Summer is off to a great start :o) I'm not too busy because I'm still training at Target, but I'm sure I'll be working more hours once I'm fully trained. Right now I know how to work as a cashier and in "softlines", which are items like clothes and shoes. On Friday I'll be trained in "hardlines" which is everything else essentially; then I'll be prepared to work more than 15 hours a week.
On Saturday I'm leaving for my vacation with my grandparents to the southwest part of the country- I'm so excited!! I want to visit all the states, so on this trip I'll get to add 4 more states to the list of states I've been to. Right now I've been to 13 states, so I've got quite a ways to go! During my trip, I'll be visiting Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah; I won't be doing anything in California really except driving through the bottom corner of it, and I won't be near the coast, so it sort of doesn't count as visiting the state, but I'll go back someday to really enjoy it.
We're starting our trip out in Las Vegas, where we're going to rent a car and tour several national parks. The trip will start out by driving to Flagstaff, Arizona; we'll also tour Sedona and its area attractions. Then... off to the Grand Canyon!! (Can you tell I'm excited!?) We're also going to see the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, and the Meteor Crater in Arizona. Next we head to Utah to visit Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park; the pictures on these websites are pretty amazing and I'm sure I'll never see anything like these parks anywhere else :-) We'll end the trip by spending a few days in Las Vegas to see the city (but my Poppop says he won't let me gamble... darn). So that will keep me busy until June 5; if you'd like a postcard, let me know and I'll send you one! I even bought the nice postcard stamps (because now that actual stamps are 42 cents, it was worth it to buy the postcard stamps that are only 27 cents instead of just using the stamps I already had).
Later in the summer, I might also be joining Keegan's family at what I affectionately refer to as "Brochufest", which is their huuuuuge family reunion in Vermont each summer. Seeing as how Keegan's dad has 27 biological aunts and uncles, that makes for an absolutely gigantic family once they all marry, have kids, who marry and have more kids... If I go on this trip with them, I'll be adding Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont to my list of states visited. Combined with the 4 states from my southwest trip, that will get me up to 21 states visited. That's almost 50% of the states! I'll get to all of them someday :-) I'd like to get to all the continents some day too; right now I've got North and South America checked off that list, and I'm not sure how I feel about Antarctica... but I'd like to go to all the other continents. There's so much to see! I sure hope this Ph.D. work will earn me a hefty salary so I can afford all these trips I'd like to take... or maybe I'll invent and patent some amazing method or device, then just live off the royalties. That would be nice too ;-)
On a totally unrelated note, I'm preparing to buy myself a laptop tomorrow. I really, really HATE Vista, so I'm buying my laptop now when I can still buy one with XP Professional. Other than the car I bought last summer, I think this is the most money I've spent on anything in my whole life. Computers are expensive! Luckily I already bought Office Enterprise 2007 from NCSU with my student discount; seriously, I get Access, Communicator, Excel, Groove, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word (half of those things I don't even know what they are used for) but it was only $89 at the bookstore. If you buy that preinstalled on a computer, it's like $400 extra. I'm not sure what all programs I might need at Duke with my research, but it was only $15 more than the basic Office 2007 package, so I splurged to save myself potential grief down the line.
Well, I'm going to start getting some things organized for my trip to see if there are any last-minute travel things I need to buy :-)
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