“If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make it come true?” -Oscar Hammerstein

It's been awhile. Whoops. And this girl was trying to be more diligent about keeping up with this. There's really no excuse. I've just been living the dream. Ish.

I started at Vail Resorts last week and I've only been in the office 5 days. And let me tell you.. I'm in love. This job is, as I've thought from the beginning, perfect for me. I get to work with great people, I help not only assist the people in our resort communities, but also the environment around them all while working for an awesome, awesome, AWESOME company. I mean, let's be honest, a company that has the makings for any Starbucks drink you could imagine in the employee lounge can't be all that bad, right?

I also moved into my temporary home, FINALLY! My roommate is super nice and the condo is great and in a perfect location. Unfortunately my sublease only goes until June 30th so I'll need to continue my housing hunt, but this will definitely do for now. Eventually I'll try and get a video tour posted on here. But let's be honest, it could be months before I get around to that.

I've also nailed down a part time serving job too. It involves one of my favorite restaurants that happens to serve a lot of beer. Needless to say, I'll be in heaven. Well, as close as I can come to it while working in a freaking restaurant again. Words can't express how much I'm not looking forward to the mundane rolling of silverware again. It is THEE worst side work ever. Except for that time I had to clean each individual grate of the salad cooler. If you're ever feeling bad about your job or thinking about dropping out of school, do a couple night's worth of side work for a server. You'll be bound and determined to make your situation work.

So everything is going well as can be expected. Money is a little (lot) tight right now. Being unemployed for nearly 2 months and moving across the country will do that to you. Hopefully I'll be back in my feet in a month or two and I can feel a little more adventurous. And finally get some snow pants so I can abuse my season pass for what little of it is still left. Yep, just livin the dream. At least my version of it.

"Each of us, in our own way, has got to do something. Save your soul, ya know. Whatever that is." --180 Degrees South

I don't want to give a falsification as far as the difficulties I've encountered through this craziness the past couple of months. Sometimes I think some feel like I quit my full time job, got rid of my apartment, moved across the country, and everything was as perfect as can be. Let me assure you, that is far from the truth. The truth is I had an extreme breakdown while on the phone with my parents one night in the midst of all of this. I've never had a nervous breakdown and never really had anxiety, but in that moment I'm pretty sure I was displaying signs of all of the above.

Truthfully, I simply try to stay as positive as possible in difficult situations. Almost to a fault. Thinking of all the ways something can go wrong is not my forte. Thankfully, I have parents who knock me back down to earth when my head gets clouded with visions that are too big for me. It has not been easy.

I moved across the country after quitting my job (that I was extremely unhappy at), finding a subleaser for my apartment (that I was paying way too much for on a salary that was not able to support living in the Chicago suburbs), and moved across the country on the little bit of savings I had... hoping for something better. Hoping to 'live the dream' and find whatever it is I'm looking for. I think I'm on my way.

I love living in Colorado. I've lived here for about a month and I still don't get sick of walking outside and seeing the mountains. Knowing all the possibilities they hold. Something in my mind, instilled by my Grandma and Grandpa, just makes me feel at home when I see the mountains. But as I said, it has not been easy.

I'm staying in my friend's spare bedroom, for the time being. Half of my things are still in the back of my car. The other half are half-heartedly strung throughout this room so I feel at least a little sense of home. For the first 3 weeks I was sleeping on a twin size air mattress. I'm happy to report I've upgraded to a double high queen size air mattress. I don't see myself on a real mattress in the foreseeable future. I did find a more stable place to live, for the time being. I move into a condo on Monday, but the lease only goes until July 1st. Where I live after that? Still up in the air.

I got offered a full time job. With a a great company. But the position was far from what I went to school for. Ultimately, I turned down the opportunity to begin, what I hope to be a long, career at a company I've wanted to work at for years. I start on Tuesday on a part time basis. I turned down the security of a full time job with benefits to do what truly makes me happy. What is best for me, I believe, in the long run. In the mean time, I'll search for a part time serving job to make ends meet. Student loans aren't forgiving, come to find out. And the reality of that is a hard one to take. When all is said and done, I will be working around 50-60 hours a week.

Friends, 'living the dream' takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of sacrifice. If you are unhappy, change it. It won't be easy. It will be hard, and stressful. It will test your patience and sometimes you will feel like everything is falling apart.

It is. Everything will fall apart. And you have to put it back together. But don't complain about the circumstances you are in until you are willing to change them yourself. You are the only one who can. Do any of you truly think that my 'dream' involves waiting tables again? I don't. But if that's what it takes to give me the dream I've always wanted, then so be it. At the end of the day, and your life, the person you have to answer to is yourself. Do you want to look in the mirror at the end of your life or look your kids in their eyes and say you followed the rules? Or do you want to say you followed your dream?

I can assure you that your dream will pay you back ten fold. You just have to let go of your comforts and be willing to take a chance. Everyone has to save their own soul.

And if you need a little push in doing what you love.. check out this movie on Netflix.

180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless

Snow Day

“I love snow for the same reason I love Christmas: It brings people together while time stands still. Cozy couples lazily meandered the streets and children trudged sleds and chased snowballs. No one seemed to be in a rush to experience anything other than the glory of the day, with each other, whenever and however it happened” --Rachel Cohn

"Winter" in the midwest so far had consisted of a slight dusting of snow that barely covered the green grass underneath it. This clearly did not satisfy my undying need for the fluffy white stuff. So you can imagine how excited I was to open my WeatherBug App and read that there was a winter storm warning for Boulder County with a minimum of a foot of snow expected and upwards of 2 feet. I couldn't sleep Thursday night because I was SO excited to wake up and see the snow. I'm pathetic, and I know that. Whatever. It was WELL worth the wait, let me tell you. I woke up to around a foot of snow at 9 and there was no end in sight.

So I talked to Danyell and devised a plan for sledding later that afternoon and informed Danny of the plans and we were ready to go with a case of beer and some farm tire tubes.

The video does a pretty good job of showing you exactly what we did with our day. What it DOESN'T depict, however, is how much we hiked to get to where we were sledding. Another thing it doesn't show? The ridiculous slope we had to walk back up after sledding down, in a foot and a half of fresh powder. Midwest girl couldn't hang, kids. They talk about getting your sea legs? I need to do some work to get my mountain legs.. and lungs for that matter. The powder at the end of the run was well worth it though. Final snow count: 22.6". Awesome.

Here's the video from our Snow Day '12.

Back By Popular Demand

"It doesn’t matter what people tell you. It doesn’t matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you’re headed in the exact right direction.” -Practical Magic

Apparently, since I've moved to Colorado, I've been slacking on the whole "communication" thing. Don't worry- those of you who have made comments about this fact are not alone. I wish I could tell you why my Twitter has cobwebs on it or why Facebook has become somewhat stagnant (I think I've done an OKAY job with that...) or why when you text me it takes me all day to respond. What happened to me!? Geesh. So, I decided to start the blog back up. I figure this would be an easy way for me to kind of keep people (friends and family) up to date on what's going on in my life. I mean, I moved across the country for the third time in a year, my life tends to have some interesting stories in it. So I'll just start with the basic catch-all post for the past couple weeks. It's going to be cliff note version, most of you know what's going on by now. I won't bore you... too much.

We'll start from the beginning. I had a bit of a hard time at my last job. I was hired on as one thing and for the first month or so I was doing things that fit perfectly with what I wanted my career to be. Then that changed. Drastically. I was not happy. I went to work dreading what the day would entail. I honestly don't think I'm better than any other job, but there are definitely jobs that I would NEVER want to do. Clerical and administrative mundane things are one of those. I am the kind of person that needs to be constantly challenged and constantly evolving. In my industry, public relations/marketing, you have to constantly be up with the current trends otherwise the brand/company/organization you represent will fall victim to evolving marketplace and left in the dust with the likes of Myspace. So, I spent a lot of time contemplating where I was at in my life. Whether I was happy paying $900 a month for a 421 sq ft apartment and dreading going to work every day. Spoiler alert: I was f*#&ing miserable. So I took matters into my own hands. I searched for a subleaser, I searched for jobs in the Chicago & Peoria areas hoping to stumble upon SOMETHING. Then, a good friend verbally slapped me and called me stupid. I believe his exact words were something like "So... you're going to quit your job, find a subleaser, essentially leaving you with NO commitments and then you're going to move back in with your parents when you've always wanted to live in Colorado? Huh." His "huh" was far from thoughtful. It was more a "Huh. I thought you were smarter than that."

So I decided to move to Colorado after a very promising phone call from the awesome girl I interviewed with at Vail Resorts. She didn't offer me the job, but she offered to get me in at any possible capacity she could muster up. So a few weeks ago I turned my keys over to my subleaser, spent a few days with my family and friends in Peoria and then packed my puppydog and beloved air mattress into Jeep and hit the road west. Let me tell you- Western Nebraska? WOOF.

So here I am. I'm looking out my (borrowed) window in my (borrowed) bedroom at a winter wonderland of a foot of snow in Boulder. I'm currently unemployed.. ish. I'm still doing part time design work with a marketing firm, but those projects have tapered off with the new year it seems except for a few Facebook landing pages here and there.

This past Monday I did meet with Nicky (the girl who interviewed me at Vail Resorts, and I believe someone who could become a very good friend! YAY FRIENDS!) and she mentioned the possibility of doing an internship with Vail Resorts. It would be doing similar work as the job I previously interviewed for and used as a big step to get an in with the company so that when more prominent jobs come available, I'm first in the line up.

I'm also in the process of trying to find a place to live. Which is a job in itself. GEEZ. I have a few prospects that I'm hoping work out, but we'll see in the coming weeks how it plays out. After finding out how much I'll be paying in student loans (Oh. My. God.) I'm gonna need something cheap for the next 45 years. Thank goodness for financial hardship forbearance for a couple of months!

So this is where I stand for those of you who are looking for more of a bullet point look into life from my air mattress:
-I moved to Colorado, it is awesome.
-I hike a lot.
-I take Max for a lot of walks.
-Snow is awesome.
-I'm in the process of getting my DREAM. JOB.
-I need a place to live.
-Student loans can kiss my ass.

I promise to try and be more diligent about updating you all on my life through this. I'm sorry it's not as personal as a phone call.. It's so difficult to keep in touch with everyone I adore. There's literally way too many of you. I think that's a pretty okay problem to have. I hope this will tide you over from my lack of TweetTweet and Facebook posts and text messages and emails throughout the work day. If it doesn't, text or call me over and over telling me how terrible of a person I am for not keeping you updated on my life. I'll understand. ;) ♥