God's Time

Go to google maps and search "Palomar Mountain"... cause that's where I am right now! It's AWESOME. Kairos is definitely the biggest part of my job at SAINTS, and this is the first of two I'll be on this year. For those who aren't familiar with Kairos, it's a four day long retreat for high school kids, and it usually ends up being a life changing experience for a lot of them.

The leadership team and I got up here last night after climbing up a 5000 feet on windy mountain roads in a 12 passenger van full of high school boys and 400 dollars worth of snacks. I knew I lived in Flemington, NJ for a reason. Dangerous roads are exhilarating. Actually, now that I think of it, this place reminds me a lot of Flemington. There are deer and wild turkeys and woodpeckers, except there are also rattle snakes that will kill me in an hour if I don't get anti-venom. Apparently.

This morning I tried to go for a run. Ha. Running is A LOT harder when you are a mile higher than your usual altitude, the temperature is in the 30s and you have recently bruised your tailbone. But, hey- Team Diet would be proud!

Anyway, I have a couple hours to rest before the rest of the retreatants get here, so I thought I'd let whoever is reading this know about what I'm up to this week, and ask for prayers for all the Saintsmen. I'm so excited to finally see the results of all the stress I've gone through at work to get ready for this week :-)

Peace!

The Last 5 Months

A lot has happened so far this year, so I thought it would be a good idea to catch everybody up! My housemate Ali takes a lot of pictures, so pretty much everything from Cali is from her, and my other housemate Katie gets credit for the idea of using pictures to tell the story of my year so far... here goes!

These are my housemates! Left to right: Allison, Anne, Katie, Mike, and Chris. I am quite fond of them! This picture was taken after our Commissioning Mass at Villanova before we headed out to California. Fun facts about them: Ali is a Villanova nurse which basically means she's amazing and saves lives all over the place. She works at a clinic at St. Vincent DePaul Village, a homeless shelter downtown. She's also from the lovely Garden State. She likes to bake and is my running buddy. Ergo, I love Ali. It's not a coincidence that I made Ali first ;-) Anne is my direct roommate. I spend a lot of time with Anne. Too much time? Maybe. No. As you can see, Anne is the cutest ginger in the world. She works at the orphanage in Tijuana (you'll hear a lot more about that later) and is a PE/computer teacher at St. Patrick's School. We have thousands of common interests including the djembe, Spanish, musicals, and MacBooks. Katie is a PE/computers teacher at St. Patrick's. We tutor together on Mondays and Wednesdays after school trying to get little kids to focus on their homework. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. She is the go getter who will always go to In-N-Out or fro yo with me, and after everyone's in bed on Saturday nights we make grilled cheese and watch Friends or Will and Grace and fall asleep on the couches, tweeting at each other. Mike teaches P.E. at Holy Family School. He is also pretty much the best basketball coach ever. Mike and I drive to work together every morning. He waits for my coffee to be ready and he listens to me as I discuss my dreams from the previous night before wishing me a good day at SAINTS. Also, he helped me win my first, second, third, fourth and fifth games of beer pong last weekend. Chris was my lab partner in Honors Gen Bio I lab freshman year at Nova. I thought he thought I was annoying, but now we are considering marriage because we both have the same taste in food, and that's what's really important in life. Chris has hundreds of thousands of fun facts. Literally. He works in Child Services at St. Vincent DePaul, and at the orphanage where he's dedicated to teaching the kids English. I live with awesome people.

This is our house!

Before it got "cold", we went surfing on Saturday mornings with Deac, who's our Augustinian Site Supervisor. He's a great surf coach, but didn't believe me when I saw a leopard shark on my first morning surfing... that better have been my first and last shark.

I live about 2 miles from the San Diego Zoo, and I have a membership! (thank you Mike!) If I'm looking for a good run and have some time, I run to the zoo and visit the pandas and gorillas. One Saturday, all of us went and we had SO MUCH FUN. Gorillas have always been my favorite animal since my first grade animal report, and they were particularly adorable when we were there. See the little guy there napping with his dad?


Well, he woke up and wanted a little attention so he poked at him for a while. No crime!
Daddy was still tired and crabby so he kept sweeping his arm back to get little gorilla son to stop. At one point, he was particularly harsh and the little buddy got up and ran to his mommy who greeted him with a hug and cuddled. Gorillas are so cute.

Us at the new elephant exhibit... did you know there used to be elephants in the United States?

While we're talking about animals... I love dogs very very much and even though I'm not allowed to have one of my own yet, I have made some puppy friends in San Diego. Meet Jack. Jack lives two blocks down, and he's the most reliable friend ever because he is always outside ready to play. He looks exactly like my Sophie (black lab, a little pudgy..) so when I met him for the first time over the summer when I was here for my job orientation, I totally felt awesome about moving to this neighborhood. He's so funny, cause as soon as he sees anyone who might play with him he runs and finds a tennis ball to launch through the space in the white picket fence surrounding his house for you to throw back. He's so cute that you don't even care that you have to pick up a slimy tennis ball over and over again... He'll be coming back to the East Coast with me...

Contrary to popular belief and rumor, Hercules is NOT our dog. Sorry for all the worrying the AV office went though on that one. He's Ali's friend's dog, and we puppy sit him from time to time.

This is us when we went on a 8 mile hike one Sunday. We said we were going to do it every Sunday becuase that's how much we loved it. We have not gone hiking every Sunday.

There have been a lot of nights that end with me saying, "that was the best night of the year" during pillow talk with Annie. Well, this was definitely the best night of the year so far, hands down. The orphanage was nominated for "Charity of the Year" for Stay Classy's Classy Awards, an event held to recognize and support local charities in San Diego. See that award Dan has? We won! It was so exciting to see something we had all so quickly fallen in love with succeed and to be there to represent all of the hard work that so many people have put into the orfa for so long.

This is Halloween!!

My mom and I went to Santa Monica to visit my Uncle Danny Halloween weekend. We went to West Hollywood, which was a BLAST. This was the costume Uncle Danny and his friends put together for me. The picture I really wanted to show you had my mom and uncle in it too, but I'm going to go ahead and spare them of the embarrassment pictures of their costumes online might cause.

Thanksgiving started bright and early at the St. Vincent DePaul 5K. Allison and I ran together and got a pretty good time. It has recently been brought to my attention, though, that a 74 year old woman beat us. Wearing my V shirt was a good call.. we got Go Novas a couple times to encourage us during the race :-)

Then... we came home and played football! My team lost (twice) but it was still an awesome afternoon and helped me work up an appetite. I do remember Mikey and I having some sweet touchdown passes though. Afterward, we took this picture and tried to get me up in the tree too, but that attempted failed like my two point conversion.

Fast forward about 7 hours. I'm just going to let this picture speak for itself and say that I love my housemates very, very much.

And Thanksgiving also
turned out to be the
best night of the year.

Here's a picture of my office at SAINTS! It's very purple, cause that's the school color. Important to note: The candy basket on the front left corner of my desk. I haven't figured out if guys come to my office because they like me, or because they like candy. I'm thinking about making them give it up for Lent.

Christmas break was awesome. This is my family! (for those of you who don't know them) Mom to the left...

Paul, Sarah, and Me on Christmas Morning (right), and Paul and Dad (below left)

We went to Mass on Christmas at this little Abbey near my mom's house. It was really cool because it's a smaller place run by a a handful of Benedictine monks. I really felt like everyone who was there actually wanted to be there on Christmas, which was nice, and plus they had goats to feed. Goats are great.

This is Ollie. He's my puppy but not really my puppy in Boston.

New Years Eve I went back to Villanova for the first time since I had left. Campus was deserted, and we were the first to set foot on the path around Vasey Hall.

My afternoon at Villanova ended as afternoons usually did when I was a student.. in the chapel playing piano. Karl should be mentioned at this juncture, as he not only took this awesome picture, but taught me just about everything I know about playing piano at Villanova.

This is what my favorite place
in the world looks like.

Back in San Diego! Actually... Tijuana. The orphanage is one of my absolute favorite parts of this year. I wish I could spend more time there... it's an amazing place. This was on a particularly awesome Sunday. Anne and I went down to give piano/guitar/djembe lessons, and we also made cookies. The collective effort of Anne, me and about 25 kids turned out alright actually! At one point, things got a little hectic and Alan (4) dumped half the box of baking soda into the bowl... we saved them and they were sooo yummy..

This is Fausto... He's good with finding amarillo y verde in Candy Land and basically gave my life meaning by wanting to sit next to me during Anna's preschool in the Karate Room.

y Cristian... in the little time I've spent with him, I've kind of fallen in love.

In this picture, Alan looks so.. peaceful... (you might remember Alan from 2 sentences ago when I described what a great helper he is in the kitchen). I'll refer you to Chris for other Alan stories.

This is Olga and me on the first day I met her! She's a fun one, and really likes to inquire about and comment on my love life. It's so funny. Big project of the year for me: improve my Spanish so I can talk to them more!

Well, that's it for now! I nearly went crazy trying to format the pictures on this post, and then I went to publish it and everything got all messed up, so sorry about that! There are thousands of pictures and memories but hopefully these selected few give you an idea about how my year has gone so far! Stay tuned... :-)

Now that she's back in the atmosphere, with drops of Jupiter in her hair...

Hi!!

Welcome to my blog! I figured now that I’m out in California a few thousand miles away from almost everyone I know having all kinds of awesome experiences, it would be a good time to start. I always thought people with blogs were so cool and had such interesting lives. So thanks to all you people out there with your own blogs who inspired me!! Anyway, I’m really excited. Now that I’m finished with undergrad and 10 graduate school applications, I feel like I have all this new free time to do stuff I’ve always wanted to do… like running, yoga, working on my Spanish, this blog, so on and so forth. Even if my mom is the only one to read it (Hi Mom!!), I’ll still update as a way for me to remember everything that happens to me this year, especially all the experiences that make life really great.

I can’t exactly take credit for the name of my blog... I was beat to a great idea so I decided to just go with it! But Karl can’t take credit for the name of his fish (Spotkles and the late Sunny), so we’re even. It’s from the song Drops of Jupiter by Train, which has always been a favorite of mine. It’s about a girl who becomes an astronaut and flies all over the universe and gets Jupiter stuck in her hair. No, actually, I’m not a big lyrical interpreter, but I think it’s a cool song about a girl who lives her life to the fullest and tries not to miss any opportunities. That’s kind of what I’m going for! Thanks for reading :-)