Blogiversary

Monday is my one year blogiversary. I must admit, I enjoy blogging a lot more than I thought that I would. It's so neat to look back over the past year and see all of the places I've been, the things I've learned, people I've seen and how I've grown.

Believe it or not, here are all of the places I've been in the past year - Orlando, Florida; Galveston, Houston, Amarillo, Dallas and El Paso, Texas; Kansas City, Missourri; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Washington, D.C.; New York City, New York; and Taipei, Taiwan. (I provided links so you can read about the adventures you may have missed out on!)

Some other big changes include a job promition to Director of Media Relations, moving offices from the Harrison House to Packer, moving out of my apartment and into a house with a new roommate and my family moving from Canyon to El Paso.

I feel like this past year I have grown a lot in my relationship with the Lord. I'm learning more about who God is and how He loves me. I'm also working on figuring out His plan for my life. That's definitely a process that I know will continue the rest of my life, but God's given me a new confidence in who I am in Him, which has really changed my perspective.

Lots of new people have come into my life - new friends, a new pastor in my church, a new president at my school, a new Sunday School class.

Not to mention I joined the Quarter Century Club in November - being 25 has rocked my world! I'm in my mid-twenties. Whoa.

It's definitely been a pretty big year in the life of me! Thanks for being a part of it! I look forward to the next year of blogging - sharing about my trips, my thoughts on God and life in general, updates and just for fun stuff too.

So, here follow me as my Tales of Wanderlust continue...

More pictures from DC

Here are a few more pictures from my trip to DC last week. I had such a great time! One of the highlights was actually seeing A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Center Starring Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett! She was awesome and it was so neat to see her perform live. It was definitely worth the $25 and standing for 3 hours straight (it was sold out and the only tickets they had available were standing room only!). Other highlights included my first trip to Mount Vernon - which was beautiful! - and a visit to the top of the Washington Monument to see DC from up above.

Living My Dreams

My life lately has been very busy, but I've been having a lot of fun! Last weekend was Homecoming - my fourth that I have planned, which is crazy! Our theme this year was "Living Your Dreams" and it was such a good weekend. I think it was probably the best that I've planned yet. Everything went really smoothly and it was great! It was fun to see old, and new friends and reminisce about my time at HPU. Sometimes its easy to forget about actually being a student here, since I've worked at the school all this time.

Now, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. (my favorite US city!) on a trip with students from the Model UN team at HPU. We left Austin yesterday morning at 7:00 a.m. and have already had a full schedule of events! I took some of the students around the National Mall last night, which I can just NEVER get enough of! My American pride is just always bursting at the seems as soon as the Washington Monument comes into view. We went to the Smithsonian for a bit before it closed, then walked to the White House and saw the monuments at night. It was really beautiful! This is amazingly my fifth time in DC (my 2nd this year!) but my 1st time to see the city in the fall and it is so beautiful! I love all of the trees changing colors - we don't get as much of that in Texas!

Today we got a tour of the Capitol building, which was really great. An intern from Congressman Mike Conaway's office did a great job (I must admit, it was a lot more thorough than the tours I gave as an intern for Sen. Hutchison several years ago, haha) spending over 2 hours with us and taking us all over the building. It's always fun to go there and I think the students enjoyed it too. Tonight they started their conference so I am going to the Kennedy Center to see City Dance Ensemble: Latitude. I'm not sure what to expect, but I love dancing, so I'm sure it will be great!