why not.

27 May
A cute photo of a baby in a gnome costume and a thank you to my readers today!  It’s official – the month of May has been the month with the most blog reads here at there’s no place like gnome.  And the month isn’t even over yet!  Thanks for tuning in and validating my rambling by reading!  

Source: etsy.com via Lindsay on Pinterest

pinch me.

26 May
Is it real?  Seriously.  Am I really supposed to walk across a stage in three days to receive a master’s hood? 
It doesn’t seem possible.  Classes just ended and it has been nearly two weeks of playing, sleeping, and repeat.  It’s been a fun two weeks of avoiding the inevitable reality that I will be moving in less than a week.  That I will no longer be a student.  That I will no longer call the Twin Cities my current home.  That I will be in a continuous state of transition.  Again.
yes.  those are the christmas cards I received still hanging
on my closet door.  I like the photos of people I love displayed,
even if it isn’t seasonally appropriate.
My family begins to arrive on Saturday and on Sunday morning I have a party of 18 dear-to-me people who will celebrate my graduation with me during a brunch before the commencement ceremony.  I will walk in my robe [picked up ominously yesterday afternoon – robe with wonky sleeves] across the front of Central Lutheran Church and complete this four year journey.  
[enter cliche line about looking to the bright future]

senior awards.

26 May
My sister and I are both seniors and graduating, me from seminary and her from high school.  Last night was the senior awards night at Edgerton High and my sister not only received scholarship awards, she also gave one.
You see, my family presents a scholarship to a graduating FFA [Future Farmers of America … oh yeah] senior each year in memory of my dad.  In the years past, my mom has presented the award at the banquet night.  Last night, with my sister already sitting on stage as a senior, she presented the award to one of her fellow classmates.  I love that she did this and wish I could have been home to see her both give and receive scholarships. 

She sent her little speech to me to proof and I couldn’t even read it without crying.  I think she did an awesome job.  Here is what she said:

“Good evening everyone,
My name is Emma S– and I am a senior here at Edgerton High School and I’m here to present the John S– Memorial Scholarship in memory of my dad, John.
Growing up, I lived on a farm with my three older siblings, Matt Ben and Lindsay, my mom Leanne, and my dad John. On the farm we raised cattle and grew corn, soybeans, and tobacco. My dad learned to work hard from his upbringing on a local farm. I remember helping my dad with chores around the farm. My dad was a hardworking farmer who taught my siblings and I responsibility and hard work. There was always the time of year when the whole family and friends helped plan and harvest tobacco in the fields. Sure there were those times when my siblings and I didn’t always feel like helping out; but it was those experiences that have helped shape who we are today. I will always remember harvesting the crops with my dad. We would go out in the fields in the combines to harvest the crops. He would let me ride along inside and sit on his lap.
When I was in sixth grade, my dad suddenly passed away. He was the hardest working person I knew. He was funny, considerate, and the greatest dad I could ask for.
My dad was a member of the FFA at high school here in Edgerton. He continued his involvement with FFA by being an active member of the FFA Alumni. One of the primary purposes of that group is to provide financial support to current FFA members.
To remember my dad for who he was as a farmer and friend, and on behalf of the S– family and Edgerton FFA Alumni, I would like to present the John S– Memorial Scholarship, in the amount of $500, to my fellow classmate …”

the latest.

24 May
Sleep is low.  Stress of moving increasing.  Emotions are draining.

Creativity for the blog is pretty low.  Please accept another stories-told-through-my-iphone-camera post.

Here’s what’s been going down:

Friday night was scheduled to be drive-in on campus night.  We hired a projectionist to show a movie on the backside of our library building while we sat on blankets, enjoyed the spring weather, and ate cotton candy.  That, unfortunately, so did not happen.  Weather forced us to move the movie inside but we still ate cotton candy, made ourselves in a rented cotton candy machine that sat on the table next to the root beer keg.  Paige and I [in matching yellow] show off our sugar-twirling skills above [in matching blue].

After the weather moved us inside on Friday night for that senior week movie event, we were thwarted by the weather again on Sunday.  We planned a Run Away 5k for seniors – a run/walk at a park just a few blocks from campus followed by a cookout.  The threat of more rain and thunder [and it turns out – tornado watches] caused us to reschedule.  That, however, did not mean we didn’t raise our heartbeats.  A bunch of us gathered at our school’s gym for a group work-out session.  As the tornado sirens went off, it was fortunate that the gym was in the basement.  We were also fortunate ‘toys’ were found for entertainment. Like workout apparatus turned into catapult.  [It takes little to entertain us, folks.] [The group workout was followed by a cotton candy party in my apartment.  We had lots of floss sugar to use before I had to return the rented machine on Monday.]

Melissa has a sewing machine.  I know enough about sewing to throw a few pieces of fabric together.  Lessons ensued.  By the end of the night, we had figured out how to wind a bobbin, how to use the knee-thinga-ma-gig to raise the presser foot, and how to sew an infinity scarf.  [It’s harder than one would think.  Really.]  Sewing success.  
Not photographed but please include the following activities to the list of reasons why I have not been an attentive blogger of late: lunch at ikea.  moa trip.  mannings.  wine tasting at a professor’s house.  [won by friends and I at a silent auction]  movie/snl viewing.  savoy inn pizza for the first time.  debating of graduation attire.  rhubarb sauce.  not packing.

I’ll miss you.

23 May
I’ve been absent.  Don’t hate me.
Senior week has thrown me for a loop.  A loop of lots of fun, an odd schedule, and an inability to ever remember what day it actually is.  Monday, right?  Right.
As graduation looms less than one week away, I fear I’m becoming more sad than anything.  I’m trying to squeeze everything in before that day comes, but I know I’m missing things.  And as soon as I move, I’ll miss people.
I’ve been seeing friends nearly every day of the past week and a half.  As we depart at the end of the nights, I’ve gotten into the habit of saying, in a funny way, “I’ll miss you,” knowing that the chances of me seeing them within the next twenty-four hours are pretty good.  It’s my version of a sentimental silly joke.  But soon it will be reality.
I said another goodbye today.  I drove to Stillwater for lunch with Denise, my BFF from my Trinity days.  Denise is one of my Stillwater ‘moms,’ a former coworker who calls me “Linnie” and spoils me with lunch and awesome cookie pans at my birthday.  Here we are, full of sweat and concrete dust as we put roofs on houses with 90 Trinity youth in Mexico in 2008, the trip when we became official BFFs:

We went out to The Green Room in downtown Stillwater to catch up and talk about what’s next for both of us.  Denise is moving to southern IL in a matter of months to join her husband who recently moved there for work.  It’s her last week at Trinity, but I hope not our last chance to see each other.  With her moving to southern IL and me moving to who knows where after a few months in WI, the chances of us catching up again in person may be slim.  I’ll miss her.
Luckily, we have facebook.  And pinterest.  We will send each other messages.  But still this move seems so much more final than other ones I’ve made.  In the past, I’d always known I was coming back to somewhere.  I’m not coming back to the Cities in the near future, and Denise is leaving too.
I’m not sure how else to sum up this blog post and these feelings but with an ‘ugh.’
Ugh.

photos from last night.

20 May
It’s like the website ‘texts from last night’ but these are my photos and they are most likely much less offensive.  Here’s my Thursday, as told through my Instagram photo app:

I completed The Hunger Games series on the patio at Starbucks over a grande-iced-white-chocolate-non-fat-no-whip-mocha yesterday.  I wasn’t overly impressed with the last half of the last book, but I will say that I was content with the very end.  I will also say that it’s a good thing I was outside and wearing sunglasses because there were a few tears shed.  If this ever blows up like Twilight [casting for the movies has already begun], I’m totally Team Peeta.  I want a Peeta.  I mourned the ending of the series yesterday; it’s sad to know that something that has become a part of me in the last week is over.  The grief has happened and I think I’m ready to move on.  Time for a new book!  *claps hands*

Library game night was last night as a part of the senior week festivities.  The library was opened for us and we played games in the reference room for four hours, using our outside voices, eating sandwiches, and ignoring the books that surrounded us.  Four of us began a game of Settlers that consumed our entire time at game night.  Wooten to another three hour game of cities, settlements, and roads!

Game night ended and I offered Sarah and Paige a ride down the hill to our apartment buildings.  We got in the car – it’s 10pm at this point – and we realize it’s too early for bed.  We car dance for a few minutes and then text jD to tell him we’re coming to get him and Lauren, our former competition in Settlers at the library.  He invited us up to their apartment where we waited outside of their door in folding chairs in a row.  It was hilarious at the time; I think we were quite slap happy.  It’s also difficult to take a self-photo with an iphone – evidence above.

Once inside, we learned how to tie a bowtie [above], watched an episode of Friends [Paige had never seen a full episode before!], and ate ice cream sandwiches.  We left around 1:30, making it another 2am night for this girl.  I think that’s just becoming my new schedule for the next week; it’s starting to feel natural to stay up so late.  The minute I have to start getting up before 9 it’s going to bite me in the butt …

dance party.

19 May
Let me begin by saying that I love all this play with no work.  With many of my friends, this will be the last chance I have to hang out with them so take advantage of it I will.  I have now been up until at least 2am the last four nights – granted, one of those nights it was for laundry purposes – and have been having much enjoyable time with people and [the introvert adds] myself.  Like yesterday.  I took a Lindsay afternoon and walked about Como Lake a couple times, drank a latte and read outside at a coffee shop.  I cannot convey the all sorts of perfect that was.  The Lindsay afternoon was followed by an evening of potluck and dance party.  Though I will try, pretty sure I can’t completely explain how awesome that was either.
We ate our potluck supper outside on the green grass and once we were filled with deliciousness, the camp games began.  leg wrestling.  elbow tag.  chicken, cowboy, conqueror.  trust falls.  my grandma’s big fat toe. 
awesomeness.
leg wrestling.  crazy.  [I promised no facebook exposure.  blog is fair game?]
chicken!
Paige would not crack during my grandma’s big fat toe.  Would not one bit!

The pure awesome-sauce nature of the night continued at J & M’s apartment for – that’s right – a dance party.

My friends and I in college would often think, “Let’s have a dorm room dance party!”  But we’d never really dance.  Or we’d dance for two songs and then get distracted and do something else.  [Squirrel!]  I went to this dance party, certain that we would have fun but never could have guessed that we would actually dance.  For three hours.  Three solid sweaty hours.  [We did our best to heat up the room, trying to make the indoor thermometer read 80 degree.  That was the goal.  We had to settle for 77.9 just after 1am.]
[most likely living on a prayer.  can you tell?]
dry ice.  don’t touch!
This dance party was awesome.  It was like the best wedding reception dances that I’ve been to but there were only seven of us, we were in an apartment living room, and no one had gotten married hours earlier.  There was brie baked in a bread bowl.  There was wine.  There was dry ice.  [Joel bought dry ice for the party!  I don’t think I can say awesome any more than I already have – the limit is three – but if I could, *insert here*]  There was even a friend visiting from New York.  [See what I did there?]
And there was Gaga.  Justin.  Instructional dancing for Katy Perry’s Firework.  We whipped out the Chris Brown Forever wedding song in peel-the-banana fashion, each of us cruising down the aisle.  Bon Jovi.  Britney and Boyz II Men.

a bit creepy.  a bit cool.  these guys were in the zone and crazy dancers.
As we were hydrating during a dance break [kinda like this], Sarah asks me, “Why didn’t we become friends earlier?”  Good question.  But I’m glad we’re friends now and so glad the seven of us partied it up dance-party style last night.  This last semester has been a blast of new friends, new experiences in fun, and – I’m going to say it – awesomeness.
  
I declare the need for a dance party encore.

mosaicing.

18 May
Way back yonder in October, I bought a groupon to attend a mosaic class at Mercury Mosaics in Minneapolis.  I bought two actually – one for me and one for Sara.  Cassie bought one as well and later I discover that Erin [a college friend of one of my high school friends/blogger at growing up gaffney] also had a date with ceramic tiles and grout coming up.  And so the fellowship of the mosaic class was formed.
We started with dinner on the patio at Psycho Suzi’s [ahh, patios.] and then made our way to class where we dug through bins of tiles on the ’tile buffet,’ organized, reworked, and finally used an adhesive with texture like cream cheese to make our work permanent, all while navigating interactions with the incredibly awkward instructor and incredibly rude fellow classmates.  Grouting was sent home with us, the final step to be done after the adhesive cures for at least a full day.  Here are our [nearly] final [still grout-less] products:

Monday was –

17 May
First of all, Monday felt like Friday.  
Second of all, Monday was just all sorts of emotions.  
Also all sorts of seven dwarf names.
Sleepy: I spent Sunday night with a sleepover at Sara’s.  We watched Modern Family, made two recipes off of Pinterest [lemon puppy chow and jello molded in citrus peels], and feel asleep to our usual movie – Pride and Prejudice.  We didn’t start the movie until well after midnight and we both casually dozed off as the music played in the background.  Sub-consciously, somehow, we both knew when to wake up.  I looked at my phone at 2:17am and then glanced over at the couch.  Sara was awake too and right at the time when Darcy first declares his feelings for Elisabeth.  [Watch the scene here.]  We stayed awake to watch him mutter the feelings he can bear no longer.  He loves her, most ardently.  *sigh*
Sara shakes it.  [the puppy chow]
Sleepy also will work as I then stayed awake until 2am this past morning.  Reading.  Three-quarters done with the second book in The Hunger Games after beginning it yesterday afternoon following class.  [It’s probably best if I just do nothing else and finish the series, right?  Not like I’ll get much done in the meantime.]
Happy: I completed and turned in my last final of my seminary career.  I also went to my final class period of seminary.  Can I get a wooten?!  [Whenever I text ‘woot’ on my phone, it auto-corrects to ‘wooten.’  I think I might just give in and start saying what the iPhone tells me I should say.  Though what is a ‘wooten’?  Any clue?]
Sneezy:  I sneezed.  Twice.
Dopey: I was a little dopey.  Truth is, my brother began his move to Alaska yesterday.  I heard last week that he got a job there and, while I had known he’d been looking, I had no idea he was moving so quickly.  He packed his camper, organized his life, and on the road he was by Monday morning.  Now my older brother moved to Colorado last year but Colorado just doesn’t seem as final or far as Alaska.  Airfare to CO is much more manageable than flying to Anchorage.  So Ben is moving … and I’ll miss him.  Since he became the boyfriend of a U of M student this spring, I actually saw him more than I have in many years past.  Plus, he’s taking his dog, Jetta.  I’ll miss Jetta lots too.
Grumpy: For the sake of the seven dwarfs, I’ll use this emotion but really, it was more frustration.  I had a macaron-making date with Melissa and our first batch, intended to be mint chocolate, failed miserably.  Like couldn’t even be salvaged to snack on.  Like epic fail.  [This did mean, however, that the mint leaves originally reserved for the filling of the mint macarons could now be repurposed for mojitos.  When life gives you mint leaves, make mojitos.]  Our second batch – coconut mango – turned out edible.  [Not necessarily pretty, but edible.]
Bashful and Doc: This is where the seven dwarf comparison fails me.  I’m out.

a proud bibliophile.

15 May
I loooove the books that draw you in and refuse to let you leave.  The books that make you turn the pages as quickly as possible.  The books that leave you crying because you’re so involved in the characters lives, and the books that make you scream, gasp, and read on in disbelief when something you had hoped with your whole being would never happen does.  The ones with characters that you want to bring up in conversation as if they were real and your friends.  The books with a fictional world of characters who do things, experience things, and feel things that I can only imagine.  I love the books that actually make you sad and even distressed when they’re over, and you wonder what will fill that place in your life now that the last page is read and it seems those friends are now gone.
Luckily, there are two more books in the Hunger Game series.  But I wonder if I want to read them at all.
I mean, I do.  I really do want to read them.  I want to dive in right now but yet, I don’t want to because I have a feeling that things are going in a direction that I don’t want them to go.  And if I don’t read the next two books, then Peeta and Katniss can simply be happy, right?  *sigh*  Probably not.  I know.
Suzanne Collins, the author of this series, is a genius to make her readers feel this way.  I can’t put the book down, am so involved in the characters, and don’t want to read on but know I will because I can’t just not read the other two books.  There were moments as I got to the end of the first book that I wanted to put it in the freezer.  I could sense something bad was about to happen, or just knew things couldn’t end so peaceably.  I wanted to put it in the freezer like Joey on Friends puts The Shining in the freezer when he gets scared.  [But I’m reading these books on my kindle so that probably wouldn’t be a good idea, eh?]
Harry Potter had the same effect on me.  I remember hating that Dumbledore died and, moreso, that Snape did it.  Snape is my favorite and I was so disappointed that I almost wanted to stop … but I didn’t because I knew that couldn’t be the end.  I knew that Snape couldn’t be all evil.  I believed in that greasy-haired crazy man who held a soft-spot in my heart.  I remember camping on an island [seriously.] with my high school friends and taking Harry Potter with me because I was 40 pages from the end and knew I couldn’t wait until I got home the next day; I read those last pages by flashlight in a tent.  Likewise, I was so angry when a Weasley boy … nevermind.  I won’t spoil it for those of you who are waiting for the last movie installment, not having read the books.  [But you really should read the books!]
I know I’ve talked about being that girl as a kid.  The one with her nose in a book constantly.  I was that girl and proud of it.  [My parents were not always so thrilled.  To tear me away from a book was not easy.]  The yellow hardcover Nancy Drew novels of my Mom’s and Babysitter’s Club led to Fear Street and then John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks.  Then college hit and leisure reading became a facet of the past.  Maybe I’ll become that girl again this summer.  [In all this book chatter, I’m reminded of this blog post again – a post about the girl who reads.  Perfectly worded and explained.  I’ve posted it before but maybe you didn’t read it.  If you have, read it again.  I think it’s so worth it.]
And so I will read on.  [After my last two finals of graduate school are completed.]  I believe that Katniss’ journey can’t be one of all tragedy; I need to hope that there can be a happy ending at the conclusion of the series.  I might cry.  Yeah, I probably will cry if I have any inkling of what might come.  But I’ll read on, engage in her world again, and hope for the best for my new fictional friend.

[What book does this for you?  If you feel so connected to a book or fictional character and want to share them with me, please help me compile my summer reading list.  Let me know what you’re reading and what you love!]

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