where'd you go, kristen?

Literally, Seattle and Vancouver (and an hour to/from work every single day M-F, as well as occasionally on weekends).

But I will start from the beginning and try to give a play-by-play. It appears that my last post was 2/13, and the only thing we did between then and the weekend is go to Capital Tacos and Costco for Valentine's Day.

I had a frozen margarita, and I don't usually like frozen margaritas but this one was tasty. It did give me pretty bad brain freeze.

Saturday morning we ran over to a local business that sells compost and topsoil by the yard and loaded up Dan's truck.

After getting all of that dirt out of the truckbed, we had to get ourselves looking nice and head on over to see Hamilton.

We did not have great seats (you can tell). I found out about the tickets going on sale at around 7:00 AM when I watched a news story about it on the local news. I got "in line" for tickets in Orlando and Tampa and was able to get tickets for Tampa pretty quickly. They were stupid expensive, and I hadn't planned on buying them, so I got the cheapest seats possible. We went out afterwards to Brio and the mall and I tried my first Aperol Spritz, which was delightful.

New summer drink? I think so.

The following week I had several events on campus - I think I stayed late 4/5 nights that week. Lots of students with questions and event preparations. Everything wound up going smoothly, fortunately! I had a visit with an employer on Friday, and then left work early to go have dinner with family in town over in Orlando. The traffic was HORRENDOUS and it took us almost 3 hours to go what is usually a 1:35 trip.

After driving all that way, I was not going to leave without going to Disney. One of my friends and I planned a day trip to the Festival of the Arts at EPCOT where we planned to eat, drink, and be merry.

I also had to get some pictures in the Canada movie since I would be there in just a week and a half.

The last week before I left was basically just me cleaning, working, and drinking to soothe my pain of having to go on this darn trip (that, spoiler, wound up being wonderful and not horrible at all, but a pain to have to go on nonetheless).

I'll break up my next few posts from while I was gone so there aren't quite so many photos to scroll through.

life without pictures

I promise I'm here, I didn't forget about you, and I am working on putting together a few summary posts of where I've been/what I've been doing...

but I could not for the life of me figure out who to get my photos from my phone onto the computer - but not just on the computer, in a place where I can find them to upload them to the blog so I could post them and talk about them. I finally just gave up and am in the process of slowly syncing 10000+ photos to Google Photos. On the plus side, I think I'll be able to reduce my iCloud subscription!

Because of this, my most recent photos available to post are from 2017, including this gem:

 of Dan at Disney World, the one time we rode the go-karts.

Work is crazy busy, I can't believe it's almost April, and I'm gone again next week for a few days... then I'm here for a week, then I'm gone for a few days the following week, then it's the last week of the semester! What is happening! I have so much grading!

In the meantime, I have countless students trying to put together an internship for the summer who are waiting to hear back from me, two applications for awards for students that I have to fill out myself, and multiple work trips where I'll be tracking my time to see how much I end up working (I figure it will be a whole lot).

The best note in all of this is that PAY DAY IS TOMORROW which means I get to put a bunch of $ in my savings account. Hollaaaaa!

welcome back

I could backdate a bunch of posts but why?