1 Year

ONE year ago today I arrived in Auckland, New Zealand around five in the morning, pretty wide-eyed and with expectations out of this world. It's close to impossible to compare my experience in NZ with my expectations going in, but if I did I would have to say they were well exceeded. My time living in and exploring that country set 2008 off to be a good year for me...

Five and a half months in breathtaking New Zealand. A little over a week in Australia. Come home to a week with family at Lawrence Welk in Escondido. Houseboating at Lake Mead. Camping at San Onofre. A weekend fishing trip up in Mammoth. A month in Alaska. A weekend spent in Sequoia and Yosemite. Finished off by celebrating the New Year in Mammoth. These travels were nice, but they were only a means to the more important stuff. I had the opportunity to meet different, exciting, unique people and lifestyles and cultures from all over the world, experience the trying fluxuation and growing of friendships and relationships already in place, enjoy countless real conversations about new ideas and thoughts and what it means to think differently than we're accustomed or supposed to, and give up on a few those ideas that didn't seem to be of such importance anymore. All good things.

Last February on the Routeburn Track

A Rough Draft of Sorts

I'm not one to plan too far ahead of myself usually, but I can say I wouldn't mind if the next two and a half years of my life looked something like this.

Summer 2009

The following Fall/Winter/Spring

Summer 2010 through summer 2011

That's so far away it's crazy to think about. We'll see where I end up. At least as of right now I'd like to see this carried out.

Reading, Reading...

I ventured into the new Barnes & Noble the other day hoping to exchange a book I received for Christmas. Interesting bit was, I had not the slightest idea of what book to get in return for it. I started by looking at books by the same author, but there wasn't anything that grabbed my attention that I knew my mom didn't already own. I walked past the cardboard rack holding classics like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and saw they were, as usual, buy two and get the third free, but again I couldn't muster together a worthy trio of them and moved on. Next it was checking out some of the over-sized photography in the coffee table books like Africa from the Air, or Horses, or The Sea, but remembered I'm not in the market for one of those anymore. I peered at the Current Issues rack from a distance, and spent some time looking into what the employee's of the store recommended. Walking away empty handed I went to see if there were any biographies that would be of interest to me, for some reason I've wanted to read Martin Luther's for some time now, but didn't find it and moved on to the Christian/Spirituality section. I looked through the C.S. Lewis collection for a while. I contemplated buying several of his books, then thought an anthology of his would be most practical, but again decided against them all. Finally I came across a table with an intriguing green-covered book titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Feeling successful, I proudly carried the book up to the front counter just to let the manager tell me they won't be allowing me to do any exchanges that day.

That said, my extended time in the book store did motivate me to do more reading. I remember a friend at the beginning of last year setting a goal of reading six books by the end of the year, though I'm pretty sure she surpassed it by quite a bit. I started off hot, and slowed down, well almost stopped towards the end of the year, here's a list of the books I read in full:

1. Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller
2. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien
5. The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara
6. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien (I was in NZ, it was only appropriate)
7. The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert

Sad thing is that was completed when I was still in Alaska in September. Some may consider the LOTR trilogy as one book, but if I'm counting, they're three, those things took forever. This quarter I'm taking an interesting Religious Studies and Womens Studies class, and I actually intend to keep up with the reading for them. We'll see.