All posts by Becca

I’m Being Way Too Productive for Summer

I am truly blessed by such amazing friends and family. Sometimes I really don’t think that I deserve the wonderful people I’m surrounded by. I had my graduation party on Saturday and a lot of people came and it was just over all really nice. My teacher from kindergarten came and a lot of family came in. It was great to be able to see all of them again.

It was a gorgeous day as well. We had tables set up out on our deck and down on the lower patio in the backyard. My mom worked her butt off getting ready for it – decorating and cooking. We kept it pretty simple by just having BBQ, chips, some salads, fruit, and cake.

A couple days before I was shopping for shorts for the summer and found this really cute dress just lying on the floor in one of the dressing rooms. It wasn’t out on the racks anymore and it was a size too small and the price tag read $48, so I was a little bit bummed. On a whim, I looked online to see if they had it and I found it on clearance for only $13 and in my size! My mom had another coupon she let me use which brought it down to $10. Definitely a lucky find.

I opened all my cards and presents later and was overwhelmed by just how generous friends and family were being. My aunt bought me the cutest sock monkey graduate in a coffee mug. I love sock monkeys. :*

With these new gifts, I was trying to determine where to put what in my room. It was obvious, however, that I really needed to perform a Great Purge. While I’ve cleaned my room before, these were really just superficial cleanings; picking up, throwing some papers away, minor reorganizing. It was apparent I just needed to get rid of junk.

So after work last night, I started to clean. I began with my desk drawers and I just couldn’t believe all the stuff I have saved since I was little. I mean really, I’m like a rat pack.

Anyhow, I didn’t really get too far. I filled up two trash bags of things to get rid of so far, but I haven’t even really achieved too much yet. I’m hoping that if I’m not too tired after work tonight, I can keep going. I took some before and after pictures so it looks like in the future I’ll have a whole post devoted to my nasty room! :P

If you hadn’t noticed, I bought a domain for my photoblog. :) I’ve always loved the phrase Shades of Gray since my last name is Gray, so I decided to give my photoblog its own little space. I think I had also mentioned before that I couldn’t access my travel blog site to work on it for two weeks now, so I finally just switched hosts. So I want to give a big thanks to Nancy for being awesome and getting everything set up so quickly for me. :)

Unfortunately, I lost most of my information for my travel site because I’m dumb and didn’t make backups. But oh well, I’ll be working on that in the next couple of weeks.

It just seems that at the moment I have so much I want to do over the summer and not enough time! So I’ve made some goals to keep me going and stay on track!

  1. Finish writing and mail out graduation cards.
  2. Complete my travel blog.
  3. Import all posts from previous blog on Weebly.
  4. Clean room.
  5. Edit old articles on Jovers and work on the site overall based on Cami‘s review of my site.
  6. Finish writing half of my new novel, Learning How to Run.
  7. Finish my first novel ever, Not as Easy as It Seems.
  8. Run three times a week.

So I’ve got quite a bit of work to be done over the summer! Though, these are all things that I like to do (well, cleaning my room falls under organizing, and I like organizing!). And of course I’ll hang out with friends and have vacation and ahh, I’m just really thinking this is going to be a great and productive summer! :)

5 Comments Family & Friends

Graduation and the Week After

I am now writing to you as a class of 2012 high school graduate. :)

I swear last Saturday could not come fast enough. But it finally did and the actual commencement ceremony passed in what I consider a blur. When they called my name, I was focusing too much on not tripping and just walking across the stage normally to pay attention to my family and friends cheering. While it was all grand and everything, I’m glad it’s over. Whew!

We had our graduation at an arena and not at our school. I would have preferred to have it at school, but they don’t ask my opinion on those things. :P When I exited the arena with the rest of my class and eventually found my mom, she immediately started complaining about how the rest of the family had already left and that she didn’t get the pictures she wanted and blah blah blah. I was so mad because it was my graduation and she couldn’t even say congrats?

She apologized later, but it pretty much killed my excitement and put me in a bad mood for a while.


Me and Becky. <3

Hi, it's me!

Red, white, and blue cord was for French Honor Society.
Yellow cord was for graduating with 4.0+ GPA.
Blue and yellow cord was for Math Honors Society.
Math medal was for being a math major (5.0+ credits of math).
Blue collar was for National Honor Society.
Small medal was for Best of Class in French Honor Society.


My parents and I. My mom made my dad change shorts so he looked a little grumpy. :P

My school sponsors an event called Operation Graduation and it’s a lock in for graduating seniors the night of graduation. My siblings had all been and talked it up a pretty good deal so I was really excited. It would be one of the last opportunities I would have to see some of my friends before the summer and college and I knew it would be fun. They had a bunch of blow ups ( an obstacle course and then a bunjee race – both really fun!), had the pool open, they hired caricaturists to come in for free, a magician, and more.

Besides the food (which OMG so much better than the normal cafeteria food), my favorite part of the night was the hypnotist. He came around 3:30 AM and selected ten students from the crowd and then proceeded to hypnotize them. He then would make the students do different hilarious things. He made one girl believe someone had stolen her belly button. She confronted someone in the crowd and she was so angry that I thought she was about to fight him! :P They then envisioned everyone naked, went to the “movies” and watched sad, scary, and funny movies, competed on a talent show. It was just overall extremely funny.

Needless to say I was exhausted by the time I got home. I went straight to bed (at 6:00 AM – a little bizarre just going to bed when the sun is coming up) but had to get back up around noon to get ready for work. x_x I know, work ruins everything. :P

For my graduation present, my dad took me to Best Buy on Monday (my only day off besides Saturday this week) to look at laptops for college. I was really excited because I’ve been wanting a laptop since I fell in love with computers (so uhm, twelve?). It took me a really long time to pick one out. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to begin with so my dad suggested a few. However, we could only find one of them at Best Buy, so that made it a little harder to compare.

We went to a few other stores and then home so I could do a little more research. I figure if my parents are going to fork out the money for a laptop, I want them to get the best bang for their buck, per se. Again, I was a little clueless, but I read a lot of reviews and finally settled on the new Toshiba Satellite. It was a decent price and seemed like it would be a good buy – plus I liked the design. :) I haven’t had a whole lot of time to really play with it yet, but so far I’m really liking it. I’m writing this post on it actually while lying in my bed. It’s the most amazing feeling. ;D

Speaking of my dad, he’s doing fairly well. He’s adjusting to his colostomy bag, despite not liking his restricted diet. But he’s doing well. He went to see his doctor today and he was real pleased with how he is healing so far. He’s starting work again tomorrow, so we’re all very happy that he’s doing so well.

Onto the week after graduation, it’s just been one of those weeks where I cannot wait until it’s over. Summer vacation officially started for me so I kept thinking of sunshine and swimming and sleeping in! Instead I had to babysit Tuesday and Wednesday morning, come home for enough time to grab a bite to eat, and then go to work for a seven or eight hour shift.I’ve been exhausted all week and really haven’t had that much time for myself yet.

I’m super behind on commenting and I was doing so well on working on my travel site. However, the last week I the servers have been down or something so I’ve had no access. And for whatever reason, I wasn’t getting emails with my backups so I think all that work is gone. GRRRRR. Needless to say, I’m switching hosts for that site. So I guess just another week in the busy life of little old me. :P

7 Comments Academia - Family & Friends