Tidings of Great Joy

Oh what a lovely evening, filled with graham crackers, laughter, and an over abundance of Christmas candy.

You know the saying "you don't know what you've got till it's gone". Well that is totally true. I didn't realize - well I mean I guess I always knew, but I didn't fully realize how much I appreciate and love my friends and family until I was removed from them. I missed everyone and everything so dearly. Raise you're hand if you are a homebody. Because I am. I am one who likes the feeling of familiarity, safety, security. I don't handle change all too well. But I force myself to do it anyway cuz it's good for me. Like drinking that nasty cherry flavored cough syrup. You don't want to do it, you don't enjoy doing it, but you do it anyway cuz the end result it great.

But now I am back, if only for a short, fleeting moment. And it is good to wake up in the early morning and see the sun rising over those glorious mountains, and it feels good to drive around town, up and down through the lights of Main Street, checking to see the movies playing at the Sticky Shoe and ending up at the gas station for an ice cold beverage. Just like the old times.

And it feels especially good to be hugged by old friends who you haven't seen in a while and to laugh with them again.

And also to have your dad cook you delicious gourmet hamburgers and to listen to your mom laugh at her own jokes and to shake your head at your brother in disapproval as he runs around shirtless.

I seriously have some sentimentality issues. I would make a terrible drifter. I could never be a ramblin' woman. I mean I understand the whole "romance" of traveling from place to place, never staying too long anywhere. But come on. That would never actually work for me.

I am one heck of a grounded girl.

So that's why I'm forcing myself to move around right now, so I can hurry up and learn my lesson and then settle down and never leave home again.

Anyway. Merriest Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

I love these peeps.

Around Town

For whatever reason driving around the town all night listening to Tim Mcgraw and talking about nothin' in particular just feels like home to me.

It's good to be back. Even if I've been running from a lot of the memories here for the past four months. But now all those memories seem like so long ago. So far away that I can't even reach out and touch them anymore.

That's a good thing.

It's good to move on.

Also... I'm now officially 19 YEARS OLD!!! AHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Holy canolie where did the time go?!?! Nobody knows. My very last year of teenager-hood.

Bring it on!

Looking Back

If we stop and look back on our lives we can trace back through all of the decisions we made that got us to where we currently are. Now that my first semester of college has gone by faster than a runaway train it has left me thinking about where the time has gone.

How did I get to be here?

I think as we are living life we don't realize what is happening to ourselves. But then when we grow a little older and get a little taller we are able to finally look back and see everything that happened, and then we realize all that we learned.

And we also smile because we recognize that we are better people than before.

Each day is filled with something new, some other life lesson that we might not realize is changing us until after it is all said and done.

My first semester of college. Now that it has come to a close I can at last look back and see.

Let's be perfectly honest with each other now.. I struggled a lot. I'm not gonna lie. It was hard. A friend of mine pointed out to me that I am afraid of change, and he is quite right.

We all are in some degree or another - agreed?

But it is good to struggle. That's the only way to grow.

 People do say that a lot but as sure as the day is long it's true!

Life changes and so do our situations, we just have to learn to adjust to those changes and make the most out of it. We gotta learn to have faith that it will work out.

That is what I learned this semester. I also realized that everybody else is going through the same darn thing. Who knew, right?

Life is gonna get real good people, just you wait. And this isn't even the beginnin'!

Wide Open Spaces

I think I'm startin to understand what they mean when they talk about a Home on the Range.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still a mountain girl, always will be. But there really is something magical about a huge wide open place, where you can see everything around you for miles and miles, and the sun setting lower and lower on the earth until you could lie down on your stomach and it would be at eye level with yourself. You can't do that with mountains.

That's a place you could really run. There's nothing to stop you, not a single thing for miles around.

And wouldn't ya know it! I'm kind of excited to move to Kansas!