To the Motherland

I don't know if everyone that reads this knows yet, but I'm going to England this fall for Study Abroad.  Not only is my scholarship financing a huge chunk of this, but I'm pumped to visit the land that a good chunk of my ancestors hail from.  My Grandma Mayer's family is English and Welsh. In fact, my mom's grandma emigrated from England as a little girl.  I'll also get to visit Ireland, and even though the most Irish thing about me is my last name and I'm more German and Polish than anything, I still consider myself an Irish girl at heart--probably because I was basically raised in a pub.

I got an email from the principal of the school I'll be attending, as well as all the medical forms.  So it's pretty official, I'll be leaving at the end of August, and I couldn't be more excited/nervous/terrified.  I'm such a homebody that it's mildly disturbing, and my parents won't have enough money to visit me.  My goal in life is to save up enough money to send them to Ireland for two weeks.  It would mean so much to my dad, and he's worked his butt off at a job he hates for 35 years just for my sister and I.  It's because of them that I'll be going on this trip and I couldn't be more thankful -- plus I will probably cry my eyes out for the first two weeks because I will miss them so much.  I'm 21, for goodness' sake, you would think I could go 3 months without seeing my parents.  I think I made it a month without seeing them my sophomore year, but that was tough.

I might get some funding from the school to do a Quest project while I'm over there.  For real, I have enough on my plate without doing an extra project for absolutely no reason, but I have a feeling that the school is basically going to force me to do it.  Can you fail a Quest project?  I probably could.  If the Quest project was just a blog, I could do that.  But they told us that the schooling over in the U.K. is much harder than it is here, so I really won't feel like lugging equipment around Europe to do an additional project for my home school when I have hours of homework at my U.K. school.  Plus, I want some free time to stalk celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Paul McCartney.

Ha, I just read the description for the Quest program and you have to do 3 projects.  Forget that.  Not happening.  Once I get back from England it's all about the Internship search.  Then it's concentrating on graduating ASAP, and then it's all about grad school applications.  I feel like I have hit the fast-forward button on my life.

For now, I'm going to stop procrastinating my homework and say sayonara.