Yesssss - finally the summer is here!  Ok, "summer," but when you're in school it's all relative.  Everything is relative for that matter.

 These past couple of weeks (has it been almost a month already?!) have been a whirlwind of activity. 

School:
We finished up finals with a blast and my semester shaped up really nicely with my GPA boosted to a 3.5+ cumulative. I'll take that! ;)  As an MBAA officer I helped with pre-commencement for the second years then worked on crafting an HTML newsletter to keep the new alumni in the comm circle. 

Family & Friends:
Two weekends ago I visited Doylestown to help babysit my little 9 mo. old nephew, Padraig (www.padraigconley.com), and of course hit up the shopping circuit with my mom and sister. Sunday was Jessica and Scott's 1st wedding anniversary, but when I called them to wish them congrats I found out that Jess's younger brother, Jimmy, had just died that day.  The rest of the week was chaos as I went immediately to the Wright residence for the day and ended up spending almost the entire week there.  The service was on Friday and Rich, my mom, sister Kat, and I all attended.  It was a beautiful service that filled the church to standing room only and I know Jimmy was looking down on us happy that so many people were there showing their support for the family and remembering him.  Rich and I returned to State College on Saturday after helping Kat purchase her first game console - she got a Wii!  Monday we had friends over to use the BBQ for the first time this season and then my mom came out yesterday to start the wedding planning.  We're looking at June 19th at Toftrees, but now we're considering marriage at the PSU Chapel... but it's not available for that date!  Any other day in June, fine... ha!  Can you believe it?  Why is the 19th so popular?

208 Danielle Drive:
Richard has officially become a vegetable gardener.  I'm the plant/flower lady.  The house is looking really gorgeous as the ferns and hostas have come in, the bradford pears and lilac were beautiful, I planted cute flower boxes for our shed, and the American flag banners are hung from the top 3 windows.  I planted gladiolas that are coming in, the irises will bloom soon, I planted 5 rose bushes, 4 of which are doing WONderfully, and I've got another week to get everything else in order AND organize my closet!

Internship:
June 8th I start at Chase Credit Services in Wilmington, Delaware. ("yeah... we're in... Delaware"). I'll be working in Advertising and Media in the High Net Worth division. I am SO excited to start, it's definitely excitement levels equal to those of working on the wedding.

No, it's not football season, it's FINALS season!!  Yes, every 7 weeks we MBA's have another bout of finals, but truly nothing is worse than the week BEFORE finals.

 Just ask Rich.  The last time I saw him was for a couple of hours this morning when he got up and went to work and I slept in a bit.  If you call that seeing him!  The truth is I've had a grand total of 3 hours sleep in the past 61.5 hours.  You guessed it, those precious three hours were this morning where I decided to indulge in an extra 2 rather than the 1 I should've only gotten in order to make it to class on time.

But as traumatic as this is, I'm sure some of you are thinking this is entirely self-inflicted.  And I'd completely agree :)  Instead of taking lessons learned from the last semester and applying them and sticking to them rigorously this semester, I found order and reason essentially flew out the window when faced with team assignments.  We decided that everyone would work on everything, which really IS a good plan because then everyone is up to speed on the class... but the problem is that is zero multi-tasking. 

Last night at 9pm I received the portions of a Marketing case that was due at 8am the next morning.  Great financial analysis, but where was the other 2/3ds of the paper?  Oh crap.  7.5 hours later I finally closed Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer, shut my laptop, and slugged home.  I was actually a little surprised to see the MBA commons completely empty at 4:30am - not exactly sure why.  I guess I figured there had to be at least one other totally crazy person here, perhaps nose to book dead asleep in the middle of the room.  No such luck.

It's now 8:30pm and I've just finished proctoring an additional exam my GA professor asked me to cover.  And before that proctoring one student's makeup exam as a special last minute request.  And before that taking a makeup Supply Chain quiz myself.  And before that in class, and well the rest is history.

Well somehow I'm still awake (although probably a relative term at this point) and maybe this writing is less coherent than I believe it to be - but that's survival.  And if there's anything I've learned from this program, it's survival.  Maybe that's a bad thing (acception of these bad habits), lol - but we'll work on that in negotiations class next year!!