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:
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| Ohhhhhh, how I love my sweet nephew! |
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!
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