Wow, are we really almost heading off to Embry?  Just a couple more weeks of summer fun and then we are off to college….it’s sad yet exciting!  Anyways, just wanted to fill everyone in on my last few weeks, since it’s been a while.  I’ve been working hard at my job and that takes up most of my time, so I guess I will start there.  Usually at my job I just answer people’s questions when they find it necessary to ask things like “Where is the closest restroom?” or “Why are all the flowers dead?” but a couple of weeks ago, I did something that I is unforgetable: I helped deliver baby piglets.  I work at a fair, so there is a farm that actually runs year round on the grounds and I was lucky enough to be working the night the mother decided to make it happen (don’t worry, I’m not putting any pictures up here for this one).  I will never view bacon the same way…

I did have some fun during these past few weeks too!  Just last week I went up to Big Bear Lake and stayed in a two million dollar cabin right on the water!  It was extremely fun.  I went with my friend’s family so I automatically had some1 there to hang out with.  The cabin not only had its own private dock, it had a water trampoline! 

For those of you who didn’t know what a water trampoline was, I just showed you.  🙂   It was really awesome to just get some R&R away from home, and being able to go tubing behind a boat helped that along too!  There were two boats at the cabin, one was a cruising boat that was good for fishing or just hanging out and the other was built for speed, but unfortunately we only used the slower boat…  We weren’t at the cabin for more than a couple of days, but the trip felt like it took almost a week.  I had an amazing time and I can’t wait to meet you guys in a few weeks!

Last week was very exciting for me…I took advantage of the cash for clunkers stimulus.  Our family had been talking about getting rid of our 18 year old Jeep Cherokee, but since I needed a car it never seemed like a good time.  When we heard about cash for clunkers, I realized this was the golden opportunity.  We figured it would go until November, as the government had planned.  Well, my dad got a call Thursday afternoon from an auto dealer saying they just received an email letting them know the government was cutting the program off at 9pm due to a budget shortage.  The entire 250,000 car stimulus was used in one week!  So when he got home and told me, we rushed over to look at a Dodge Caliber he had seen.  Upon arrival, an older couple was already buying the car so we started strolling around.  One of the salesmen came up and told us another one had just come in that day, so we went to see it.  This one was the SXT Sport and, unlike the other Caliber, it had tons of features.  It had never been test driven, or driven at all for that matter except to get gas.  I ended up buying the car for $8,000 off sticker price with the Chrysler discount and turning in our old Jeep.  For a few minutes we were freaked out because we couldn’t find the Jeep title, which was necessary for the trade.  So after 4 hours at the dealership, we finally drove my new car home.

I realize now I forgot one small detail; it’s a manual transmission.  So, for the past week, I’ve been going around our neighborhood with my dad learning stick shift.  I’m already fairly proficient and last night we practiced starting up on steep hills.  It’s a really cool car and I look forward to bringing it to ERAU this year.

Here’s a picture of the car, the color is surf blue pearl I think:

Tonight is officially the last night of my former, non-college life.

First off, before I get started on the first post I’ve written in a while, my apologies for not being able to write for the past couple of weeks.  My dad and my brother, being the studly men that they are, decided to rent an auger for the day to drill places for the cottonwood trees that will be planted lining my driveway in Pinetop.  Heaven knows why they didn’t hire professional help in doing so, which would’ve saved a lot of heartache over lost internet and telephone lines, but being the typical men that they are they decided that “it couldn’t be that hard!”  I was reminded of Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor from the TV show Home Improvement, always trying to put “more power!” into the dishwasher or another helpless household object, or trying to remodel the upstairs bathroom on his own, which led to a monstrous hole in the wall and a bathtub being lifted to the room through a hefty crane!  The men in my family definitely give Tim Taylor a run for his money!  Well anyway, little did they know that while this spot was the perfect spot for a tree, it was also a very good spot for the telephone line.  That’s not all.  They continued trying to man it out.  They didn’t just hit the line once…they did it twice!!  So, my link to the outside world via internet was cut off, and the past couple of weeks I haven’t been able to blog!  But back to my declaration that tonight is my last night as a non-college student.

Because I’m playing volleyball, I am staying in a hotel in Prescott Valley tonight so that I can check in tomorrow morning with the rest of the Embry Riddle athletes!  I packed up all of my living essentials (which are currently in my car out in the parking lot), said goodbye to family and friends, and took off for the college life!  Well, right behind my mom.  She still had to lead the way to Prescott!  🙂  Some college student I am, I know.  Don’t worry… pretty soon I’ll know this town like the back of my head!  I mean, um, hand!

So bright and early tomorrow morning,  Anna and I will head to ERAU to begin check in and to OFFICIALLY start preseason as Eagles.  This past month I’ve been thinking about what it will be like, and after going to the Take Flight Volleyball Camp for little girls a couple weeks ago, I definitely think that it will be what I hope it will!  So wish me luck!

1st Day: The Orientation was headed by Dona and all the camp coordinators. We had a total of 3 FE Camps during this summer. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie.

After the orientation, we had the ball game going on for an hour or so. Close to 9 PM, we took them to Walmart and the day was ended at 10 PM.

2nd day: Every pilot needs to go through the basic ground school instructions before they can actually fly. This day was filled with classes educating the student about the ground school, proper safety measures followed and what to look forward to with respect to the weather conditions.

3rd day: Students went flying today. They did a short flight today along with an instructor. The students were ecstatic and they were waiting for this moment for a long time now. After the flying, the students had another class on Weather. It was pretty informative. Dr. Curtis talked about how clouds are formed.

4th day: Students completed their night flight. Everyone had their cameras armed to take the best shot of the Grand Canyon. The fun seems to never ebb but increase. I called this day as the flying day. It was probably the only day where they didn’t have to take a class. During the free time, we played Kickball and Dodgeball.

5th day: We took the students today to the Lookheed Martin aviation branch in Prescott. The students were given some critical information that every pilot should know but generally tends to ignore. After a cross country flight, the students were taken to both a dinner and a movie. We had our dinner at Chili’s. After the dinner, all of us went for a movie at the Harkin’s Theatres. This was surely a tiring day.

6th day: Today the camp ended with the Grad Luncheon. The students were provided with a certificate for completing the camp. This was the last camp of this summer. After everything was over, I started packing my stuff to move to the new house. David, one of my roomates, would show up in a week and hopefully things will get more interesting.

I finally managed to get my driving license as well. Now, all I need is a car. 🙂

This year, I will be renting a house with my roomate and two of my friends. It is sure going to be very interesting and loads of fun! Keep watch for my next blog post. 🙂

I think the last I wrote was when I got back from Cancun.  Since then I haven’t done much except work and the beach a couple of times.  If you don’t already know, I work at a flight school (www.sdfti.com) as a webmaster/graphic designer, and I also do some other marketing work.  Last week, for example, I developed both a print and web version brochure for us.  A lot of my other work is attracting visitors to the site, like creating facebook ads that show up on the right hand side (they’ve been surprisingly successful).  I normally work 6 or 7 hours mon-fri, so I can’t do too much else during the week, and it gets kind of old sometimes.

Luckily, I’ve been able to squeeze in a little beach time the past couple weeks.  I went yesterday with a friend and the waves here in San Diego were huge.  I love boogie-boarding and those were the best waves I have ever caught; some were a little too powerful though.  When I was body surfing I decided that instead of diving under a breaking wave I’d turn my back against it and caught the full force of a five foot wave on my back and neck.  I hope that remains a once in a lifetime experience.  It’s almost a ritual for me to dig holes at the beach too.  Yesterday, we hit about four and a half feet deep before water seeped in through the bottom.  Further up the beach last week, though, another friend and I got to six and half feet.  Then some little kids wanted to jump in and play.  Another thing that amazed me yesterday was that the water was actually warm.  Now for San Diegan’s, that’s a very loose term, but it wasn’t just tolerable, it was comfortable.  That’s something very rare around here!

So, I just turned 18 on Sunday,  finally I’m an adult! I had a great birthday.  I spent the whole time with my boyfriend and his family. We started my weekend fun with a day at my job, Knott’s Soak City Water-park (Palm Springs). I had four incentive tickets from working there and I gave them to Wyatt and his family so they all got in for free. I get in free whenever I want. I also get to go to Knott’s Berry Farm for free! Anyways, we had a fun time, but I got super burnt! Oh, and we ended up getting free food since an order was left unclaimed, the cooks had to either throw it out or give it away, so we got it! It was about $40 worth of food too!

I guess I got to admit, working at Knott’s is pretty cool, it just gets super hot! Luckily we can jump in or go on rides when we rotate! 😀

After that we went to my house and I opened gifts so my grandma could be apart of it, otherwise I would’ve been at the beach doing it. Then we went to bed.

Next morning we left to Oceanside and checked in to our hotel. It was nice and less than a mile from the beach. It was a good walk to get there, and there were many interesting shops and restaurants. We had fun, and the beach was beautiful. The first day we were there we saw a bride with her bridesmaids taking pictures with the beach sunset! It was soooooo beautiful!!! We took a lot of pictures, here are a couple of them. 

We enjoyed trying out the different restaurants, my favorite was Joe’s Crab-shack! Wyatt and I wore the bibs and took this awesome picture, but it’s on my cell phone and it won’t let me send it to my computer. 🙁  But it was an amazing place, and I would definitely suggest it to anyone who goes out to California! 😀

On my actual birthday we had some cake and then they left to go back to Arizona. I did buy a couple lottery tickets and won a few bucks. I won about 5 times, then I lost the money by putting it back into lottery tickets. lol.

The day after my birthday, Monday I opened a checking account and I went to the doctors and had the “adult blood test”. Oh and I also got in contact with the owner of the apartments I was looking at and I’m in proccess of getting one of them after they check out my application. I’m very excited!

So that’s about it for now. I’ll blog later. Hope everyone is enjoying the last bit of their summer, it’s ending fast!

Bye.

Hey folks, 34 days until classes start!

This Summer has gone so fast, and it’s hard to believe that in a month I’ll be at ERAU.

I think I’m more excited about this school year and consequently the three after that than I have been about anything for awhile. Second to getting to fly helicopters every week, I think I’m looking forward to Army ROTC the most. I know it will be challenging but I really enjoy pushing myself physically, and I think it will be a great way to get to know people really well while learning some great skills. I’ve always liked backpacking/hiking/climbing, running, and shooting stuff, so it should be a good fit.

Once after spending two weeks building trails and backpacking in new mexico my crew spent the last day by getting up at 3:00am, and hiking over 7 mountains, and then making brownies 🙂 it worked out to about 32 miles, I don’t think I’ve ever slept better than I did that night, even though I was crunched up on a rock on the top of a mountain.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, we had a big family reunion, I played a couple of softball games, took a defensive driving class to dismiss a speeding ticket I got (what a way to spend a saturday) and spent almost a week at my grandma’s house with one of my cousins from Denver.

The softball team had our first big loss last week when I wasn’t there, so I guess I must not be completely useless out there. we have a couple tournament games tonight that should be fun, even though only 4 of us showed up for practice this week.

Spending a week at my grandma’s house was a really fun time, we played a lot of games, went fishing, and searched through some of the large collection of stuff my grandpa accumulated in his shed over his lifetime (he pretty much filled up a 50’X100’ steel building) He has boxes of books that were published well before 1900, several of them dating back to the early 1800’s and before, so it makes for some interesting reading.

My cousin Nate and I went up to my Uncle Gary’s Lake house one afternoon and spent a few hours out on the lake, I got some good wakeboarding time in,and Nate did some tubing, and then we just hung out for awhile.

                            
The next day we went fishing with my grandma, we were talking about it and realized it had been about 9 years since the last time the three of us had been fishing, it was kind of slow, but still fun.

Here’s Nate & Grandma with a couple Catfish and a Bass.
     

And then toward the end of the week Nate and I drove out to Lincoln, NE and I showed him around there a little and he got a few things from the university bookstore, then we got together for dinner with three of our other cousins. We didn’t have any idea how big of a deal it would be to our older relatives that family from our generation was getting together on our own without our parents or grandparents making us, they were extremely thrilled, so much so that grandma made copies of the picture we took and ended up giving a copy to each of our parents, and several other relatives.
                               Nate, Jamie, Me(Jonathan) Matt, & Dave

Now I just need to start doing some clothes shopping before I move down to Prescott, I just ripped the knee out of my favorite pair of jeans this morning 🙁

I’ll see you all soon!
PS: Aren’t we supposed to hear about roommates and all that pretty soon?

Hey everyone!  I just thought I should give an update on my job as of today.  *Ahem*  So far, I have built a few cool things at my job but after that was done, I kinda just watch over them so little kids don’t just go trampling on them  >.<   

 This is me sitting between a pond I helped build and the three tiered planter I built, soiled, and planted in!

My other project was to build a planted inside a building and here is me sleeping in the comfy chair sitting on top of my project  😀

So yea, so far so good with the job at the fair!

I promised that I’d write again last week to finish up Cancun, but I was overcome by laziness.  I’ve finally summoned the courage to write.  Firstly, we saw some pretty awesome fire dancers there, and you can see pictures on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soccerkingpilot/sets/72157620949223744/.  We also saw a magician one night and although I figured out a couple tricks, some were pretty…well, tricky.  Continuing, the following day I went ziplining.  That was pretty fun, but it wasn’t in tree canopies the way I envisioned it.  Instead, we were in a quarry with water.  I hear Costa Rica is good for ziplining, and I’d like to do that sometime also.  Feel free to leave comments if you know of good places 🙂  After the zipline, I went ATV riding for the first time.  That pretty much made up for any disappointment the ziplining had brought on.

Ziplining Towers

On Tuesday, the weather called for storms, and storms there were.  I was in the pool playing water volleyball with three other people during a downpour (not to mention the wind).  It was so intense that on the side facing the ocean, you couldn’t see anything unless you used you hands as a visor.  The rest of the hotel guests had retreated to overhangs or given up and gone inside.  Coming home was a little interesting.  We got to our Dallas connection on time, but everything fell apart from there.  We got in the line for customs.  The foreigner line had 12 agents, ours had 4.  The citizen line (ours) was twice as long as the foreigner line from the start.  We were told that the computers were running slow, and I still wonder if it was a side-effect of the July 4 cyber attack.  Well, we moved through the line at a decent pace, and then we were lined up in front of a stall since we were next.  There were about five people lined up in front of each stall.  Well, our guys’ computer froze and we were the very next people in line for 20 minutes.  As a side note, all the other stalls worked fine so people kept going in the stalls next to us.  When it finally started working, it took him less than a minute and a half to check us through.  Looking over my shoulder as we walked away, I saw that the line had almost doubled it’s original size and had found it’s way past the bathrooms and toward the terminal.  By the time we got to our baggage, they had already turned on the sign with our flight number and we were the last ones there to get our bags.  We proceeded to “walk with a purpose” (aka jogging) through the airport to the gate.  When we got there we found our plane had just taxied out.  Long story short, we took the next flight home to San Diego, but we weren’t to happy.  We actually got the last seats on our next San Diego flight and in row 33 of 33, we could see nothing except engine and rivets out the window.  Pretty exciting.

Now that I’m back in San Diego, I think I’ll still go to the beach, just a little less often since the water is freezing here.

This week we started off with the CE Camp.

1st day:

We had an orientation where everyone was introduced. Prof. Tarek El Dokor was also there to introduce the students the concept of this camp and how interesting the field of computers can be, only if one is ready to make the efforts. After the dinner and some games, the students were back at the dorms. Later that day, they were taken to Wal-Mart to get anything they were missing.

2nd day:

They had a lot of time with Prof. Tarek El Dokor to learn about C ++. All the class time was focused on covering this computer language. Most of these classes took place in Academics 1 building. After an exhaustive day in the class room, the students had free time from 6 pm to 10 pm. Thus started the huge game of dodgeball. At 10 pm, lights were out and the students were excited for the next day for classes that included Machine Vision Lab.

3rd day:

A lot of information on the Machine Vision Lab can be found on the college website. I only know a quantum of what it is all about. Students got to play around with the Machine Vision Lab and also to understand the concept behind this endeavor. They also had classes on ‘Programming Mastermind” and ” Stenography and Watermarking”. Everyone was stoked about the next day because they would be going on a road trip to Sedona, hike a lot and get a bit of respite from classes.

4th day:

Pics say it all. We hiked Sugarloaf Trail and West Fork Oak Creek Trail. We also stopped at Basha’s between the two trails to refuel our supplies.

5th day:

A class with Randy Shaffer started their day and it was the best start they could have. This class talked about Electronics and Robotics and they got to ‘blow stuff up’. After a trip to Admissions Office and the Bookstore, they spent their free time chilling in the swimming pool. During the evening, they went for dinner at Garcia’s and a movie at Harkins Theaters at Prescott Valley.

6th day:

The camp wrapped up with a graduation luncheon at Academic 1 Atrium and tours around the campus.

As usual, pictures and videos follow: