Greetings from North Carolina!! :)

Hello, lovely friends and family members!

Some of you may have seen this in a mass email, but I thought I'd post it here, too (with minor edits), in case I'm missing any one's email address.  A number of people have been asking if I'm alive and where I live and other assorted questions, and since time is at a premium these days, I thought I'd just get the info out in one fell swoop.  I also think I have old emails for a bunch of people, so if you have a better email to reach you, please let me know.  :)  And I am sure I missed people, so you can feel free to pass this along if there's someone you think would want to hear from me.  :)

So, greetings from North Cackalacky..ahem...North Carolina!

The South is lovely this time of year, especially if you love 90+ degree temps and 80%+ humidity!  Haha, don't worry, the giant bugs make up for any kind of less than desirable weather.  Kidding, kidding.  North Carolina is GREAT!  The only totally scary bug I've seen is a house centipede (dare you to google it!) in my kitchen.  Otherwise, thanks to extermination on my second day of orientation, my puppy Allee and I are thankfully so far the only ones who live in my apartment.  And with the exception of a few hot and humid days, the weather has been surprisingly mild and much like a lovely Pacific Northwest summer since I arrived.

Despite a bit of a rocky start with my living situation, I am now happily getting settled in my lovely TWO bedroom townhouse apartment (did you notice I said TWO bedrooms?  And I didn't mention a roommate?  That's right, friends, I have a place for you to stay, so you should all start planning your trips to North Carolina now!).  Allee has made a million friends with all the kiddos who live in the neighborhood, and they come over frequently to ask if she can come out and play.  She's doing better than I am in that arena, because they couldn't care less if I can come out and play!  ;)  Which is good, because I am way too busy for that anyway.  

Speaking of busy, school is off to a lightening speed start.  Holy moly, they aren't messing around with this accelerated program business.  We are almost finished with the third week of classes and we already had our first pathophysiology test on Tuesday (which I survived and did NOT fail, thank you very much!) and our next test is coming up on Monday.  But here's the craziest thing--I go to DUKE, you guys!!!  Seriously, I still can't quite believe it.  But as I spend all my time in basically two buildings on campus, plus the hospital, it might take awhile to sink in.  The faculty are INCREDIBLE.  They are some of the kindest, most brilliant people I have ever met, and even though my Gonzaga friends will never believe it, the vibe at Duke is much more Gonzaga-like than I ever could have imagined.  Everyone is incredibly supportive and the faculty are like cheerleaders in their enthusiasm and desire for us to succeed.  It's awesome.  I am surrounded by brilliant and talented people all day every day, which is both amazing and exciting...and sometimes slightly exhausting (but in a good way).  My cohort is made of people from literally all over the country and all over the world (no joke, China, Tanzania, Jamaica, Ethiopia...just to name a few), all ages and shapes and sizes and colors and ethnicities...it's really exciting.  I love being surrounded by this much diversity!  And my new bit of excitement is that there is an a cappella group at the nursing school and I am TOTALLY joining it and I can't wait.  :)

Anyway, I really have to get back to studying, so I will wrap this up, but just wanted to say hi, and thank you so, so, soooooo much for all your amazing love and support.  My phone number is staying the same as always, and in case any of you are inclined to drop me a line or send me some love (which I would NEVER say no to, especially since I have once again joined the ranks of poor, starving college student) and want my address, let me know (I never turn down a good care package).

Please stay in touch, and feel free to drop me a line or give me a call anytime!  Love you guys and miss you all!  And always remember...the BEST is yet to come!

Loves!

Jen

I'm Baaaaa-aaaaaack!

I know, I know, I haven't posted in forever.  My life went BANANAS these last few months, so hopefully ya'll can forgive me.  :)  (See, I said "ya'll"--I'm catching on to this North Carolina thing!)

My last few months were seriously really crazy.  I had to finish up my last prereq--Intro to Sociology.  Okay, so I know a lot of friends who have been sociology majors who are brilliant and amazing people who worked hard to get through difficult soc classes, but I have to be honest--this was the easiest class I've ever taken in my whole life.  I literally did less than no work for it--and I wrote like three papers, so what does that tell you?  It was a little bit time consuming but a piece of cake, and I easily slid by with an A.  Sweet.

The pre-registration requirements for Duke were CRAZY!!  We had SOOOOOO many hoops to jump through before we could even register for classes that it was like a full-time job all by itself.  Crazy.  Drug testing, background checking, fingerprint taking, shot getting, paperwork filling...you can't even believe how many steps there were!  But I must have gotten through it, because here I sit in North Carolina!

So my last few months in Portland were filled with lots of work, preparations, hanging out with my beautiful sister and this darling kiddo:

Ohhhhhh, how I love my sweet nephew!

and just getting ready to head off on my new adventure.

My last few weeks of work were pretty rough...my supervisor basically stopped talking to me after I gave my notice, and just in general things happened that made my life pretty hard, but the good news was that it was great confirmation I made the right decision.  And my boss and a few of my coworkers were overwhelmingly supportive (Jordan!  Lucy!  Gail!) and wonderful, so that mostly made up for the rest of the crap.  Plus my school was INCREDIBLE!  They were really the most supportive people I could have asked for in this whole thing.  My principal even had me come up at the end-of-the-year faculty/staff brunch, said a whole bunch of incredibly kind and wonderful things about me, told me how much they would miss me, and announced to everyone that I would be headed to Duke.  It was hilarious--you could hear an audible gasp, then everyone started clapping.  They are seriously the BEST.  I am going to miss them like crazy.  The Vice Principal (who has become a dear friend), Cyndi, literally cried when I said goodbye.  I have been incredible lucky to work with some truly wonderful people there over the last few years.

So two weeks after giving my notice, my sister and brother-in-law and my mom and I packed up all my stuff, and my mom and Allee and I set out on this epic cross-country road trip.  Literally over 3,000 miles of craziness.  It was actually pretty great, and included a lovely afternoon with a bunch of my best girlfriends from high school (Audri! Val! Amber! Renee!  Love you girls!), a couple days at home with a great day on my parents' boat at Flaming Gorge, snuggles with my darling goddaughter in Denver and late night visits with my bestie, Janna, a loooooooooong day across Kansas and Missouri (holy humidity and heat, Batman!), my first introduction to the hum of the cicadas, a stop at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, lunch with one of my favorite Gonzaga lovelies, Colleen, somewhere in Tennessee, a gorgeous drive through Great Smoky Mountains National Park and a foggy drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway, and finally we arrived in Durham.  We took a bunch of photos for my dear friend Aaron's wife, Liz, who is fighting breast cancer, with her "Team Liz" logo sign along the way, which made for some quick, fun stops.  I wish we'd had time to stop and do a few more things, but we had to meet my stuff which was supposed to be arriving in Durham ahead of us.

Once we got here it was a little bit of an adventure.  It turned out my stuff was not actually going to make it to Durham for a few more days (UGH!), the apartment I had reserved was NOT what they said it was and was actually pretty scary, and my mom and I had to figure out a way to track down her CPAP machine, which my dad had mailed since she forgot it in Utah (fun, right?).  We also had to find another place for me to live with zero notice because I got a pretty skeevy feeling about the first place and refused to sign a lease on a place I didn't feel safe.  So it was an exhausting and stressful few hours trying to sort that all out, but it worked out in the end.  Luckily I had thought ahead enough to pack my air mattress and pump in my car instead of in the moving pods, so we actually had a place to sleep, and we literally camped in my apartment for about four days while we waited for my stuff to arrive.  It was made even better because the air conditioner didn't work and the North Carolina summer was in fullllllll swing.  Luckily that got sorted out eventually so we didn't just melt into humidity puddles.

Anyway, there's the story of how I made it out of Portland, across the USA, and landed in Durham, NC.  Yippee!