The Real Deal

Since I basically didn't post all of this past semester, I thought I would do a quick recap of what I did!  Prepare for a long and picture heavy post! I started out the semester by celebrating my 21st birthday with my friends from school!  My sorority does something called a "Paddle Party" when someone turns 21.  I joined together with five other girls in my pledge class who had birthdays over the summer so we could all celebrate together, and my best friend made my paddle for me! With that, my birthday celebrations were officially over after three whole months!  I then spent the next few weeks as a Rho Gamma, or recruitment counselor.  This means that I disaffiliated from my sorority and had a small group of girls going through recruitment, and helped them find the best sorority for them. I had so much fun getting to know so many other women in other sororities, and met people that I otherwise would not have been friends with.  I also helped...

This past weekend, I made the 5 hour trip up to Chicago to visit some of my friends from college!  We mainly went to attend the Mustache Bar Crawl in Wrigleyville, but also to hang out since we haven't really seen each other all summer. I took the train since I didn't really want to drive the 5 hours all by myself.  My first train on Friday left at 3:00pm, but I ended up getting into Chicago 2 hours late because a freight train broke down in front of us.  I didn't mind being late, I just felt bad making my friend hang around the city for so long while waiting for me!  We eventually met up, and we just headed back to her house to sleep and get ready for the bar crawl the next day. Saturday morning, we got ready, picked up some of her friends from home, and headed into the city!  We found a parking spot about a 10 minute drive from Wrigleyville, and took an Uber to the first bar of the day: Rizzo's! On the way to our next bar, we obviously had to take...

This past weekend, I drove up to my college town, Peoria, IL., to spend some time with some of my friends from college! As I've mentioned before on here, I am on the dance team at my university, and am also on the executive board for my dance team.  Before going home for the summer, we picked the weekend of July 7-8, to come back to school and have a dance workshop.  My entire team ended up being there that weekend, plus some people brought friends from home, making it a big and fun group! It is only a 2 hour and 30 minute drive to Peoria for me, so I left on Saturday morning so that I had time to get there and get settled before I had to head over to start our classes. The teacher of our first day of classes was the former dance teacher of one of the girls on our team.  We are a completely self-choreographed and taught team, so taking classes from a real dance teacher again felt really good!  She taught us four classes on Saturday: ballet technique, jazz ...

My birthday is my favorite day of the year, and I always love to have myself a day every single year.  But, since this year was my 21st birthday, we had to make it even more special.  My two room mates from school came down to St. Louis to spend my birthday with me and some of my friends from home, and we had a blast all weekend! Friday night is when they came into town, so we just hung out in my pool, and had a relaxing night.  On Saturday though, I had a touristy day planned since they had never been to St. Louis before.  Two of my best friends from home, Robert and Logan, came with us this day since they both knew my room mates and to make the day even more fun. Our first stop was the St. Louis Zoo.  Our zoo was voted the best in the country, and is completely free to get in!  It was wicked  hot this day, so we only stayed for a few hours.  We saw some great animals and had a blast, but our favorite part was getting a mixture of a piña cola...