My friend Heather Demetrios inspired me to post my reading list for grad school. As I don't have a lot of time to write in-depth posts and I won't write about the content of my grad program, I thought posting my annotated bibliography is the best way to keep everyone informed about what's going on in my life. After all, my life pretty much revolves ( Read more... )

I survived my first residency at VCFA. If you want to read about what residency is like, head over to my classmate Lisa Papademetriou's blog or learn a little about my faculty adviser Kathi Appelt at Through the Toll Booth.

Read more here.

As I sit here, taking a break from packing for grad school, I can't help but think about all the different adventures I've had in my life. I left home when I was 17 for an internship in our governor's press office, and I feel as though I've been on the road ever since. In my eyes, that's not a bad thing. I've been lucky enough to put down roots in ( Read more... )

Growing up in tornado country, you spend a lot of time cleaning up after storms. You spend at least one weekend every summer shoveling muck out of a basement, cleaning up downed branches or picking up debris. And then serving a mission for my church in hurricane alley... Well, let's just say I saw my fair share of floods, over-turned trailers, ( Read more... )

I decided to go without the internet on Saturday to try to minimize distractions for a productive day. And while there were some annoying side-effects (I wasn't sure what time the library closed, the name of an actor in a movie I was watching escaped me, I couldn't check Facebook to see if my friend had her baby), I was more than pleased with the ( Read more... )

I haven't always been a daddy's girl. In fact, there were a few years there in my late teens/early twenties when I thought my dad and I would forever have a strained relationship. Maybe it's because we're both so stubborn and set in our ways that we never really tried to understand each other. Then one day-quite out of the blue-I realized I was ( Read more... )

It's been a long time since I've posted a new playlist, but I couldn't resist when I started thinking of how great it would be to have all my baseball songs in one place. Now I listen to it practically every day on my way home from work to put me in the mood for the Nationals or White Sox game (both if the timing works out) I'll be listening to. In ( Read more... )

I have an intern. Yes, after all the internships I've done over the years (there were three, the first when I was 17-years old), I now have a poor, unsuspecting college student to dump all of my crappy projects on. Okay, you know that's totally not true. The teacher in me would never allow myself to do that. Even though the next few weeks will be ( Read more... )

It had to be the most ridiculous book I had ever read. Making booze from weeds, a broken-down carnival game, a Podunk town in Illinois. Seriously? I couldn't believe my English teacher was making me read such a stupid book for my first reading assignment in high school.

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I can't believe it's June! Seriously, where did May go? Or for that matter, what happened to April?

My first writing assignment for grad school was due this week. I had to put together a 20-page submission for critique groups that I will participate in this summer. I was shocked by how difficult I found it to pick what to submit. This is the first ( Read more... )