I'm starting to get things packed away for my move to Tucson. I've already packed 3 boxes full of stuff that I'll need, just not right now. These things include:
Pots and pans
Favorite jackets
Scarves
Plates
Dishes and glasses
Text books and books that I want with me (Donald Miller––a must have)
My Fossil messenger bag
Things that I still need to buy:
Floor lamp
Desk lamp
Linen sheets
Medicine
Serving bowls
A couple cookbooks
Small binders
Plastic document sleeves
Paper of all sorts
Kitchen trashcan
Spices, sugar, salt, pepper
Cleaning chemicals
Things that I can't forget to take with me but I can't pack yet:
Plastic file folder full of important financial info
Blogger just wasn't doing it for me any more. So I moved to wordpress.
And it's still in beta form, so be advised. Beta= the theme might change multiple times in one day, images might be messing up the alignments, the website might not flow very well (it isn't right now, and it hurts my heart).
I am taking pictures every day. It's hard, but it's like keeping a journal for English class. Or something. Like, I mean, it stretches my creativity.
Xanga has always felt like a secret little secluded area in my collection of blogs. I still intend to dump the finer details of my life here, and the part of me that lets bad grammar live will still be dumped here (I really, really don't have bad grammar in real life. I just feel pretty comfortable here and bad grammar comes crawling out and I really can't stop it and I also make a lot of run-on sentences. Did I ever tell you I am a grammar snob? Now I'm a hypocritical grammar snob).
I intend for alisawilhelm.com to maybe be a professional site in the future. Or whenever I'm a journalist people will be able to find the blog and feel like they're let in on a little secret that no one else knows about. That's a key to good PR relations in my mind.
Let me back up a little. Good business models have a niche. Good blogs have a niche. I have been a long time fan, devoted reader, and holding-my-sides-due-to-laughter follower of dooce.com. If you don't know anything about the world's most well known blogger, let me give some background info: Heather Armstrong, a.k.a. Dooce, was the first person ever to be fired for her blog. She is an ex-mormon (interesting in itself), and she has a 3 year old daughter. She and her husband live quite comfortably off of the money her blog makes because of the ads it shows. Neither have to have a "normal" job anymore because the site is so popular. The world knows every detail about the lives of the Armstrong family. I love her photography.
Back to what I was saying. Dooce found its niche among mothers looking for someone going through the same problems as they are.
I don't want alisawilhelm.com to ever get as big as Dooce, because it's just soo time consuming and costly to run a site that popular.
A while back I read an article about how university websites are hiring students to be bloggers to show the nitty-gritty of being a student at that school. I was reading one of the student-blogger's blogs... She attends MIT. She wrote something along the lines of, "I am an A student here at MIT. I sleep only a few hours every night, I only have time to eat a little bit of food during the day. I run to hand in papers no matter how tired, no matter how sick, no matter the fact that I have only slept 8 hours in the past week. This is what it takes to be an A student here."
I remember thinking that I wanted to read more of that type of thing. But she didn't really have anything else of interest to me (as in, nothing else was that powerfully moving). Then I remember thinking, I want to fill that niche. If I am hungry for that sort of thing, then I am sure that high school students are wondering what it's like, and other college students are wondering about other people's college experiences.
That's the goal of alisawilhelm.com/blog.
It's kind of about creative writing. I could say:
Sorry I haven't updated in a while. Finals week.
I've lost track of how many times I've read that. And that's like, "Duh. Everyone knows that Finals week is hard. It's supposed to be, stupid. Tell me something controversial about it. Is that biased professor going to screw over your grade? Oh wait, you never told me about your biased professor in the first place. I think you just failed Interesting 101."
OR, I could say something along the lines of:
Before finals week I talked Professor X, the one straight out of his precious Dante's 9th Circle of HELL. I told him that I really don't understand how Aristotle's view of the role of women and Socrates's view of the roll of women differ. He told me, "That's too bad. Hopefully your god will have mercy on you and you won't end up floating the river Styx when you take the final." etc......
So, yeah. I forgot what I was talking about because I was imagining how professor X would look.
A couple people (read: Beth) have been asking about Chelsee. I went and talked to my swim coach the other day. I haven't talked with Laura in forever. Nothing has changed around the pool. It's nostalgic there.
So Laura gave me some info that Chelsee's little druggie friends couldn't tell me.
I knew at New Year's some thing really bad happened, but Chelsee wouldn't tell me exactly what it was. Her parents were hosting a party, and Chelsee invited a lot of her friends over too. Because all the adults were drunk, they didn't notice/care that Chelsee and her friends were drinking also (mistake #1). Well, the party was busted, and Chelsee's parents were cited for providing alcohol to minors, all of the kids were arrested, and it was a big ordeal. After that, Chelsee dropped out of the main highschool campus and started going to the alternitive highschool (mistake #2). Kim, Chelsee's mom, quit her job (mistake #3). Chelsee started dating this tweaker (mistake #4), which kind of doesn't surprise me. I mean, it does, but there are just so many heavy drug users at the alternative highschool. I'm not sure how long Chelsee had been using Cocaine at this point. So anyways, Chelsee can be talked into a lot of things, esp if it's by someone she loves and trusts.
Actually, I can imagine a large number of high school girls using cocaine. All the celebrity girls do to stay thin. I bet cocaine use is much higher amoung teenage girls than one would like to think.
Soo, Chelsee ran away, and hasn't spoken to anyone in about a month now. Kim cut all ties with Casa Grande, leaving her family behind and moving to Maricopa. I've called Chelsee's old house, but no one answers.
I think Laura put it best:
"Who would have thought that little Chelsee would become one of those statistics that we all cluck at?"
I was digging through the archives of the Pulitzer Prizes. Everything from the past 10 years or so is online, and everything else, starting in 1917, is listed.
This photo got the 2007 breaking news photography award. It's interesting to go back and look at all the photos. They say so much history and you don't even have to read a history book. Just read the captions.
