Random Thoughtz By Amy

Not that I am too good for a real post, but I have class in 1.5 hours and am currently in my pjs

• I would like the meet the inventor of PMS, because it is a pretty rude invention and I would like to make that clear to him
  
• I don't mind the cold - but when it's cold AND windy, it makes it impossible to find motivation to go to leave any building
  
• Why does the girl in my genetics class always smell like horse ass? I get so distracted by it
• The more important question: why do I know what horse ass smells like?
• I am currently on a country music kick. My roommate is not ok with it
• I realllllly need to readjust my budget; I am doing a poor job maintaining my funds
• I start my second job today - greenhouse assistant. I am pretty pumped to see what it's about
• I have 300-some profile views on this thing - who are all the poor souls reading?
• I am worried about my goldfish, Cup. I have caught him swimming with a tilt the last few days
• The high today is 17 degrees! It's a HEAT WAVE!
• All boys are still dumb*
• I am going bowling today after class/job/meetings
• I wish Whose Line is it Anyway would play all day, every day
• Now, I only have 1 hour to get ready for class

On that note, I need to get cracking! I promise, real posts soon. :)

More Math/ SALT Saga Part 4

Ok, let's revisit some math equations:

Today: January 24th
SALT winner announced: January 20th
Days since announcement: 4
Status of my nerves: Just fine
Reason for not posting the result: Can't you guess?

At 8:20pm I received an email from the Consultant for the nation (he was in charge of notifying all of the candidates). When it finally came up, I froze. ALL day, I was refreshing my email and fidgeting to finally hear who won... and now we had the email! My heart was beating louder than a train driving through my room. Shannon sat on her bed and stared at me, waiting to open the email.

I finally took a huge breath and clicked on it and started the read the email:

I want to personally take the time to thank each of you
and your institutions for submitting a bid for this year's
Student Award for Leadership Training (SALT).
It was extremely exciting to see and read all the
wonderful bids that came in.

This year, we had 11 schools submit bids from 7 of the regions.
The National Board of Directors spent a lot of time
reading, discussing and providing feedback for all of the bids.

This year's winner is:
Missouri University of Science and Technology

Congratulations!

The email went on to say that we will be receiving personalized feedback from the National Board of Directors within the next week, and we will receive a copy of the first newsletter which will spotlighting all of the submissions.

I sat at my computer, and reread the email about 12 times to make sure I didn't misread the winner's school. My heart literally broke, and my eyes teared up. A lot of nerves and emotion leaked out when I saw we had lost!!! I notified all of the people who were following and hoping we had won. :( It was a sad, sad few hours, while I had to realize that I was not going to be going to any more conferences to show off how great our retreat is.

I'm obviously doing better now, and the school that won obviously deserved it! I am REALLY excited to see feedback about our bid and see what we can do to improve our retreat for the future. :)

SALT Saga Part 3

Ok, people.... we are on the HOME STRETCH HERE!

Today: January 17th
SALT winner announced: January 20th
Days left to wait: 3
Status of my nerves: fried
Plan to get myself to Wednesday: Not a clue
Chance of me focusing in classes on Wednesday: .05%

I am currently wishing I had a fancy blackberry or iPhone so I could check my email ALL DAY. I am very anxious to hear who the winner is! I have a gut feeling we will not pull through, but who knows!

"It sounds like it's going to take off!!!"

Oh yeah, that is referring to my laptop! I don't know how it happened, but it started making a horrible shaking noise at the beginning of last semester. The sound was definitely comparable to a helicopter or airplane starting to take off. I could rarely watch anything on my laptop because I couldn't hear it above the noise!

All along, it would overheat and I had to buy a cooling mat. Not even joking, I used to keep chocolate candies in my desk drawer..... they all melted after having my laptop on for a few hours! Suddenly around November, it would spontaneously turn off and wouldn't load again for at least 20 minutes. It was starting to stress me out and I was afraid I was going to loose everything on my laptop.

And enter - my new baby!!!! I spent a billion days in Best Buy (ok, seriously, I did go there every day for 4 days) and looked at different models, tested them out, and asked really random questions of the sales associates. (I think by day 5, when I actually bought the computer, they didn't actually think I was ever going to buy anything.)

So, thanks to my Dad and extra money in my college fund, I was able to purchase a brand new, QUIET laptop. :)

My closed, lovely Asus laptop. Yes, those are finger prints. Haha, they are hard to see until the flash of the camera makes them obvious!

I am now ecstatically the owner of Windows 7, and this sleek Asus model :)

It has an amazing number pad (I know right, such a weird reason to love it) and its own operating system as a back up!

I am pretty much in love with this inanimate object.... I mean it's hard not to be! So happy to be computing from such a great computer!!!! :)

Kasmire: Indemnification

Before I start, if you follow my dear cousin's blog, this post will be redundant. :) She beat me to the update!

What is Kasmire: Indemnification? What a great question! When Doug first told me about it, I gave him a blank stare. What does indemnification mean, anyway?

WELL! This is the title of Doug and his production team's second feature length film!!!! When Doug was in high school, his group of friends and him made their first film, Puddles 9. It was an absolute hit; very funny and very well made for a bunch of high school students!!! It is based off the movie, Oceans 11. (The name parallel cracks me up every time!)

On Friday, January 8th, Doug premiered his second film. His group had been filming and editing and such since the beginning of the summer. He decided that he wanted a bigger premiere event, so we researched different hotels and local theaters in the area! It didn't take long to realize that the AMC theater in our area cost $1,600 to rent and play a movie in! While this venue would have made Doug's dreams basically come true.... we had to leave that option behind.

After a little more digging, we found and booked the Marriott in Schaumburg. It is definitely a gorgeous hotel! They were excited to book such a unique event - and we got a nice deal. :)

Entrance to the hotel

Main entry/lobby. Great place to welcome people!

Doug worked to edit and prepare the movie for the premiere. On January 8th, we invited friends, family, and co stars to come view FPS's second feature length film. It was so exciting to view it on a much bigger screen than his first premiere!

We were in Salon F, a portion of the Grand Ballroom. We had a slide show playing before the movie premiered! It had fun facts, trivia, and cast bios!

Doug may or may not have slipped this cool placard out of the hotel. :) It was cool to see his production team's name printed on everything!

We collected a $3 admission fee from people who were interested in seeing the movie to help cover costs of our pricey venue. No one seemed to be too concerned with having to pay!

Unfortunately, Doug was having some issues with getting the movie to render and burn onto a DVD.... which meant we would have a tough time playing it. While him and his friend, Josh, came up with plans B, C, and D, my dad took a minute to let everyone know why we were running late. Talk about a tense time!

Finally Doug and Josh figured out how to get the movie to work at the hotel. It was a nerve wracking wait while they figured it out. Even though we had to have people wait a bit, it was worth it in the end!

The film was great! The acting, directing, editing, and writing were all very impressive. Everyone involved in the film should be so proud of their work. :) Great job, Doug!

PS We are selling copies of the DVDs if you are interested. :) All proceeds will go to paying for the venue... (which means, paying my mom back for the use of her credit card! :P)

New Year's Resolutions

I decided to actually make a few resolutions/goals for this new year, maybe that will help! :)

• Be more on time: I am not ALWAYS late or INCREDIBLY late, but I need to work on it in general. I'm known for breezing in just a few minutes late :\
  
• Shrug it off: As EVERYONE knows, I worry about everything-all the time-all day. I plan on letting the small things go. It'll help me so much to not worry so much!
• Swear less: I dont cuss like a sailor, but I do need to work on my language a little!
• Say no: I'm not sure how successful this one will be, but sometimes I get so stressed out because I cannot learn how to say no to people. This is my attempt to look out for myself a little more!

Do you have any New Year's goals? I know how easy it is to fail at these, but I am totally willing to give it a go! Every month I'll check in with myself and see how it's going!!!! :)

The Basement Saga

I bet you were wondering how the basement situation turned out? Haha maybe you really aren't, but I aim to let you know anyway!

So as I mentioned in this post - we had a lovely surprise on Christmas morning around 1am: a flood of about 3 inches of standing water. On the 26th, we needed to remove everything from the basement so we could get a team in to remove the carpet. So we set up to start removing everything from the basement.

After approximately 9 hours of hauling all of our belongings into the garage and living room and kitchen and family room, this is what we were left with!

We had gotten most of the stuff out of the basement, but left furniture and exercise equipment for another day! We were EXHAUSTED!

The next day, we had a restoration team come down to the basement and remove nearly all the bookshelves, since they all looked like this :(

Here is how it looked the first day of the restoration process. Carpet is all gone and all of the bad furniture was put on the curb. We had a few dehumidifiers and fans for 3 days!

Yes, you counted right - we only have 2 bookshelves left. And the entertainment unit!

We were lucky enough to have our couch still, so that is an upside! We have finally purchased new carpet, and it should be installed soon! I'm not going to say what color carpet were putting in, but I WILL say that it will look totally different! This is quite the slow process, but once we get the carpet and new bookshelves in, things will start to finally calm down!

2010?!? New Years!

When I was a kid, 2010 was REALLY far away, and it meant that it was going to make me an old lady. I'd be graduating college, the state quarters would all be in circulation, and we'd be driving flying cars.

Hmm, at least two of those seem to be happening! This year, I was lucky enough to spend New Years with Stephanie and her fiance's family! This is the second year that they invited me to their celebration, and I am so glad they did! Everyone in that family seems to have a Wii... and boy is that game fun! Between the hula hooping, dancing, and bowling, I think we all burned off the calories we were consuming that night!

Part of the group playing the dancing game! It looks like some sort of aerobics game, doesn't it?

Stephanie and I joked about Adam needing some dance lessons before the wedding ;-)

During the night, Austin played music for us and sounded like a cheesy announcer! Tony joined in on announcer bits throughout the evening

Adam couldn't resist, and wanted to sing as well! We found out that he sounds like a bingo announcer when he talks into the microphone!

Another fun New Years with my 'cousin'! We sort of look alike here, too!

Uh oh! Our DD was getting a little sleepy by the end of the night!

We had a blast, and if you were lucky enough, you'd get to see some of the ridiculous videos of us dancing and hula hooping... but I will let that remain a mystery for you readers. :) It wasn't a pretty sight anyway! I definitely can say I rang 2010 in right!

Random Thoughtz by Amy

• It is 8:46pm on a Saturday and I am in front of my computer. Lame sauce
• I have 5 blog posts I want to do in the near future
• I am very hungry, why haven't I eaten dinner yet today?
• I bought a new computer and love it
• All boys are dumb**
• Is Stephanie the only person who is not allergic to commenting to my posts?
• Wait, who reads this?
• I wish Erin was around Skype more so we could talk
• If I dont Skype with her while she's in Egypt, I will go beat her up
  
• I am and am not ready for classes to start
• I should really order my books
• It is now 8:47pm, still lame
• I am looking forward to demo-ing a ceiling and buying an area rug tomorrow
• They aren't even for me
  
• Still lame
• I am negative excited to go downstairs to see the contents of our basement still all over our house
• But I am still hungry

This has been: Random Thoughtz by Amy. Tune in for further installments.



**Excluding anyone with the name that rhymes with Nickey Bollins.

The Christmas Morning Flood

If you notice, I have not been keeping very well with my blogging: there was sort of surprise crisis that popped up during the holidays!

Every Christmas Eve, my family celebrates with my dad's side at my grandmother's house (posted below). It is one of my favorite traditions. We normally return home around 1am or so, by the time we help clean up from the big celebration. Doug and I were exhausted for some reason, so we scampered upstairs and our parents set our gifts under the tree for the next morning. One of the other amusing traditions my family has involves my dad wrapping and stowing my mom's gifts in our basement. He spends a good 2 hours down there wrapping his gifts each year. :) While its normally an inconvenience to us, let's say we are so glad Dad chooses to do this every year.

While Doug and I are changing into our PJs and brushing our teeth, I start to hear shouts from downstairs. Hmm, seems a little hostile for Christmas morning at 1:15am, don't you think? Still in my dress clothes, I ran downstairs and my mom is shouting something about water. I turn the corner and she's in the basement stairwell. What the heck?

"We have WATER!!!"

Hmm, ok mom. I know that, in fact- I just used some to brush my teeth.

I ambled down the stairs expecting to see a puddle below where our main level bathroom is. Oh, was I immediately stunned at what I saw.

Ok, I do know there is a lot going on in this picture. But can you see the reflection on our carpeting? That would be 2+ inches of standing water.

I ran upstairs and whipped off my dress pants and threw on shorts. I started shouting for my brother - his Mac was sitting on the floor! I think all I got out was, "We have a flood in the basement. Get your computer!" Doug FLEW out of his room, actually body slamming me into the wall, and ran straight to his computer. For about 30 minutes we worked to get everything valuable off the ground onto tables.

Between Doug's valuable computer equipment, we also had a lot of valuable Peanuts collectables to quickly save from rising water. It's hard to see, but the water is up to Doug's ankle in this picture!

My mom ran upstairs to make appropriate calls about the situation. Hold the phone. It's CHRISTMAS EVE? Who is going to help us? That was a question none of us wanted to dwell on, so we sent her up anyway. She made the calls to the insurance company and plumbers in the area. While she was working on that, Dad was searching for an answer to why this was happening. Ah ha, found it:

This is our sump pump and its cover - currently floating above the pump cavity. Our sump pump failed!

While that sucks pretty bad, we do have another drain that leads straight to the sewers that should have minimized the damage! Why the heck isn't it draining the water out? My dad went over to that pump and found this:

OH lovely. That would be the outlet that our second pump WAS plugged into. As you can see here, the outlet blew - leaving our basement plugged up with water

It didn't take long to get the valuable items off the floor onto towels and furniture. Now what? My mom did not get anywhere with getting a plumber out and of course the insurance company couldnt help us on Christmas morning around 2am. At this point, Doug found our large garbage can and we bailed the water out of the basement for the next 5 hours.

Have you ever done that? Let me tell you something - it'll make you feel like your body is on fire. I spent the time filling the garbage can with buckets full of water, then helping hauling it up the stairs, and pouring it out our front door. For. Five. Hours. Keeping in mind we had all been awake since 9am the previous day. Doug and I created a pretty good team, but we were having trouble keeping up with the water levels. It was warm enough that the precipitation coming down from the sky was rain - and the snow was melting at the same time!

I'd like to believe that we were all too tired to think of this; but finally someone had the idea of plugging the second pump into an extension cord and put it into an outlet that worked. We were initially afraid that the whole pump blew, but we were JOYFUL to learn that the pump still worked. We wired it across the room and watched it suck up a majority of the standing water in the room. From there, Doug and I swept the water out of the carpet into the working drain, and hauling the water from the sump pump cavity over there as well.

This is one corner of the basement indicating how high the water actually got!

Around 5am, my body was starting to give out. The buckets of water suddenly started to weigh hundreds of pounds and my legs were starting to burn. My parents begged Doug and I to stop and go to bed. Ok, something you need to know about me:

I NEED A PLAN!

I went upstairs and booted up the computer. I was going to find a bloody plumber, no matter what! We just couldn't keep up with the rain, and my parents could barely function anymore. After 5 unsuccessful calls, one company picked up their phone. After getting the logistics out of the way, the man said, "Ok, I'll have my guy out there in less than an hour, is that ok?"

Is that ok? OH MY GOSH I LOVE YOU! The man, Mike, laughed and said he was glad they could help. I shared the news with my family, who were very skeptical that anyone would actually come. I sat with the phone, ready to call EXACTLY an hour after I hung up with Mike to give him a piece of my mind if no one showed up.

Luckily, the owner of the company, Terry, rang our doorbell 40 minutes later. I could have hugged him! With 30 minutes of work, he replaced our failed sump pump and our other pump and the pump cavity emptied immediately! If only we could have found a plumber earlier in the night! Regardless, the four of us stood there exhausted and speechless when he left. Now what?

Well, I CAN tell you that we all ended up going to bed around 7am that morning. Doug and I needed showers after all the gross water we stood in and lifted all night. We decided that we would get up around noon to open gifts and figure out what our next step was in this nightmare. Good enough for me! I could hardly keep my eyes open!

As we settled into our beds, my dad said, "Merry Christmas, everyone."

Merry Christmas indeed! Keep an eye out for what else we learned and what we had to do next!

Christmas Day

*This next post is not necessarily posted in chronological order*

Christmas Day! What can I say about it? Well, I can explain more about the circumstances in my next post. :) But for now, I can say I have never felt so exhausted during a Christmas morning. I LIVE for the way Christmas makes people feel: the snow, the music, the tacky decorations. I just LOVE it! My entire Thanksgiving until December 24th are spent preparing for Christmas: Baking cookies, decorating, shopping, wrapping, cleaning, planning, singing carols from the shower.... it's just my favorite time of year.

Waking up on Christmas morning afternoon was surreal, and not the way it's supposed to go! Regardless, we were able to enjoy the time together. Doug and I still waited at the top of the stairs like anxious 6 year olds, and my dad still waited by the Christmas tree with the video camera.

Before we opened the generous gifts left under the tree, we took a moment to thank the heavens that we were all alive and together. (More later) Then... Doug and I busted into some gifts. It was so great to see such amazing gifts under the tree for us. My favorite part is watching other people opening their gifts. Seeing their faces of surprise (did Amy REALLY get me that?) or amusement (Is this wrapped in BARBIE paper?) makes me smile. My parents were very generous to Doug and I this year, and it was a very fun couple of hours we spent laughing and enjoying the gifts we received!

Among some of the fantastic gifts I received, I opened a box of amazing work boots! Ok, this is SO exciting to me! I always work outside and am in a pair of really old shoes... now I am rocking the steel toe work boot! I put them on and wanted to run outside and plant a tree! I have been wanting a nice pair for such a long time! Now, I just have to exchange my Carhartt coat for a smaller size, and I will finally fit in with all the other farmers in my classes! :)

The other gift that meant the world to me was a shadow box with a collage of VERY meaningful things inside of it. During my freshman and sophomore year, I lived in Walker Hall 333. My sophomore year, I was president of that area of campus (three buildings). My government was called CCRG - Central Campus Residential Government. I worked my tail off and fell in love with the very old buildings. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and Central Campus was decommissioned at the end of my sophomore year and demolished. Shannon and I sat in our room junior year and watched our old room of 2 years get clawed out by the construction machines. Tears welled up in our eyes as 2 years of memories were flattened in a matter of moments.

My mom found on the ISU website that the mailbox covers were being sold to alum who were interested in preserving a part of Central Campus. She did some research and bought the 333 mailbox cover and added it to more:

I was absolutely SHOCKED to see it when I opened up that box. I wanted to cry. What an amazing gift. In the shadow box she added a key chain that Shannon designed and I ordered for every resident in Central Campus. She also printed out a few goofy pictures: 1 of me hugging the pillar in front of Walker, 1 of our window above the front door, and 1 of the name plate. This is by far one of the BEST gifts I have ever received! :)

Doug and I have always been so lucky to receive such presents from our parents on Christmas - and this year was no different! Perhaps the best gift of all was life and the love we have for each other. Merry Christmas and I hope everyone had a meaningful day with their family and loved ones!