Relaxation

I have to say that my favorite thing to do is to relax. There isn't a greater feeling then to kick back in a chair and prop my feet up on something. When I am able to do this I can handle it for hours do to the fact that I have just hit my favorite spot. Another way I love to relax is out in my hammock at my house next to the pond I built. When I relax with others I find it awesome to go by a river bank kick out some chairs and throw down some brew. I can't stand when I go to kick back and someone calls for me to do something so I have to resume my happiness until later. One of my favorite drinks to have while relaxing is lemonade, there isn't anything else like that drink when you're sitting outside in the summer and just straight up chilling. People may find this weird but when I get extremely pissed off I will go outside (when I am at home), and will just do yard work. Being outside and just working on the yard helps me take my mind off shit that makes my blood flow 5 times more then it should.Relaxation overall really helps me release stress that occurs (recently a lot).

Summertime!!

So I guess it is about time to start talking about the old summer plans. To start off my summer I have received a call from my old boss that I used to paint for during the summers. He called to tell me that this man whose house he painted was needing someone to come and spread mulch around his house so I called up the guy and the next day (during easter weekend) I went by his house and talked to him and decided when I would start mulching. The other day when I called him to confirm when I would be home he told me that his neighbor would like for me to do some yard work also. So besides those two jobs I am still in need of finding more work to do. Also this summer I am taking a class at the local community college back home. Other then these few things I will definitely be doing a lot of fishing with the dudes and chilling out. Another thing I will probably regret later when I start doing this but I can’t wait to start bailing hay. This is one of the hardest, demanding things I have ever done. Due to the fact my dad owns an old school bailer we have to stack the hay twice, once on the wagons and then again in the barn. I have been bailing hay with my dad since I was in 5th grade. I remember all the times I was too small to throw bails around and then one day during the winter my dad had me help him go out to the barn and restack the hay. I was really excited that I could finally help him. Last summer I did something I really regretted I was trying to hook up the hay tetter to get the rows fluffed to dry out faster and the thing was too heavy to lift by myself and the jack on the thing was broken. So I took rope tied it around the tetter and then roped it around the lift bars on the tractor to try and lift it up. When I did this I was swinging the tetter over to hook up and the rope broke and the tetter fell on my foot in which I was wearing flip flops. I was worried at first when I was lifting the tetter up to get my foot out, that I lost a few of my toes. I definitely learned a lesson from this experience.

This Weekend

This past weekend was my birthday, so Thursday afternoon my girlfriend arrived for the weekend. When she got here we hung out and napped until my other friends were ready to do the pk dinner. Later after pks we came back and watched some tv before we went out to my friend’s apartment to hangout for the night. Friday was my birthday so when we woke up we went to IHOP which was a disaster the waitress were running around with their heads cut off and it just over all took forever. It took 2 hours to get the food and 6 minutes for us to chow it down. After we ate we went to the grocery store so that she could get food to make me a birthday dinner. After we dropped off the food we went down to the river to layout and chill for a little bit. After we got back we played Mario party on the N64 for 2 hours. Then finally dinner time arrived she fixed me bbq shrimp and twice baked potatoes. I have never had bbq shrimp before, but it was actually really good. We stayed in Friday night and watched Law Abiding Citizen which was a very good movie I recommend that if you have not seen this movie yet that you should. Then Saturday I woke up and did some Econ homework and that was a thrill made my whole weekend. After the Econ got the best of me, my friends and I set up some lawn pong in which we use 6 5-gallon buckets and then take tennis balls and use them to knock out the buckets. While playing this we grilled some hamburgers that were really good. So I know it doesn’t sound like that much happened but this was all I wanted to just spend time with my girl.

Life as it is

So this past week was a pain in the ass, had some work to do and also take my biology test that was a kicker on all of that. I was ready for the weekend as soon as I woke up Monday morning. On Thursday I went downtown and started out at PK’s, (I suggest this if you all didn’t know about the Tijuana Toss) every Thursday from 5-10pm. You get an x-large 1 topping pizza (or however many you want) and you flip a quarter for each pizza you have and if u get it right you don’t have to pay for it. After that I went to the Cellar and had a few there, this place is neat it’s like an underground bar that has a real chill atmosphere. I then finished up at Hokie House where they have the “death steps” and I was training to do this last year until I had my incident. I finally counted them on my way up and there are only 19 steps, I was told that there was 21 but I guess this is because not many make it up that far. So each step has a different name of a drink and you’re supposed to have that drink of whatever step you’re on.
Okay enough of the downtown information for now, so Friday I didn’t do relay for life but went by for a little bit to visit some friends. While I was there we went and listened to some very heart wrenching stories of how some fellow students were affected by others they knew that had cancer. I listened to two girls the first girl’s sister’s life was taken by cancer and the way she told the life of her sister and the goals she had really made me take a step back and realize I am grateful for what I have. The other girl was talking about a fellow sorority sister who was hit by cancer last year. She said how her friend sent her a text and all it said was “I have cancer,” she never liked to talk about it but she was always interested in how others were instead of everything being focused on her. She said it didn’t go that way until she was getting sicker and was worried about leaving her family behind. These kind of stories make people realize stuff happens within a blink of an eye. I have to say from this don’t hold grudges, live life to the fullest and make the best of the shitty situations!

Easter Weekend!

Easter weekend was just what I needed! I went home on Friday after class and went to a local whole sale nursery to try and get a summer job. The owner was impressed with my resume and said that when I would be coming in to work he would be looking to cut back on employees. He said that I was worth consideration due to my qualifying information, so I hope I can get at least part time there. Once I got done there I went home to hang out with the family until dinner. After dinner I went over to my girlfriends place and hung out with her for the night. Saturday morning I went and met with a guy who was interested in me spreading mulch for him when I get back from this semester. I am happy I at least have one thing to do when I get back for the summer. Once I was finished talking to him I went to my grandmothers and mowed her yard. I was in my zone, I was so happy to be back and doing some yard work. After I was done at her house I went home and cleaned up around my parents flower beds. Saturday evening we celebrated my dads 50th birthday. Since we live on a small farm, my sisters thought it would be fun to have a farm theme party so everything was about cows and tractors. Then after the celebration everyone just sat around and talked for a good bit. After everyone left, my girlfriend and I watched some of the Sherlock Holmes movie. I have to say this weekend flew by but it was something I was in need of since school has been rough lately.

Crazy Weekend

So last weekend I was driving through foxridge and my jeep steering wheel started to stiffen up making it hard to turn. I some how made it into a parking spot and sat and moved the wheel around a little bit to get it to move better. Then once I got it to work again I took it back to my apartment lot and left it there until I could figure out what to do with it. So later that night I called up the campus exxon to see if they could look at it. The guy told me they would and to bring it over whenever and they would look at it on Monday. So I take the car over sunday and hoped that it would be done in time for me to leave on thursday after my test. So around 9 am on Monday when I was walking to class I got a call from the exxon place saying that they couldnt find anything wrong with the pump and fluid so they would take apart the steering colum and lube up the parts in there. Well I had that done for $116, and needless to say I still didn't feel comfortable when I got in my jeep to drive away. It still made this clicking noise when I would turn it to certain points. I knew I had to go home thursday so I didn't bother to question if they did anything so I just went on my way. I trusted that they looked it over and made sure that it didnt have severe damage. Anyways needless to say on my drive home thursday my steering wheel stiffened up real bad when I was driving on 81, I was going around turns hoping it wouldnt keep going straight. Somehow maricle pending I made it to my sisters house and that was good enough for me since my friend who is a mechanic could get to it. That night he took it to his shop to allow for him to look at it the next morning. Finally when he took a look at it he thought it might have been something in the wheel axels, but it wasn't it turned out to be my steering wheel bearings they were completely shot. I was so pissed that the campus exxon didn't see that and they should have if they really did get into my steering colum. They have completely lost my trust and will not be getting a good message about them from me. I am also going to go and talk to them about this when I get the old bearing back and show them that this could have caused a severe accident.

Another Story

I thought the time that the in class writing assignment that we did a few weeks ago was fun, so I decided to do it again.
Audience: Young people
Detail: An ipod that has been stolen
Setting: A classroom
Character: A young girl who is a goody goody
On Monday Marsha was on her way to school when she stopped to tie her shoes. She finally got up and started to walk towards her school when she stumbled over a stick on the sidewalk. She couldn’t catch her balance and fell forward and scrapped up her knee. Once she got to her school she went to her homeroom and asked her teacher for a band aid, her teacher asked her what it was needed for and saw that she had a deep cut on her knee. The teacher took the girl to the nurse’s office and while at the office some kids entered into the classroom. Drew the class clown noticed Marsha’s book bag at the front of the room and scurried up to snag her ipod that she always stores in the front pocket. When Marsha came back she noticed that her book bag had been moved and started to whine to the teacher. Marsha started to go through the bag and noticed that her ipod was missing. The teacher got red as a beet and told the class to fess up to who took the ipod or they would all lose 20 pts on their final grades. Finally after 10 minutes of frustration Drew finally fessed up.

College Life!

College is the time of a young person’s life that allows for them to become the real person that they are. My grandfather who passed away in the summer always told me to stay away from the crazy college life that will ruin one’s life. I kind of just put that thought behind me because I thought well this is the only time I will be able to do this kind of stuff. Last year was probably my worse time handling the whole college weekend life, I would wake up the next morning having the worse headaches and I just couldn’t figure out how I got them. Soon I realized I had no clue what happened the night before and the days would be ruined for me trying to recover and I wouldn’t be productive at all the next day. I soon started to take school a little more serious when I finally had the party life catch up to me when one Friday night coming back from a party I tripped on concrete and too intoxicated to catch myself I face planted.
Since that day I really tried to cut back on my intakes and even for my 21st birthday I didn’t get the “total crazy” as one is usually expected. I am just saying all this because now a days since I don’t go out like that anymore I realize all I was doing was like my grandfather said and I was just screwing up my life. It really does take a reality check for people to come to terms that they need to revaluate what they are doing. My parents have been facing anger, worries, and heartbreak with some of the things that the college weekend life has caused me to do. Life is really about choices and the paths you take, I hate having the addicted personality that causes me to do some stupid stuff that I really need to take into account when I do them. Recently I have had the lazy bone since I’m just tired of going to school, so I have been trying to use that as an excuse to not go out and party as much but stay in and buckle down and get back on track.

Story

Audience: Young Adults
Detail: An record album with no record player
Setting: A Sunday School classroom
Character: A kid vandalizing his mom’s house.

On Sunday Tucker was in Sunday school, where he had to tell about a time in his life that he had done something that was inevitably the worse thing he had ever done. Tucker decided to tell about the time he was at his mom’s house for the weekend. He started out by telling how he was outside her house breaking tree branches. While Tucker was gathering the sticks up to construct a fort, when out of the blue he notices a very peculiar object in the basement window. He decides to go down the stairs and look into what he saw. He was so amazed that he was lifting up parts of it and expecting it when all of the sudden the arm of the object broke. Tucker was scared of getting in trouble so he took the thing outside and started to beat the thing to smithereens. He then went into the house and started to see what else was in there that he had never noticed before. On a top shelf he found some fireworks and being his dumb self decided to light up a thing of firecrackers and he got afraid of the things combusting next to something flammable so he took them and threw them into the toilet. He heard a loud crack and then a gushing sound as he had just blew up the toilet. He didn’t know what to do so he closed the bathroom door and put towels under the door to keep the water from going everywhere. He then told about how when his mom got home she was in the most irritable mood ever after a strenuous meeting from work. She just wanted to go in and lie down and listen to some of her old records that she had since her college years. She then went into the basement to get her record player and was throwing shit around trying to find it and had an original beach boys album that she flung and broke. Finally she yelled for Tucker to come down and help and she started to explain to him what she was looking for, finally he fessed up and told her that he had broken it when he was examining it. She was so pissed that she made him go upstairs and while he was on his way up she noticed water leaking from the bathroom. When she rushed over she saw that the bathroom was flooded and water had ruined many of her original paintings that she created when in art class in college. After all he had done the Sunday school teacher told him that he should go and ask his mother for forgiveness.

The Lady!

A year ago on New Year’s Eve I was at my friend’s apartment at JMU and we were all just hanging out and ready to stay there for the night. Then one of our other friends was telling us that there was a party out at a farm house a few minutes down the road. I wasn’t very content with leaving to go to this party, but for some reason I went anyways. When we got there the place was packed and hard to move around but once we made it downstairs the stuff was going on. After awhile I walked into this room where people were sitting around socializing and what not and I noticed on the couch there was this very attractive girl in a pink shirt hanging out. I didn’t say anything to her cause I knew she wouldn’t talk to me so I went about my business then I was walking by and the punk stuck out her foot and tried to trip me. That right there started it out; later I was talking to my friends and she came up to me and asked what I was drinking and I just gave a really short answer so kind of made her feel like I wasn’t wanting to talk. My friend Adam was talking to me and I asked him about her, and he told me to talk to her and I said I couldn't. He went up to her and told her and she told him that I need to man up and do it. Then later I finally manned up and went up and talked to her, we talked for awhile and I was kind of pushed away at the thought she goes to ODU knowing that it would never work. A year later I am totally wrong, we didn’t talk for a few weeks then one random night we started to talk again and haven’t stopped since.

We were Valentine’s last year for about an hour which is kind of sad. This year I made it up to her I made her dinner, baked her a cake and also got a little heart necklace for her. I have found out that she is really a special lady who I believe is miss right!

Landscaping

While growing up in the rural area of Virginia, all there was to do was hang out side and cause ruckus. When I was younger I loved to go out and play in the dirt and destroy things, like any little devious kid does. When I got older and more capable of doing laborious work, I would go out and help my dad with the garden during the spring and summer. Once, I found a passion for growing plants and taking care of them I then started to get into landscaping around the house. My dad being an agriculture teacher at a local middle school really got me involved with the agriculture aspects.
When I got into high school I wasn’t in ag until my sophomore year when we would get to experience all the different parts to the class: wood working, welding, and landscaping. When I was in the landscaping part of it we learned to transplant the plants and a whole variety of things that would take way too long to explain. Then the next year I took landscape design class where we designed a landscape for the athletic fields and then once we were Okayed by the booster club we got to install them. Once I got to experience this I knew right away that I wanted to get into this career once I got out of high school.
I have had experience the last two summers of working in the outdoors landscaping and mowing. Two summers ago I worked for a guy who graduated from tech and now 10 years later owns a medium sized company that has branched out in 5 years and has four different divisions. He has landscape, hardscape, maintenance, and masonry divisions. When I worked with him he taught me a lot of valuable skills in hardscaping. After one summer I learned what I needed to allow for me to go out and build a pavered patio, walkways, paragola’s, and ponds. After I experienced all of this I knew eventually I would love to be able to get into a career of installing those sorts of things.

Goals!

In life people make many choices most of those face consequences, such as giving up on one thing to reach another. For myself one thing that I have found a great passion for are setting goals. Stated in the dictionary a goal is: a projected state of affairs that a person or a system plans or intends to achieve—a personal or organizational desired end-point in some sort of assumed development. Many people endeavor to reach goals within a finite time by setting deadlines. I find this exactly how I experienced my goals while growing up.
Early in life I always knew I wanted to be a Hokie. I would come to the football games and see the atmosphere and knew that since Hokie blood has ran through my family it only made sense for me to continue it. When I reached high school I wasn’t make good enough grades and knew that I couldn’t get into tech with a 3.7 gpa, so I had to think of other schools. Then I found out my friend came to Tech in a 2 year agriculture program. Once I looked into it I found out I could get a landscaping degree from it and then I knew that was the route I wanted to go.
Goals for me didn’t stop there, throughout high school I ran track and cross country. Those sports required a lot of dedication and goal setting. I would always make a statement during practice to run with the top guys and that would help me reach my goal times I wanted to get for my races. I didn’t believe people that running was 90% mental and 10% physical and once I learned that if you keep positive you can achieve anything. That is the same way with setting goals in general, you have to be positive the whole time and things will take shape for you.
Some goals I have set for myself for the future aren’t hard but yet will challenge me a little bit. I want to graduate in the fall of 2011 and get into the workforce in some kind of landscaping job. Currently I have a wonderful girlfriend who is 5 hours away but is always with me mentally and hope to be with her after school. Other than those I hope to one day own a landscape company and raise a healthy family!
Once I learned that goals aren’t hard to reach as long as you keep your head forward and don’t look back at what you could have done. Instead move on and keep what you want in your life in front of you and over time those things will be reachable.

Spring Semester

First time blogger here, didn’t really understand what it meant to blog so I guess this is a unique experience for me to be able to do. This spring I am taking 16 credits of which two are in Econ, Biology, English and Oral Communications. This semester will be a doozey for me since I had a “slacker” break, it will probably take a few days to get me back into school mode. I need to learn to manage my studying time as of now I feel that has gotten away from me.
The classes that I am most worried about is my Econ 1006, I didn’t get the passing C in the first section so now I am going to have to buckle down and try and master it. The thing that gets me going about econ is that it takes time to think through the problems and test the problems took so long to understand that I had to fly through without thinking. I am not sure why I have econ as my minor, other than the fact I want to have a business degree.
When I was in high school my ag teacher had an effect on my life in which made me want to beautify the outdoors. I took three landscape/horticulture based classes that got y interest in wanting to become a landscaper. People ask why I want to have a career in it, and my answer is that I love the outdoors and I have a creative mind in which I can put both of these things together and make people’s homes more special.
I have already received my Landscape/Turf Management Associates Degree from VA Tech in the Agricultural Technology program. Once I received that degree I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go back to school and receive my bachelor’s. I had the feeling that I had what I needed to get through my work career as a landscape company owner. After talking with others about it I felt that if I had a more general bachelor’s degree I could have more job opportunities.
Once I finished my first year in the program I did my summer internship. For my internship I worked for a landscape/hardscape company near my hometown. Hardscaping involves installing patio’s, walkway’s , outdoor kitchens, etc… Once I learned how to install hardscape’s I felt that it was very beneficial to my work knowledge and that one day I could hopefully add that to my company.