Overachieve?

I've been called an over achiever on more than one occasion, but I think I may be living up to that this summer. School is out. No classes until June. No homework. Yet I am still studying. I started a little more than two weeks ago, in effort to not only keep up with what I already know, but also learn more. Spanish. If you don't use a foreign language you forget it. And you forget it fast.

I took three years of Spanish in high school. My senior year I stopped taking the courses. I did not take another course in Spanish until my 4th semester of college. I started back at ground level. Last summer I took a course in Spanish online. This year I am interning in DC for the summer and will not have time to take a Spanish class online. I can only hope to use some Spanish while there.

Instead I have been keeping a notebook. Each day I write down an account of events in Spanish. Then I look up some song lyrics and translate them from English to Spanish, looking up words I do not know, underlining them and writing them on a vocabulary list. On the seventh day of each week I combine the vocabulary list and try to memorize the lists. This is the third week and I am still doing it. Hopefully it helps me remember what I already know, and if I am real lucky, maybe learn something in the process.

I go to Washington, D.C. a week from this Saturday.

Summer Break: Beginning

I spent the end of January filling out paperwork and writing essays trying to be accepted into the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown this summer. I was accepted and spent February filling out paperwork and writing essays for scholarships. Most of those I know did not pay off. Oh well.

But now summer break is finally here. I leave in about three weeks and head to Washington D.C. to intern with the Army News Service. I will have two classes at Georgetown, along with three-credit-hours at ASU for the internship. But I have to prepare for that internship. I don't have near the clothes that I will need. The dress-code is business casual. I needed a new wardrobe.

That, sadly, is how I have spent a lot of my vacation thus far: shopping. Shopping for shirts. Shopping for pants. Shopping for other supplies that I am going to need. But there have been a few breaks. I went swimming at Beaverfork lake the other day with friends. It was back to preparing today.

Pack for coming home. Unpack when I get home. Pack a lot of stuff back up for DC. Unpack some stuff I put up already that I wasn't taking because I find I need it. Pack it. Then of course comes the unpacking in DC, the packing up in DC the unpacking at home again, the packing to go to Jonesboro and the unpacking when I get there. So maybe the best way to sum up this summer is "pack and unpack."