What a difference a year makes...again.

Senior is still a scary word, my thesis is cruising right along (although sort of on cruise control until graduate school applications are in the mail), and life is still going in all sorts of different directions.

The long awaited trip back to Ireland is going to happen over Christmas. Words cannot describe how unbelievably excited I am. John moved over to London in August and there is no way to really explain how hard it is being so far away from him. We get a whole month together over winter break, which sounds pretty amazing when you've been "skyping" for months. He's never been to Ireland and I cannot wait to get back. I'm excited to be able to introduce him to a place that means so much to me. The one thing I always struggled with after studying abroad was explaining the experience to other people...so I'm thrilled to be able to share it with him.

It's especially weird that John's not here tonight...if it weren't for Barack Obama I'm not sure we ever would have met. Crazy right? Sort of like Ireland, election night just seems like a really amazing dream anymore. But I will never forget that packed ballroom and crying/laughing/being deliriously tired but so proud of everything we accomplished. Congrats again to everyone from our little Iowa City Obama family, it was a wild and crazy ride but SO worth it.

After tomorrow I only have four weeks of classes left. Ah! Bring it on senior year! I can take it.

1 year...

I sort of have to pinch myself when I say it, but I've been back for a whole year now. The funny part is that I didn't actually realize it until the day after the "one year" mark. I guess it's because Ireland just feels like a really good dream now and I have to keep reminding myself that it actually happened. I still miss it all the time and I'm waiting not-so-patiently for my chance to go back, but at some point this year it started to feel more like a really crazy dream than anything else.
As of a few weeks ago I'm officially a SENIOR at the U of I which is about the most terrifying thing I've ever heard. I keep hearing this nasty rumor that in about a year they'll kick me out of here and it'll be off to the real world for me. Yup. Only two more semesters and a completed honors thesis are standing in the way of me walking across that stage. Scccaarrryyy....
So far my favorite part of being a "senior" is not having to sign up for a single class that starts before noon. Next fall I'm going to get that long awaited chance to sleep in. My least favorite part is the fact that now everyone wants to know what the "plan" is. Well, everyone's just going to have to hold on and when I know what the "plan" is I'll be sure to share it. For now I'm keeping my options open and taking a few summer classes, because really, who doesn't love a good all night study session in the middle of summer. And past that...uuhhh....

Yes We Did.

"Right now, organizers, full-time volunteers, campaign staff, and everyone else who gave single-minded effort toward November 4 are waking up and saying to themselves and each other, "what do I do with myself?" Their cars are messes, their rooms disaster zones, and they've been cut off from friends and family for God knows how long.
This was by far the longest and biggest election season in US history, and there is so much left to process. The elation that Democrats feel is mixed with the hangover of carrying so much emotional electricity in the body for so long. Its discharge is necessarily going to leave an exhaustion behind.
We feel it too. There will be moments in the coming days, randomly standing in line at the grocery store, driving down the street in contemplation, the sight of a door you knocked, catching a certain song, a glimpse of Chuck Todd, hearing someone tell a story... where these emotions will just come bursting through, the enormity of it all. Just think of how much effort went into this. How much sacrifice. How many things had to go right. How many people had to want it so badly, and how the masterpiece of a campaign structure that David Plouffe and cohorts engineered allowed all that effort to be channeled into the right places to maximize efficiency."
-Sean Quinn (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/)

For the rest of my life I will never forget watching Barack's acceptance speech, where I was or who I was with at the time. The enormity of the thing hit me all at once and I just started crying. I wasn't the only one either. Months of hard work, little sleep, and even less free time all came down to one amazing moment for me. And it was all worth it. All of the sleepless nights, early mornings, moments when I just felt like it was all so pointless, all of the "normal college stuff" I missed because there was work to be done, it was all worth it on November 4th watching our next president address the nation from Grant Park.

At the moment I'm catching up on homework...still processing...and still constantly asking myself "what now?". My car is a mess. My room is worse. And about half of my closet seems to have migrated to the back seat of my car. Finals soon...and then Christmas break. Anyone remember what I was doing a year ago? I'd just been officially accepted at UCC for spring semester. Weird right? I was getting ready to get on a plane for Ireland on New Years Day. What a difference a year makes.

p.s. The speech at Grant Park :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jll5baCAaQU

You didn't think I'd forgotten about the blog did you??

Hello everyone!
I know it's been a ridiculously long time since I've done any kind of update on this, but it was a crazy summer between navigating the flood waters and navigating new responsibilities at sports camps.
I guess I can now say Ireland is fully done and dusted, even if I'm still in denial about it (my UCC student ID is still in my wallet, never know! I might need it for something...) My transcript from UCC finally landed stateside and everyone is moving back into Leeside... getting ready to start a new year at UCC :-( Someone say hi to Boole for me... (and The Old Oak, because I know you'll make it there before you ever find your way to Boole).
It is good to be back in Iowa City though, and as always there's more then enough going on here to keep me busy. New school year, new classes, and FIVE new roommates! Crazy right? They're all awesome and our house is a regular six ring circus most days.
I'm down to my last few credits at Iowa...getting ready to Graduate either this summer or winter of 2009. That also means I'm grad school shopping, studying for the LSAT and the GRE, and trying to figure out what the heck I want to do with my life. (Ideas anyone?!) Right now the tentative plan is to head back to Ireland for my masters (yes I love it and miss it that much) and I guess we'll see where I go from there?
Still working at the admissions visitors center - giving campus tours and working in the office. This will be my third fall of high school recruiting craziness, kind of hard to believe. While I was studying abroad I ran for STAR exec board, so I'm learning how to be Public Relations Chair too, yay!
AND...I'm an intern!! Working here in Iowa City to turn Iowa blue by November 4th.
Okay...well that's life right now, crazy as always but I wouldn't have it any other way.


ONE LAST THING!
If you're checking this out because I met you at the study abroad fair today...the application deadline for the Iowa Regents Spring Semester in Cork is October 15, so it's not too late! (take it from someone who turned her application in on October 15th last year) And if there's anything, anything at all you want to know about life in Cork...email me! I'd love to hear from you. alyssa-thomas@uiowa.edu My five months in Cork were some of the best of my life, there's nothing like it, and (in my seriously biased opinion) no better place to study abroad!

So...where are all the pictures?!

I guess most of you know (or at least you know now) that taking pictures is kind of my thing. So here you go! My favorites from the last 5 months! Eventually they'll get photoshopped and cropped and all that good stuff...but this is a start anyway.

Out at Fota, I just like the color in this one.

Aran IslandsRight by my apartment

More Aran Islands

Kylemore Abbey

Cliffs of MoherBeth demonstrating the wind at the top of the cliffs for us
Coral Beach

Aran again


Dublin, Paddy's day parade
Blarney


Gaelic Football
Gaelic Football


Diana Memorial Fountain

Grafton Street (notice the little kid in blue and the street performer on the left!)

Dublin, near St. Patrick's Cathedral, Literary walk
Hyde Park, London
Aran again!

Connemara

River Lee, Cork

Begoa, UCC trad fest '08

River Lee, Cork
Connemara

Spire, Dublin

Blarney

Back at it

One week back and I still try to pull out on the left side of the road. I look the wrong way when I cross the street. I am seriously a danger to the average person driving down the street. I am a serious danger to myself trying to cross the street. I still can’t remember the password to get into my voicemail. I wake up at 3 am every now and then because I think its 9am and time to get up.
I’m back at work already. Hooray Sports Camps. Despite my driving difficulties I’m behind the wheel of a 15 passenger maxi-van with people’s children in the back on a daily basis (parents - I truly am sorry, but cross your fingers that your kid got into someone else’s van). I guess you could say we're having a pretty normal start to the summer. I mean as normal as things ever get in a job that requires me to carry a walkie talkie and two cell phones at all times (Yes two. Don’t ask questions.) The hours are completely insane, and randomly waking up at 3 am isn’t really helping matters. This morning I asked Olympic champion and coach of the national championship Hawkeye wrestling team, Tom Brands, for his last name. Smooth. If anyone sees my brain laying around anywhere in the greater Cedar Rapids/ Iowa City area please return to Iowa Sports Camps, I’d much appreciate it.
For now we’re keeping track of middle school girl’s basketball players. Today’s major crisis was bed bugs (totally serious). Come Sunday mayhem and chaos ensue as high school football camp checks in. I’m armed with two bottles of Febreze air effects and a bottle of laundry detergent, I'm expecting both to be gone by the end of football camp. My boss is referring to it as a 10 ring circus. I think 10 is a rather conservative estimate.
The Head Counselor On-Call cell phone is quickly becoming the bane of my existence. I am convinced that the thing has a censor, it knows when I walk away. Every time I'm more then 10 feet from the phone- it rings. I jumped out of the shower today to answer the stupid thing, soap and water everywhere. And the worst part…half the time, when it rings, I don’t have a freaking clue what to do! Bed bugs were not in the counselor handbook. Being head counselor does not give me magical powers, I don't have a GPS locator on every camper, and I definitely don’t know where you put your keys.

Under construction...

Hey everyone,
The rumors are true, after 5 amazing months I'm back in Cedar Rapids. Thanks so much to everyone who emailed, left me comments here, and sent letters/packages/ all of that fun stuff.
URL for my blog may be changing shortly, and there are SO many more Ireland blogs to post, just haven't gotten there yet! So hang in there with me and I'll get them up as soon as possible.
But for now I'm stateside again, safe and sound and back to work on Tuesday. The adventure is no where near over though, you can bet I'm on my way back to Ireland as soon as possible :-)