Update

Ok, so it's been a while since i've blogged. Here's an update of my life. I did get a car, a Honda Civic just like I wanted. Then I jetted off to South Africa for a week with some people from my class. It was a blast. Our group really meshed well together, which I realized more and more since we've been back. The trip was pretty tame, and everything ran pretty smoothly. We went on a winery tour, hiked up Table Mountain, visited the Apartheid Museum and Robben Island, and went on a safari. The travel agent confined us to pretty safe areas. There was an incident on the Brazil trip where a bunch of people went out to a bar in a dangerous neighborhood and were involved in an attempted muggery. The guy tried to fight back and one thing led to another and a gun went off. The girl screamed, the muggers ran away, and luckily nobody was hurt. I was grateful nothing bad happened on my trip.

Anyway, when I got back from South Africa, my parents came to visit Chicago. They were only here two full days. I took them to see my school and some of the city. We also went to see Wicked the Musical. We bought tickets day of, which would've never been possible in NYC. Anyway, the production was very similar to NYC's version, and I think my parents also enjoyed it.

Orientation has started. Last week we sat through one day of informational sessions, then took off to Wisconsin for a leadership retreat called LOE. We had a blast. On the first day, I did the "ropes" part. Low ropes were little exercises like running through a jump rope, and high ropes were actual high rope obstacles like you see on Fear Factor. I walked across a wire and did Jacob's Ladder. I am so out of shape, I really hurt myself doing those things. I managed to complete the tasks, but my body was aching and begging me to stop exercising. If I had only listened. Anyway, there was a climbing wall and one of the students had a mishap and fell off the wall. He was belayed onto an employee of the camp, but I guess she wasn't paying attention at the time and couldn't stop him when he fell. Poor guy. The first night there was a game night. I made it to the finals in the hula hoop competition, but lost in the final when they made us compete hula hooping while turning around and clapping. People recognize me from that now. After over 8 minutes of hula hooping non-stop, I'm pretty sure I'm a decent hula hooper. The next day we were grouped in our cohorts and did challenges similar to what you'd do at a corporate training session. Our cohort got along pretty well, but we only managed to successfully complete one task. We made a contraption out of straws to protect an egg dropped from a ladder. We also had to market it. It was my idea to sing "The Final Countdown" when we did the demonstration. Our marketing campaign was so over the top. It was something like this, "Since the dawn of time, nature has used the spine formation to protect its valuable treasures from predators." Then we had a "real customer" (a dude) say, "With the Starburst Egg Cradle, I know my eggs are protected." At night we partied again. It got kind of nuts too. They gave out sandwiches for the midnight snack. And when I was walking back to my room, I saw tons of sandwiches lining the hotel floors. It sucks for the people that have to clean it, but it kind of makes me laugh.

After the weekend, I was thinking, "wow, I've been partying a lot." But I know that this is going to end quite soon. Today was orientation back at school again. We had more informational sessions, and tonight I'm actually going to choose my classes. No more informational sessions after today. Tomorrow will be back to leadership class starting with two case studies.