood of $500-$1500 for a refrigerator not much bigger than a mini-fridge) That was also the point when my mom and I realized that mine was almost ten years old and was probably knocking on death’s door as it was. Thankfully, I hadn’t gone grocery shopping yet so I lost a minimal amount of groceries, but I was still sad to have to throw away so much food.

Yesterday, mom and dad came up and we got everything figured out! I ended up with a new compact refrigerator with comparable space to my old one, a deep freezer to put outside in a storage container (we already planned on getting that, anyway), and I’ll also get a new shelving unit to put above my new refrigerator! All of these things together were much less expensive than the RV replacement unit would have been, and could possibly be much more energy efficient! Even better, I get MUCH more freezer space, which I am really looking forward to, AND I get the extra storage space from the new shelves, which my dad will be building in the near future! In case I haven’t mentioned this lately, my parents are extremely awesome!!!!! For everyone keeping track at home, this is the fourth housing catastrophe I’ve had since moving here. I’m really starting to understand what home ownership must be like, and I now understand why adults are often stressed/sleep-deprived—worrying about stuff can really make a person feel uneasy! I suppose it’s good to know this before I am really out on my own! But now, I’m super excited to have a working refrigerator and freezer!!

A last couple of notes…

I found out on Friday that I passed my OSAT with flying colors and will be free to student teach after finishing this semester and turning in another Portfolio submission! One less thing to worry about!

I can’t believe that school starts again tomorrow. It’s kind of a let-down, if we’re being honest, because I really didn't get much of a summer. Oh well, I suppose it’s a precursor of my future as an adult! Thinking about this, I am very happy that I had the foresight to buy my school supplies a month ago, before chaos descended upon Stillwater and everything became ridiculously picked over! I easily found everything I needed, exactly how I wanted it, without the crowds! I still haven’t put in my order for my rental books, but that shouldn't be an issue yet! (Chegg has quick shipping, and I’m not about to shell out money on books that I don’t need!) Also, I received another scholarship for this semester, so I can finally say that I made it through my undergraduate program without having to incur ANY debt!!! Not many people are this fortunate, so I count myself extra blessed! It also takes quite a bit of the sting out of probably having to take out a loan for my Master’s! (I’m still being optimistic by hoping that I will find a good way to pay for that, too, without being indebted forever!)

Well, that’s about all I have to report right now, so I’ll end it here! Have a wonderful week, and I’ll be back soon to tell you all about my new classes! I’m being extra optimistic right now because I’m afraid that my optimism will end after classes begin, but maybe not! :)