It's been almost two months since the last post. Yes, I suck at this.

A quick overall update on life.  Lots of excitement has been had.

I will be completely honest and admit I was having a pretty tough time back in October. Poor Dusty had to deal with the brunt of it. I was just missing Minnesota in general -- the familiar surroundings, my family, my friends, everything.  Graduate school is definitely different than undergrad.  Both academically and socially. CSB/SJU was definitely a close-knit community; like living in our own little world -- physically and emotionally. As freshmen, we went in not knowing anyone. Everyone made friends, found his or her own "family" away from home.  Our classes were in buildings just a two minute walk away and our friends just across campus or even next door.  I can't imagine being a freshman here, though. Hardly anyone lives on campus, intro classes of 200+ students, etc.

my wonderful birthday flowers :)

Many things contributed to the bad few weeks awhile back.  I think the most difficult thing so far has just been dealing with the loneliness. First of all, I spent my birthday alone for the first time in what seems like forever -- even though I tend to not like the attention, it was fairly depressing to be alone pretty much all day (I had one class in the morning) with nothing to look forward to in the evening.  My amazing roommate and her boyfriend, though, brought me four gigantic slices of cake from a local bakery, and a gift card to Target and a cooking magazine to exacerbate my addictions. Definitely made up for the lonely day.  Then, we got a week off for fall break back at the beginning of October, just two weekends after Dusty came to visit for the first time.  I drove to Denver on the Friday before break and Dusty flew there that night to ride the rest of the way home with me.  The week was great -- got to see most of my favorite people (and animals!!). A bit more hectic and stressful than I wanted, but I learned I just need to go with the flow instead of trying to cram too many things into so few days.  A big step for me (or maybe more so my Mama, Grandmas, aunts, and Dusty) was that I drove the entire way back by myself! Split the drive into two -- stopped in Rapid City, SD to spend the night -- and it went a whole lot better than I had anticipated.  No issues at all, thank goodness.

School had also not been going as well as I had anticipated. I was in as far as considering a transfer to the University of Vermont or U of M.  However, that is an entire issue I won't go into, ha.  My classmates are awesome. We just seem to mesh and get along so well.  We don't have a purely (near) evil girl like we had at CSB, which is incredibly nice. We also aren't insanely competitive with each other and actually seem to want each other to do well, which is, again, a nice change from much of my class at St. Ben's. However, most, if not all of my class, already has connections to SLC and/or Utah.  They grew up here, they went to the U for undergrad, they have family here, or they moved here with someone else.  Even though there are quite a few students from out-of-state, I sometimes feel like I'm the only one.  Much of that is my own fault, too, I realize. I hate moving outside of my comfort zone, so I tend to prefer spending my weekend nights watching Grey's Anatomy on Netflix and having game night dates on Skype with Dusty.  Instead of going out with people I barely know yet.  Such a change from the last five years when I've always had my best friends to hang out with basically whenever.


Anyway, enough of that. The last few weeks have been great.  Much of that has had to do with the visitors I've gotten, but school has also been going a lot better.  I suddenly feel like I'm a graduate student and I'm being challenged.  I got involved in a couple projects that I really enjoyed and actually had a passion for, including planning and serving a healthy meal for underprivileged families of young elementary students.

This post is getting long. I shall continue with the GOOD post in a couple days.