It’s been awhile...  as per usual.

Everything is still good, if not great.  Tomorrow is the first day of my internship, and I’m nervous but excited.  My advisor will be in New York for the next month so I’ll be learning everything via e-mail and phone calls.  I’m hoping to spend some of my time in the office working on my own writing since I’m going to be surrounded my like-minded people.  I’m anxious to start expressing myself again—life’s been too busy up until now to devote the time I need to my writing!

The past few weeks have been filled with good news.  First, I found out one my poems got selected to be in the 2008 edition of Bittersweet which is my schools annual creative writing book.  Students in a production class score all submission and the winning poems, photographs, and short stories are included in a 40 or so page book that gets distributed throughout the area.  I got to read my poem aloud at the local bookstore, which was an exciting new experience for me—it’s one thing to read a boring paper, this time I was reading something I actually cared about and created for fun.

That same poem also won the county’s Annual Poetry Contest.  I submitted several poems to the library system a few weeks ago and just got a call last week saying I won the adult section.  Woooo!!  I’m not sure what I won yet, but just knowing that so many people liked my work really has me on quite a high! ;]

I spent this past weekend home in PA visiting friends and family.  My fiancé and I cooked a lovely lunch for my parents and then we met up with some of my favorite people for the Pints for Pets charity beerfest.  There were hundreds, if not thousands of people supporting the Humane Society… and there was beer, lots and lots of beer!  It was really nice to get out of the house and spend time with other couples for a change.  Just the two of us is nice, but I miss my social drinking days.  And I especially miss all my friends from back home!  I feel like I’ve missed so much in the last year and a half.  Not that I’d trade my life for anything; I’ve got everything I could ever want. …Ok, except for a house, and a degree, etc. All in due time, I guess.  I’ve gotta learn to be patient.

-M.

I'm quite pleased with myself at the moment.  Things are going well in my little corner of the world.

I've got my next year planned out school wise.  All my required classes are lined up, and I should have no problem finding one or two "fillers" to make up the remaining 36 credits I need to graduate.  I'm in the process of filling out forms and getting the final details on the internship I will be doing this summer.  I will be working at the Creative Writing Center with one of my favorite professors.  That field experience alone will take care of six of my remaining credits.  Plus, I turned in my in-state status request paperwork Monday...  I've got my fingers crossed!  All I need to do now is wait for those results so I can calculate how much in loans I'll need to cover my tuition and bills for the next year.  As long as all things go as planned, I will be a 2009 spring graduate of Frostburg State University!

Classes aren't over for a few weeks yet, but I'm pretty confident that I'm going to make A's in both my Literary Criticism and Advanced Poetry classes.  This makes me extremely happy as I thought my recent papers were a little on the crappy side.  Half my poetry grade still hangs on my portfolio, but I've already got five of the ten poems drafted out, and I have A's for all the other assignments in the class.  I actually wrote my most recent Lit Crit paper in under 3.5 hours, thinking it would be a dud, but I ended up receiving a 95%!  Yeah!  My first two papers for that class were accepted for the Annual English Colloquium, which means I get to read my work aloud to my fellow English Majors.  I'm super nervous to read in front of that many people, but I know most of the English kids and I'm sure it will be fun. 

Doug and I have decided to wait until next summer to get married, mostly because we want to do it at the beach, and funds are short this summer (and I'll be working at the Writing Center while he's sitting on his butt for his entire summer vacation).  As much as I want to be Mrs. Michele Clark right this very minute, I have to say I'm a little relieved to not be planning a wedding right now.  Not that there will be much planning when we do get hitched--thankfully, there are agencies that handle all the hard work for us.  One down side to waiting for the wedding is my lack of health insurance.  I cannot wait to start some allergy shots so I'm not so stuffy nosed all the time; although, I guess it is my own fault for getting a cat I knew I'd be allergic to.

Speaking of the cat, Cookie has been one expensive little pet!  We have had her into the vet no less than five times (although a couple of those were for routine shots).  The latest ailment is a urinary tract infection.  The only reason we were concerned in the first place was because of her constant moaning and odd behavior--which actually turned out to be raging kitty hormones.  After expensive x-rays and blood work, it seems that our cat is just horny and looking for love.  (Her lack of peeing helped diagnose the UTI, so it was good we had her checked).

I'm going home to Pennsylvania this weekend to help my mom pack up my Gramma's house.  She hasn't lived there for the last year, but now someone is going to buy it, so we've got about a month to collect her things.  I'm bracing myself for a traumatic experience--my Gramma hasn't died, but the reality that it is coming is something I'm not ready to face yet.  She's 95...  She was old when I was a kid, but now she's really old.  She's still in decent health, all things considered, but her mind has reached its full capacity.  She's not able to remember anything new.  It's heartbreaking to watch, because she knows she's forgetting things and she gets so frustrated with herself because she still knows what's going on around her.  As horrible as it might sound, I really hope she passes on before she loses all awareness.  She is one of the most stubborn and proud women I know and it would kill me to know she had to live her final days unaware of her surroundings.

I hate to end this on such a dramatic note, but it's off to bed for me.  I've got a date with the track in the early AM, followed by a meeting with my advisor, and then some studying before my lovey love gets home from work.