Sunday, June 13, 2010

As Tomorrow Approaches...

I'm nervous!
I'm also excited!
But I'm very nervous!

Tomorrow, at 10 AM, I am going to be driving to Denver International Airport to fly to London!

Exciting, oui?
One problem.

I have a debilitating fear of flying.
I have a panic attack nearly every time I get on a plane.

Oh, well.
We'll see how this goes.

I'll try to update while I'm abroad, but don't be angry if I don't!

Cheerio!
Molly

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

*insert clever blog title here*

Hello all!

Summer is here, which means I’ve been spending my days in an almost comatose-like state. Watching movies and television, eating. I’ve been taking my dog on walks, though, so I haven’t completely turned into a vegetable. *Yet*.

So, this summer, I have an extremely full schedule. Care to read  about it? No? Well, too bad. You’re gonna hear about it anyways.

Trip #1: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota
Description: I’ll be going to this Indian Reservation for the second summer in a row. The Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota has seen some pretty rough days, including being massacred and having their rights completely ignored. I’m going for a work trip to the area with the lowest annual income per capita in the Western Hemisphere aside from Haiti. If that isn’t shocking and sad, I don’t know what is. If you want to know more, click here to go to the website of the organisation that I will be working with.

Trip #2: London and Paris!
Description: This is really self-explanatory. But I’ll explain, just to humour you. My dad was the highest bidder at an auction for an apartment in Paris for a week. We looked at available flights and realised that flying into London and taking the Chunnel would be significantly less expensive than flying straight into Paris. So, I’ll be staying in London for a few days, spending a week in Paris, then spending one more night in London before flying back home.

Trip #3: MADD Camp/Sweet 16!!!
Description: One of the things that I pride myself on is being a member of one of the most liberal denominations of Christianity in existence. One of my favourite parts of my church is the yearly summer camp. I’ve met some of my closest friends there. The high school camp is called MADD Camp. MADD stands for Music, Arts, Dance, and Drama. Also featured at camp, but not in the name, are Creative Writing and Digital Arts. It’s a really fantastic time of year. Even more fantastic is the fact that camp this year falls on my sixteenth birthday! So I’ll be having a birthday party with 150 of my closest friends.

Trip #4: Indiana/Illinois/Michigan
Description: Yet another self-explanatory one. But I’ll humour you again. My very large family (large in quantity, not in weight/height) lives in the Midwest. Every summer, we go on a road trip to visit them. It’s a really great trip. We usually stay at one of our cousin’s lake houses for the majority of the trip (my great-uncle was a very successful land developer and real estate company founder, so he bought a peninsula on a lake!), and then spend a few days in Chicago.

Trip #5: Speech Camp
Description: No, I don’t have a lisp or a speech impediment. I’m on the Denver East Speech and Debate Team, and the speech section of the department has a summer camp. We meet up at Denver University, our speech coach, Matt Murphy, and several premiere speech coaches from around the nation hold “auditions” to help us find a suitable piece. They give us a piece (a play or book to perform), we memorise and block it (for those of you who aren’t theatre nerds, blocking is the way people stand when performing a specific part of their piece), and on the final day we perform it for the whole speech department. It’s really quite exciting.

 

So, those are my summer plans. Fascinating, aren’t they?
In addition to the very busy schedule that I have planned, I also have to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and The Professor and the Madman for Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. Hoorah! I’m actually quite thrilled for both of the books, though. They’re both fantastic, and I also have a large amount of other books on my summer reading list.

That’s all for now!

Cheerio!

Molly