Weekend

1. Wedding pictures are up! It was a beautiful wedding and a wonderful time with the family! My terrible photography skills simply can't do it justice :-)

2. It's Candice's birthday this week! We just went to Haleiwa Joe's for dinner (Kaneohe location) and it was gorgeous. Now we have people coming over. Time to stop blogging and be social :-)

Back & Exhausted

Whew! Just got back from a whirlwind trip to the East Coast (kinda)! Flew into Pittsburgh (via Dallas), saw Grandma & Pap, drove to Annapolis, saw the entire DeSantis side of the family, went to Carla & Josh's wedding (an absolute blast!!), drove back to Pittsburgh, saw Carla, SB, Sarah, & Lizzy, slept in my own bed for one night :-), and flew back to Honolulu (via Dallas and L.A.). It's nearly 1 A.M. which means I need to be up in 4.75 hours...eeek...

FABULOUS NEWS re: summer - we can take some of our classes online!!!! So I will be home for a good part of June & July.

Tomorrow is gonna be brutal, but I'm soooo happy I got to go home and see my fabulous cousin and her fabulous wedding!! (and the rest of the family too of course :-P)

Dr. Pausch Part 2

I caught the special on Wednesday, then today my copy of "The Last Lecture" arrived. I couldn't put it down and finished it in one sitting. Rarely does a book have such an impact on me that I would recommend it to absolutely ANYONE, regardless of age or background, but this is the book.

For those of you who don't know the back story, Dr. Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He was signed up to deliver a 'last lecture' - a hypothetical talk where professors imagine what they would tell their students if they knew they were going to die. The twist is that a little while before he was scheduled to speak, he got the news that his cancer had returned and he had 10 tumors on his liver that would be fatal. He went ahead with the lecture, and I've posted the video below from Youtube, but it's also available on Google Video and from CMU. It's heartbreaking and motivating at the same time.

The Last Lecture

100th post! And it's an important one. Hopefully, you see this before it's on where you live - tonight at 10 PM ET (which is in approximately one hour) and 9 PM Hawai'i time (approximately six hours) ABC will air a special featuring Dr. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. A few days after his now-famous "Last Lecture" in September, I found an article about it via Slashdot and watched the entire lecture online. You can watch the whole thing on the ABC page here.

Dr. Pausch is a truly amazing person and has deeply inspired me. No matter what I've gone through in the past eight months, there is so much that I take for granted. But "brick walls are there for a reason" so I'm going to keep working hard and finding ways to have fun, following his words of advice and indomitable spirit. Be sure to check out his day to day page - this guy has scrimmaged with the Steelers, acted in the new Star Trek movie, met the Police, swam with the dolphins, and lobbied Congress - in the past few months - pretty impressive for a terminal cancer patient, no? I hope you get a chance to experience this dynamic person and his story!

More LOST Connections

One of my TFA friends wrote us an e-mail today to let us know that LOST was filming IN HER CLASSROOM! Sooooo jealous!!!!! Once it airs I'll write more :-)

No One Is Safe

This morning, shrill screams filled our apartment. One of my roommates, while getting ready for school, had a gecko IN HER SHIRT.

NO ONE IS SAFE HERE!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!