Thoughts and opinions

I just finished my class for the summer so this week will be my only
time off for the year. I thought that it would have been no problem to
just keep plowing through my degree over the summer but now I a`m not
so sure. Now the winter break is already on my mind and I'm a bit
worried about my mental health. This year we won't even get a single
day off between labor day and thanksgiving. This is making me just a
little bit nervous because I have less than a week until this next
semester is set to begin.

For this week I still don't even get a break. I want to make sure that
I am getting all that I can out of my money so I am getting ready for
my classes while I relax. I've gotten all of my books and I have been
doing the readings so that I can get a week or two ahead of the class
schedule. I know that by October I will be relaxed enough to fall back
so I won't have to worry too much. The biggest preparation that I have
been doing is for my electronic
business class. I have basically been doing the readings and
looking at a financial
blog and a real estate blog. I've been using
www.financialthoughts.com and www.real-estatethoughts.com
as a student reference. The writers of these blogs are students and so
they don't speak in too many confusing words. They are dropping terms
on me that just give me something more to look up in the textbook.

Now I know that everyone out there is probably thinking that I am
totally crazy right now, but you just wish you could get as far ahead
as I will be. When November rolls around and you are all wishing that
you had more time to study and more time to relax, I will be doing just
that. Maybe now that I have said this some of you will perk up a little
bit ahead and just sort of float in to the fall semester. If no, I'll
see you in the library.

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For the college aged male there are many things to remember if you want
to survive away at school. There are the simple things like how to get
a job and how to fold your clothes. Then there are the more complicated
things like how to get a girlfriend. Then there are the almost
impossible things like how to hold on to that girlfriend. I have been
through it all in the last two years and I think that I am ready to
begin imparting, thank you English, some of my knowledge on to those of
you who are just arriving or have been unsuccessful in the past.

For me I think that the biggest thing to remember is that everything at
college is meant to be broken. So don't get all bent out of shape when
something goes wrong. That is just part of real life. Also, everything
that you want to do is a process of building up. You don't get your
education in a day so why should anything else here ever work like
that. I will go so far as to say that almost everything in life is this
same process of a slow grind to meet you goals. I know that by using
words like slow and grind that I am making it seem like something
scary, but enjoy this time because it goes really quick people.

One of the biggest issues, as I stated before, about surviving school
here is getting yourself a good girlfriend. This is not an easy task
for most of us because we are just popping out of that dreadful time
known as puberty. We still have the lingering awkward bodies and the
face full of acne.
These things will not hinder your changes that much from getting a
girlfriend, but they certainly will not help. I can't help anyone with
their body shape except by saying that daily exercise is key to a good
look. With all of your appearance it is all part of this same central
theme here that if you pay attention every day it will get better. If
you want it now and do nothing then, as in school, you will fail every
time. I hope this helps some of you.

When I was in high school, I was all about wrestling and football. I
would eat breath and sleep those two sports. When I have any free time
in the spring and summer months I would try to get in to camps or just
in to a gym to keep myself in as good a shape as possible for the next
time I could compete. These days I stick to the bike and the weight
room for all of my exercise and I don't do much sports at all. Thinking
back to that time though, I was totally nuts about the sport and would
have died to play just one perfect game.

Where I grew up sports was a way of life. In Texas football is life and
in our town we just happened to also have the best wrestling coach in
the state I imagine. I would train and eat as if my life were just
sports. Though I never got good enough to really be considered for
college level sports, I think that at the time I was in the greatest
shape of my life. I learned everything I know about fitness and dieting
at that point and I had my whole eating process down to a science. When
I would get deficient of a certain vitamin I would know it. When I
would gain too much weight in a short time, I would take some diet pills
and drop the weight off real quick. When I would play a game and get
beat up, I would research the best ways to recover certain areas of my
body. I had my body running like a machine.

This was much more strict during wrestling season as I was expected to
be better than during football season. I was never very good at
football, but I did have some power and agility on the mat which was
only improved by more practice and more control over my body. These
days I only wish I had some kind of motivator like I had back then that
would keep me constantly on my toes when it comes to my body and my
dieting.

One of my best friends wrote me a letter that I received this morning
from his stay in Germany. He is over there for the year teaching
English to college students while he does his year of study abroad. He
writes to me about once a month to let me know how everything is going
since he feels like, as do I , that letters can convey so much more
than email and that talking on the phone is just a big hassle because
you can't see the person you are talking to. His letters are usually
about the big events his stay and about what he is doing with his
students for the moment. Right now though I think he has reached a
point where his teaching and studying have fallen in to a pattern and
he is mainly focusing on his life outside of that for his real mental
challenges.

The biggest portion of his letter is about this woman he met the other
day. Since we both have taken German
since we were in middle school he usually writes to me in that
language. This part of his letter is as follows:

Es ist einfach unglaublich, eine Apotheke

hat mein Leben total verändert. Ich hatte bei einer
Online-Apotheke
einige Medikamente gegen meine Allergien bestellt. Doch
scheinbar wollte es mit der Lieferung nicht so recht klappen.
Vermutlich gab es
Schwierigkeiten beim Versand, so dass ich bei einem Telefonat noch
einmal meine
Lieferadresse angeben musste. Am nächsten Abend klingelte es
an der Tür, es war
die Lieferung der Versandapotheke.
Als ich zur Tür eilte passierte es, ich
öffnete und da stand sie. Die junge Frau vom Lieferservice,
was soll ich sagen,
es war sofort um mich geschehen - Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Nun haben
wir uns
gerade einmal vor 2 Wochen kennen gelernt und ich glaube, ich bin
verliebt. Das
ist schon verrückt.

 Ich bin froh zu hören, dass es ihm gut geht, doch ich bin auch ein wenig verwirrt, denn er ist der Typ Mann, der so scheint es, der schnellen Liebe durchaus zugetan ist. Jetzt kenne ich ihn nun schon lang genug, um zu wissen, dass ihm das Gefühl geliebt zu werden vor Freude, die Einsamkeit zu beenden, zu Kopfe steigen kann. Ach, lassen wir uns doch einfach überraschen, was mit ihm in den nächsten Monaten passieren wird. Im September wird er nach Hause fahren und im nächsten Jahr die Schule beenden. Ich hoffe er trifft in diesem Sinne eine gute Entscheidung, Onlineapotheke.

One of my best friends wrote me a letter that I received this morning
from his stay in Germany. He is over there for the year teaching
English to college students while he does his year of study abroad. He
writes to me about once a month to let me know how everything is going
since he feels like, as do I , that letters can convey so much more
than email and that talking on the phone is just a big hassle because
you can't see the person you are talking to. His letters are usually
about the big events his stay and about what he is doing with his
students for the moment. Right now though I think he has reached a
point where his teaching and studying have fallen in to a pattern and
he is mainly focusing on his life outside of that for his real mental
challenges.

The biggest portion of his letter is about this woman he met the other
day. Since we both have taken German
since we were in middle school he usually writes to me in that
language. This part of his letter is as follows:

Es ist einfach unglaublich, eine Apotheke

hat mein Leben total verändert. Ich hatte bei einer
Online-Apotheke
einige Medikamente gegen meine Allergien bestellt. Doch
scheinbar wollte es mit der Lieferung nicht so recht klappen.
Vermutlich gab es
Schwierigkeiten beim Versand, so dass ich bei einem Telefonat noch
einmal meine
Lieferadresse angeben musste. Am nächsten Abend klingelte es
an der Tür, es war
die Lieferung der Versandapotheke.
Als ich zur Tür eilte passierte es, ich
öffnete und da stand sie. Die junge Frau vom Lieferservice,
was soll ich sagen,
es war sofort um mich geschehen - Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Nun haben
wir uns
gerade einmal vor 2 Wochen kennen gelernt und ich glaube, ich bin
verliebt. Das
ist schon verrückt.

 Ich bin froh zu hören, dass es ihm gut geht, doch ich bin auch ein wenig verwirrt, denn er ist der Typ Mann, der so scheint es, der schnellen Liebe durchaus zugetan ist. Jetzt kenne ich ihn nun schon lang genug, um zu wissen, dass ihm das Gefühl geliebt zu werden vor Freude, die Einsamkeit zu beenden, zu Kopfe steigen kann. Ach, lassen wir uns doch einfach überraschen, was mit ihm in den nächsten Monaten passieren wird. Im September wird er nach Hause fahren und im nächsten Jahr die Schule beenden. Ich hoffe er trifft in diesem Sinne eine gute Entscheidung, Onlineapotheke.

There are some things that, even though we don't necessarily need to be
concerned with when we are young, it pays off later to know how to do
them. One of the biggest skills that you can learn is the ability to
shop around. For every one of us there always will come a time when we
are placed in a situation where our thought process must revolve around
simple economics. Our parents may have played a role in this for some
of us when we thought about which college we were going to attend. I
read an article recently that said students, as compared to a decade
ago, are applying to fifty percent more colleges because they not only
need to balance out their educational needs when making the decision,
but tuition is becoming more crucial in that decision.

As we grow into fully independent adults, we will al find that these
kinds of decisions seem to take on a daily role in our lives. Even
grocery shopping has become a balancing of how much quality I can
afford and which items I can cut from the menu every once in a while to
save a buck. There are also bigger things like insurance for example,
that all of us will run in to as a major place where we can either save
money, or lose a lot of money. With insurance
we can look at insurance
quotes. When looking at these, as with colleges, we balance
the benefits of the more expensive policies with those of the smaller cheap insurance quotes

to see which one fits our lives at the time. These are just a couple of
examples of things in our lives which we need to research before
buying, but almost everything is essentially based in this thought.

The sooner we look in to these kinds of aspects of adult life the
better off we will be when it comes time for us to spend that hard
earned money, or put ourselves in to more debt. Now is the time to just
mess around and see what the lay of the land out there looks like
before we end up making mistakes that could cost us a lot more than an
hour of our time when we have no homework to do.

A friend of mine has been doing
wonderful work with her church. They have been taking trips every few
months to Louisiana to help with disaster cleanup
and rebuilding in the areas destroyed by hurricane Katrina. She says
that it has been one of the most amazing and incredible experiences of
her entire life. She says that they have been able to not only provide
the physical help of rebuilding, but that they have also had the
opportunity to work side by side with the victims of this tragedy and
provide much needed emotional and moral support. She said she has never
seen anything like the devastation in this region and that the spirit
of the people after all they have been through is an incredible wave
that just sweeps you away.

She says that she was working along with this family who had lost
everything. They are currently living in a trailer and there are 7 of
them in this small trailer. She said that their house was completely
saturated with water, and they condemned it right after the hurricane.
They are still living in a small trailer, which now they are being told
could make them sick. She said that she never thought that the
government would allow this type of suffering of its own people, and by
natural disaster no less. She wanted to move in with family on the west
coast, but her kids begged to stay in Louisiana, so she stayed for
them. Now, she says the whole family is beginning to become depressed.
At first they were hopeful that this area would recover, but now they
are realizing there are way too many people who are still without homes
in this area, and still too much land that can't be built on.

She says she is grateful for the fact that everyone in her family
survived, and recounted the scary hours during the evacuation where she
could not locate her daughter. It took 2 days to find out that she was
all right, and she was frantic for that period of time. She says it is
wonderful the way people are still coming to the area from all over the
country to assist them, but they still feel that the government has let
them down, and quite honestly so do we all.

I don't think that many people understand how tough it is supporting
yourself as a college student when your only job is as a pizza delivery
person. Your whole income depends on that next person who answers your
knock to give you something special. IF you get a good night and people
are in a happy mood then you may make a good chunk of money. On the
other hand, if people are not in a good mood then you may be scrounging
around for you next meal, because you are sick of the free pizza
already. There is also no telling when you will have those big knock
out nights and when you will have weeks where you make next to nothing.
On top of that you are making below minimum wage and you're paid under
the table so there is no hope for tax returns or anything like that.
Then there are the obvious seasonal slumps which we are in right now
with the dead winds of summer swirling around us. Since I have done
this job for two years now I understood early on in the fall that I
would need some other kind of income to keep myself alive till the fall
comes.

My solution to the problem has been to start my own lawn care business.
I knew a couple of friends who ran a business here in town but they
graduated in May. They let me keep their business name and now I am
trying my best to survive off of this money. I think I am doing pretty
well considering that I have never been a part of a small private business and I have
never been this responsible. Right now I have two crews of guys out
working five days a week and basically I have taken the office role.
Now I handle all of the date setting, and promotional products.
The biggest way we get our name around is through our promotional items

that have our logo on them. Every time I pass out more of these I get a
big spike in calls within a couple of days and it's an obvious business
getter around here.

well this summer is shaping up to be fairly interesting.  I have spent
the last

three weeks preparing for finals so that I wouldn't have to study
this

whole week.  Now my work has paid off and I have the whole

week to
plan for my vacation.  It has actually taken

drastically less time than I
thought it would have to go from

researching discount

flights to actually
booking all of the

arrangements.  Luckily for me I get a ton of student airfares

discounts just because I have maintained such a high GPA for the last
three years solid.  I started the whole planning only two days
ago and I began appropriately by looking for the cheap
international flights.  I went to the student travel
office where they gave me a list of all of the cheap airfare
that I would be eligible for.  I knew ahead of time that I

really wanted to try going to
Spain and so it was very easy to narrow

my search down to just deciding on a
date.  The list of international airfares was huge
and actually covered almost very single day

of the summer at various times of
the day.  I chose from the

smaller list of discount

airfares that was only
about ten flights for the whole

summer. 
So now I have my flight dates and my hotel

reservation booked in Spain.  I
think the rest of the week I

will spend planning out what I will actually do
when I get

there.  This is my first trip without my family so I am a
bit

nervous and feel that I need a somewhat organized schedule for my
trip

to keep from spending too much money without thinking about

it.  I
have been know to be a bit relaxed when it comes to

keeping my own finances
in order.  I don't really like to be

that nitpickey with all of the small
details of a bank

account.  So this trip has so far forced me to be
really

particular about my spending.  I want to try and have a budget

and
not go over it for the trip.  That budget will keep me in

my apartment for
the beginning of the fall semester, so there is some

incentive other than
just for personal growth.