Hello from Crazyland!

A little sketch I did a while back ...  :-)

Well, hello there, everybody (read: the 1.3 people who still check this blog occasionally)! I see that it's been several months since I've posted a real update on what's going on with my life ... I have no idea if you even care after this long, but just in case there's someone out there who does, I thought I'd drop in and tell you about some of the things that I'm up to!

Firstly, I want to say THANK YOU for all of the sweet comments I've received over the last couple of months - some of you I've thanked personally, some I haven't, some I've meant to thank and forgotten ... but I want you to know that I've read each and every one of them, and I'm going to try to do better at responding from here on out.

Today I'm on fall break, yay ... although it's been weird to have a day in which I didn't have to do anything, because the first six weeks of classes have been so full! I'm taking a full-time class load, still working several jobs, and being an officer in several student organizations. I'm preparing to give a speech completely in Spanish, give some crafting lessons to my friends, and organize a lecture series on campus; I've done late-night dissection labs in between thunderstorms, played in concerts, babysat, and learned a bunch of new and encouraging things by going to Bible studies with friends.

Yet, for all that, I will humbly confess that I have been much less productive and much more Internet-addicted than I have been in semesters past. Facebook in particular has been a huge black hole for me. I never believed in Internet addiction until I was woken up at 3AM by a thunderstorm a few weeks ago and automatically reached over to check Facebook - and stayed on it for half an hour. I've been working on trying to set up controls for myself, to only spend a certain amount of time online each day, but so far it hasn't been working well.  :-P

What has been working well is that I've been trying to take time to "reconnect" each day with things that I really love to do, things besides the Internet, like taking walks and sketching. This weekend my family and I took our first drive in many weeks, and I took some beautiful pictures and spent almost two hours writing in my journal. Here are a few of the photos I took:

Hmm, let's see, what else ... I read a lot of incredible books during the last few weeks before school started, including The Phantom of the Opera, Silas Marner, and Wuthering Heights. All of them were incredible, and I can't wait for Christmas break so I can go back and read some of them again! I've also been branching out a bit in my TV consumption, having watched the original Thor movie for the first time lately (didn't like it), and being wheedled, tempted, and encouraged by both real-life and online friends into checking out Doctor Who and the BBC Sherlock shows (do like those).

And I would say that that's pretty much all I can come up with at this hour of the night ... but it probably gives you an idea of why I haven't been blogging lately! I have probably seven or eight half-posts that I'm going to try to finish as soon as I can, but they're just more musings on stuff.  :-}

I hope you're all doing well! Please feel free to drop me a line and tell me what you've been up to - I've missed your sweet fellowship a lot over the last few weeks!!

Have a wonderful night and a great rest of the week! Sending big cyberhugs your way!

Lots of love,
Vicki