Oh, I am getting ahead of myself.

Ok, so I missed a couple of key notes between my last two posts. First, the Sunday before my birthday, I went downtown with one of my besties Amber. Our original plan was to do a little birthday shopping for eachother (because mine was the 21st and hers is February 8th), but we didn't consider in our plan making that stores would be closing because we didn't go until about 4:30 Sunday afternoon. So we ended up just taking pictures at the capital instead. It was already dark, but we had a lot of fun.





The next thing was that my sister Breanna left for Ghana on the 19th, only two days before my birthday! It was sad to see her go and we all miss her so much, but she is going to have such an amazing time and it will definitely be a life changing experience. Her plan is to be in Ghana for four months, doing her study abroad program. (My mom and I think it's odd that she wanted to spend $16,000 to go live in poverty, but I guess it is more about the experience.) And she seems to be having fun with that. So she will be done with that late May or early June, and then she and two of her friends are going backpacking around Europe for a month!! I am so jealous of them! They will go spend a week in Spain, a week in France, a week in Italy, and a week in Greece before flying home at the end of June. I miss her so much, but she is on an amazing adventure that she is lucky to enjoy and that she will never forget!

Another sad thing was that a great family friend, Tom Saelid, past away on January 17th, just four days before my birthday. His funeral was on Sunday the 23rd. It was a very sad day, the funeral day...I just don't like funerals. I am definitely a bawler. It was really awful, and really rare how he died though. He had been battling cancer for a while, and it wasn't even entirely the cancer alone that killed him. He actually died of lung toxicity from the cancer treatment. This severity of it that he had though is EXTREMELY rare, and where it usually takes months to kill a person, it killed him within just a couple weeks. I just feel so sad for his wife Gina and their three kids Lauren, Glynn, and Danny. Lauren is a year younger than me and we used to be friends...we talk like maybe a couple times a year, but my heart pours out to her and the rest of the family. RIP Tom Saelid, you will be missed terribly.