Sunday, April 18, 2010

Playing catch up

Ok, it's been a while so I'm trying to play a little bit of catch up. For the slideshow above just scroll over a picture to get a view of the entire picture. A good portion of the pictures are from a volunteer opportunity I had for a fundraiser for Victory Juntion Gang. VJG is a camp for "kids with chronic medical conditions or serious illnesses". It is 100% free to the families and there are cabins that they get to stay at while they are there too. There are a few pictures from a trip to Myrtle Beach that I went on with my friend Ashley just so we could say that we went to Myrtle Beach.

I've been putting off updating my blog because I haven't felt like uploading all of the pictures and creating a slideshow then writing about it. That's what happens when you fall behind. The longer you put it off the harder it is to get it done. So here goes. I'm going to write a brief outline of what I've done over the past months.

I spent Thanksgiving with my roommates Thomas and Sara at their mom's house with their family. I have been lucky to have good roommates. Whenever I hang out with the kids from school it just makes me even more thankful for my roommates because they are drama free. I like my school and everything that I am learning but it is primarily made up of barely-out-of-high school kids and this is their first experience living away from home. I have to admit...I'm feeling too old for that.

Christmas I spent here in North Carolina and I had the house to myself. My roommates went on vacation with their mom for a few days. I did get to Skype with my family for Christmas which was a nice compromise to not being able to physically be home for the holidays. Unfortunately there was no snow for Christmas itself but we did get a little snow the week before. The snow only stuck around for a couple of days which was my perfect idea of snow. I like to see it for a little bit then it can go away and I'm happy.

School has been going great. I earned my second SOC pin (Student of the Class) in Automatic Transmissions. Student of the Class is the person who has the highest overall score in class and I have come close in most of my classes so it was nice to get a second one. My first one was from my Service Writing class. I really wanted SOC in Auto Trans because I got my lowest grade in Manual Trans and getting the highest grade in Auto Trans, in my head anyway, makes it even. :) I just completed my second NASCAR course which was Chassis applications. The NASCAR classes are my favorite because they are so relaxed AND they start 15 minutes later than the core classes. Starting 15 minutes later allows me to sleep in an additional 30 minutes because I don't have to sit in traffic waiting to get to school. I have fabrication classes for my next three classes and those are NASCAR classes as well. I'm so excited to be able to sleep in until 6:00 for the next 9 weeks. It's pathetic I know. I still have some core classes to go through so it's going to be hard switching back to the earlier schedule.

I have been volunteering with a race team up in Hickory for the last couple of weekends. It's a great experience that lets me experience what it's like to help out in a shop and see if it's something I really want to do. I have only been able to help out getting the cars loaded and going to the track and then helping at the track but it has been a lot of fun. I've been helping with a small team that races on asphalt and the guys have been great. I pretty much just go and pick up the race tires once we get to the track, fill them up with air, measure their size, then when another guy decides which tire is going where on the car, I put them on the car. I get to fill the cars with race gas as well. Race gas smells different and looks different than regular gas. It's kind of got a flowery smell and it's a bluish purple. Pretty cool. Once we are done with the race, I take the race tires off and bring them back to the officials.

And that's the last five or so months in a nutshell. I'll really try to stay up to date with my blog so the information I provide has a little more detail and isn't just a sentence or two explaining what's been going on. :D

1 comment:

Robyn said...

super excited to see you update your blog! (even if I talk to you all the time and know all of it) I need to update mine....