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Saturday, July 24, 2010

My Last JROTC Summer Camp

This past week has been one of the best, and also one of the saddest camps I've attended. It was one of the best because I had an awesome time, and made sooo many new friends. It was one of the saddest because it was my last JROTC camp I'll ever attend now that I'm a rising senior. It was a camp called JLEAD, a JROTC camp dedicated to teaching cadets how to be an effective leader, and the different types of leadership. It was a very good camp, granted, some parts were slightly boring, especially when we had 4 hour lectures on caldendar planning, but hey, that gives me notes to help you guys be effective at organizing =) However, the friends I made there were amazing, and I had soooo much fun.

To start with the basics, I was in Bravo Company, 1st Platoon, 3rd squad (in case theres anybody that went there that's reading this.) Me and one of my really good friends, Samantha, were bunkmates. We were told that we would have twin beds, and we both use Queens at our house. So we both had to look through storage and find our old twin sheets from when we were little. She managed to find her cute green sheets from when she was eight. I on the other hand could only find plain white.... and it lookedl ike a hospital bed. Wow. If you look to the right of the picture, the one with the two bunks, you'll see a broom. Yes, that half sized broom became a very important instrument. In our halways, we were told that at nighttime we had to keep our doors open, safety precautions about the boys sneaking over and such. However, I could have sworn that some of the girls on my hallway were guys, they dressed and looked like males, except they had boobs. So me and Sam used the broom to set up an alarm system. We placed it slanted against our dorm, that way if anybody walked into our room at night, it would clatter against the ground. Haha, yeah it wasn't very effective, my other friend ran into our room, and jumped over the broom. Sam was like, "what?! NO! kasey; your not supposed to step OVER our alarm ! go out & try this again" lol.

I made so many friends while I was there. There were friends that I recognized from last year when i went, and I reunited with them. There were tonsss of new friends. If you look in the picture to your right, the guy on the far left, and the guy on the left beside me were best friends, and had a Russian accent. They literally cracked me up every time I talked to them, and made the trip sooo funny. The guy being held up in the blue was sooo sweet and he was like my soul brotha, we were so alike. Ohhh and of course thats Sam right beside me. haha, I've never been complimented so much as I was that one week, there were so many sweet guys who told me how beautiful, funny, pretty, or smart, I was. It seriously makes you laugh and feel really good about yourself, because you're looking your abosolute worst with your hair back, and in a bulky uniform, and theres still cute guys telling you that you look good, talk about a major confidence boost =)
I know it sounds so corny, but i definetly made friends that I'll never forget. The two Russian guys were so hard to become friends with. (One of them is really Russian, but both just fake the accent.) They had a wall up and wouldn't really speak to anybody. However, during the camp, they took us to this place where there were tons of obstacle courses. It was during one of the last events that I bonded with the actualy Russian guy, his names Peter. We had to help each other get across the Low Ropes Course and it definetly helped us bond. Once I got through Peter, it was easier to get to Riley, his best friend, who really wasn't Russian. We all became good friends, and I was soo sad to see them leave.


In case I previously forgot to mention the major details, the camp was held at North Georgia State and College University. If you are considering taking the ROTC route in college, North Georgia is a great place. The barracks are decent, the food is pretty good, the facilities are really nice, and it's one of the six Senior colleges in the United States. (The others being: Norwich University in Vermont, Texas A&M Univeristy, the Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and Virginia Tech) In case you don't know what a Senior Military College is, it means that you cant be deployed while you're in college. So you don't have to worry about having to stop during the mildde of school and being shipped overseas to fight in the war. North Georgia is ranked in the top 5 cheapest colleges in the US, and honestly i don't see how, because their campus is beautiful. It's a smaller to medium college with 5000 students if you're interested in that, and they have great scholarship programs. North Georgia also commisions more 3 star generals then even West Point, so that's a pretty cool fact.

Anyways, enough about the college. I had an amazing time there, and made so many great friends and memories. If you have a chance to go to this camp, you should because you'll meet so many amazing people and learn so many amazing things. Although this camp was very bittersweet, it was well worth the time, money and energy to go there. I hope this blog post wasn't too boring! I'll keep updating =)

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Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Trips Trips and More Trips

So if you've been following me on youtube for a while (www.youtube.com/stephallijane23) you probably know that I have a habit of going off on rants on almost anthing. Sadly enough this will probably be a habit that will never change, however, I'm going to view it as a positive thing. So instead of ranting away on my videos, I will do so on this blog (since that's what it's kinda made for), and my first discussion will be on all the trips I'm taking.

For me, summer has seemed extremely short due to the fast that almost every other weekend I'm headed off somewhere. As soon as school let out, I was shipped off to Girls State, which is a camp for female leaders. If you have the opportunity to go your Junior Year, you should totally take it, it opens sooo many scholarship oportunities and it looks great for college! I returned home for five days before leaving for D.C. on June 25th for JROTC Nationals for my Leadership Team in which I'm the Captain. I won't really go into the whole thing of what Leadership Team is, because it's hard to explain. I got to fly there, in which that's the first time I've flown in 10 years, and it was definetly VERY exciting =) I had the greatest time there and I bonded with the most amazing people who I still talk to.

After coming home from D.C., I celebrated my best friend's birthday. No "party party", I'm not the partying type, but a nice luncheon with frozen yogurt at the end and tons of hillarious girls make an awesome time =) The girl in the middle with the grey shirt was the birthday girl =)

Anyways, after D.C., I stay home for about two days, and then was headed up to Maryland. (This is actually the trip that I just returned from.) There's a Burmese church there (in which I'm half Burmese and half White), which has been trying to open for about ten years. My mother was on of the original founders of the church, so it was a big deal. I had a great time while I was there with; I'm not around asian people too much because they're pretty much nonexistant where I live, so when I get around them I get super excited haha. I had a blast while hanging out with my cousins, driving down the road with music blasting and watching fireworks in the back of their SUVS, definetly had a fun time. However, my poor mother did not. On the first night there, I got really sick and threw up, but we thought it was just because she was car sick. However, her illness continued throughout the second day, and we figured it was probably food poisoning. While I was out watching fire works, my mom was taken to the Emergency Room in which she was there for many hours because it got sooo bad. My poor mommy. She wanted to return home a day early, and we agreed.

So here I am, home once agin. My next trip isn't until July 20th, in which I have to go to another JROTC Leadership Camp called JLEAD, probably my least favorite of the bunch. So anyways, there's my life in a nutshell for the past couple of days. I'm going to try to get back into the swing of putting up more videos within the next two weeks before I leave. If you have any requests, leave them below, and spread the word about it!! Thanks for taking time to read this and God Bless! =)

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