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!

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!