New Home!

Hi guys!

Some of you may or may not know, but I just moved into my first house last week!  While I am extremely excited to begin this new chapter, if only for a summer, we have definitely hit a few bumps in the road.  But first, I list the awesome things about living in your own house with your friends!

• No RAs :) - sorry to my RA friends
• You can literally do anything you want with decorations, furniture, setting up drawers, and more
• I CAN COOK MY OWN FOOD - those of you who know me know that this is a really big deal!
• I can really have control over what I put in my body - I'm trying to only buy real food, not the freezer stuff full of chemicals, and I can decide to not keep sweets in the house
• We can host parties, pregames, and more!

These are absolutely awesome things about having my own place.  It also allows you to get to know your roommates even more than living in a sorority house.  When responsibilities are greater, like dishwashing, cooking, and yes, laundry too.  You learn more about your friends' habits than you ever wanted to either :) With that, it brings me to the not-so-great things about house living, 

• Instead of RAs, you can get the cops called on you (whoops!)
• You have a lot of space to decorate, and not nearly enough money to do it
• With cooking your own food, it can really take a lot of time out of your day, time that can be spent running errands, doing homework, and studying
• With buying real food, it can get expensive, and adding that to rent, water, electricity, cable, internet, and everything else, it all adds up really fast
• With hosting parties, someone has to clean up after...

I mean, the good things definitely outweigh the bad, and the more time I can spend with my friends, the better!  Our house is still in the works of being unpacked and set up, and hopefully we can do it by this weekend.  If you're looking to living on your own (aka not in the dorms) I highly recommend choosing to live with people who like to cook and appreciate food, it makes it a lot easier to entertain :) as well as setting down house rules and chores so you don't have those awkward moments when you have washed the dishes every day of the week and don't know how to ask someone else to do it (haven't reached that point yet, hopefully we don't get there) but this is definitely something I wish we did, and there's still time!  

Living in your own place is a huge step in adulthood (my god, who let me be an adult?), and adulthood definitely has its perks.  We bought a bar the other day just for kicks so we can entertain like the classy women we are (just ignore the fact that it's stuffed with red solo cups).  But living like an adult means acting like an adult, and that's sometimes really hard to do when all you want to do is sleep all day and have your mom make you dinner, especially when your parents are really good cooks, and not to mention, they send me pictures of the amazing (expensive) food they make, which is probably the worst part about being away from home.  Anyway, I'm so excited to see where this summer goes, and now that I'm in a house, hopefully a lot of parties can be held and a very good time can be had!

Thanks for reading!

Kim

The Joys of Packing

Well, I have just hit that time of year where I gather up all my belongings and uproot somewhere else until I come back to college.  I like to call it "packing".  I live in a home with 30 other women, and I haven't heard any positive things to be said about packing up their stuff, which is weird for me since I think packing is great!  If we never packed up our stuff to leave, we would never find our favorite pair of shorts we lost in January, or that picture that was never meant to see the light of day.  Personally, it takes me a really long time to pack because I just sit and go through my memories of the time I've spent in that place.

Most recently, I just stumbled upon a book I thought I'd lost that I love, called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (I highly recommend it, even if you're not science-y like me), so I just started reading it again, and I'm reminded why I loved this book so much in the first place, especially in science-based writing, it's very hard to not be extremely dry, and this book does a great job of it.

I also found my wine bottle corker, been looking for that for months!

One hard thing about attending college far away from home is you never know what exactly you need when you come to college.  Yes, no one actually knows, but at least you can get the stuff you forgot or bring unnecessary things home.  I've felt awful this whole year for taking up way more space in my room than either of my two roommates, but have been justifying it to myself by the fact that I live 2,000 miles away from home, while both of them live within 40 minutes.  However, I realized while packing up my things that I didn't use about a third of the things I brought with me, and that I had been taking up all that space for no good reason (sorry roomies!).  This is another great thing about packing: if you don't have hard emotional attachments to things, you can really purge everything unnecessary, like the 10 sweatshirts I haven't worn in two years.

^my room is so sad now!

The adventures of packing up all your stuff can actually be a good time (like the time my roommate and I drove around for two hours trying to find boxes in a part of Denver we had never seen - good times) but it's sad as well, because you know you're leaving the place where you made so many memories over the past year and that you won't see the people you are used to seeing every day for a long time.  The bright and fun room I've lived in this year is now drab and dull, but this just means that I have the chance to redecorate my new place of residence - right across the hall!

This time packing is more bittersweet than I intended it to be, especially saying goodbye to my friends and sisters.  I will be headed abroad to Zanzibar in August to study coastal ecology for four months, so I won't see some of the amazing people I've spent time with this year until 2015.  But I know when I get back and am able to unpack, I'm going to start a great Junior year at the University of Denver!

^yay for studying abroad on an island that no one's ever heard of!

Thanks for reading!
Kim