personal day

with the program, we get three personal days and two life after americorps (laa) days. because I saved all my days until this last deployment (yeah I'm not sure why either) I haven't had a full week of work in the past few weeks, taking a day off per week to take advantage of my allotted days before the program's over. I am enjoying a personal day off today, making myself luxurious big breakfasts (trying to use up the excessive amount of eggs we have...still haven't even made a dent) and buying fudge supplies from big lots across the street while my team is working up at mt weather, deploying reservists and watching as snow flurries fly by their windows. 

some days I am more than ready to be home and in a bed of my own with no reports to write or khakis to wear. other days I am inexplicably content walking the two miles along highway and park paths to old town wearing my collection of goodwill and gabriel brothers' clothing. 

I found out yesterday that I was accepted into nyu's school of social work and will be starting come january. meaning, one: I better get used to this cold weather real fast, and 2: I will only be home for a month and a half after the program ends before I move away. but this time for longer than nine months. there are only 25 more days until I am put on a plane back to southern california and plopped back into the life I lived nine months ago. 

I was talking to my team/room/life mate last night about the way things change and end. it's strange that I lived with these people so closely (and I mean three people to a bed at certain points) for an extended amount of time and experienced things so far out of my comfort zone and gained insight into myself and into others. and we'll all be split and leave each other after the program's graduation in november. and move into new parts of our lives separately. it's all very strange. 

it's especially strange to imagine myself come january in a place to call home for longer than 5-9 weeks at a time. where I'll have my own space and will no longer carry around five ipads and three blackberrys (alright, slight exaggeration...). 

 all I can try to do now is to appreciate every moment I'm fortunate enough to live in. working alongside the warm and welcoming folks in the FEMA deployment branch at mt weather. receiving free meals because the brand new building we work in now (that's still being built as we speak...) is opening a cafeteria on the third floor and the wonderful cooks are trying out new equipment and recipes on us. movie nights via netflix on our little ipad screens after a dinner of steamed veggies and rice. looking up endless no-bake recipes in order to provide ourselves with comfort food after a long day at work as the weather gets colder and colder. trying to convince our coworkers to let us come to work dressed in costumes for halloween. watching as the leaves change from green to orange to yellow to red every single morning on our drive to work. driving along the most beautiful country roads I have ever seen in my life. making new east coast friends who have already impacted my life greatly. being asked "so what is this thing called americorpS" (emphasis on the S). and sitting on my bed on my day off listening to the rustle of leaves outside and feeling the brisk fall air float into our small shared space and being able to be completely still while reflecting on the year I've just had. (now THAT is service learning people: REFLECTING).

(per my mother's request)

I have received a special request from my mother for a blog update...

we have 11 days and some odd hours until we leave the virginia countryside and head back to sacramento. in our van. with our duffels. across the country for the fourth time. I really can't complain though, how many people get to drive cross country, let alone four times. and get to experience so many people and places and homes across several states in only nine and a half months? 

I've been getting emotional thinking about the ending of our program. in 29 days I will sitting in my bedroom. without the presence of seven other teammates. with no hours or quantifiables to count and no nccc position summary paragraphs to submit. able to drive wherever and whenever I need to. 

and that's not even exaggerating. it is only 29 more days. and I'll be back home. in my bed that I don't share and no khakis to look forward to in the morning. 

I can't believe how fast this year has gone by. if I continue to reminisce anymore I'm going to start a cryfest in my  hotel room and I don't have energy for that right now. I'm saving that for november 19th when the friends and family I have met and lived with the past several months have to part ways.

so in the meantime to distract from being sad and emotional....photos of beautiful virginia: 

thursday night

there's something about the freezing rain, blindingly thick fog, uber saturated leaves, and a bag of semi sweet chocolate chips that just makes life absolutely perfect on a thursday night.

I've been looking up no-bake recipes (due to our hotel housing and lack of oven...we do have a stove though!) and will attempt to create s'more fudge tonight. I can't imagine being anywhere else than in my hotel room with my two beautiful team/life/room/bed mates, trying to bring to life a fudge recipe off my phone, listening to a soft pandora station, recounting our FEMA corps tales since day 1.

these are the times I will miss the most. 

in the midst of the government shutdown...

(this post really has nothing to do with the government shutdown so, grams and gramps, if you're reading in hopes of learning some inside info on raising the debt ceiling or the final decisions made on obamacare, 1. you are about to be sorely disappointed by this post, and 2. I am an americorps member and am likely to never have any inside government information despite being affiliated with the government at this point in my life.) 

I just wanted to get on my soapbox for five seconds and write a post about being a person with diabetes living out of a duffel for ten months. if any of my diabetes friends are out there and wondering if you could live out of a duffel for ten months, you definitely can. and if this post reaches no one but myself in five months (yes I'll already be reminiscing in five months I'm sure) then I want to remember that I pulled through the trials and tribulations brought along with this program as a twentysomething but also as a young person with diabetes.

on the 31st of this month (also known as halloween...the biggest sweets day of the year), I will have had diabetes for eleven years of my life. today is just one of the days where I'm reminded I'm diabetic. it's been a combination of exhaustion, cabin fever (for being in the last month or so of the program), and excessive low blood sugars. it's tough when there's so much team planning involved every day for either PT after work or team grocery shopping, etc. sometimes it can be a lot. 

I just mainly want to put the message out into blogging cyberspace that, lifelong illness or not, you can do exactly what you want to do in life if you set your mind to it. yes managing diabetes on the daily in addition to meshing my schedule with those of seven other teammates can be rough and challenging. but things in life will always be rough and challenging. your reality is a reflection of your response to those things. 

there will always be days where you'll wonder why you're the one who has to wait another hour and a half to eat dinner in hopes of your blood sugar coming down or why you're the one who is late to the van in the morning because your pump stopped working and you have to change your site before leaving for work. there will also be days where those things won't happen. you will have good days and bad days no matter where you're at in life, so don't let them hinder you from trying new things (like living on the road for 10 months traveling the country assisting with disaster relief and recovery) and pursuing your dreams..whatever those may be. 

I wanted to write this post to my future self to remind myself of the challenges I've overcome thus far and that I will only continue to do so. don't let yourself think you're in any way less capable of achieving a goal because you have a failed pancreas and a few insulin bottles in your pack. you have as much drive and ambition as the next person. maybe even more so because you have to work to take those few extra steps to count carbs before you leave in the morning and make sure your insulin pump has enough battery life in it. and you don't get a choice whether you want to take those steps or not-they're already decided for you. 

whether you have team PT at a time you're trying to change your insulin pump or you find yourself eating cereal at 3am for a low blood sugar, don't let it get you down. suck down that sugar, bolus those units, put on your steel-toed boots, and get back to work. because there's so much more waiting for you to discover. it can seem overwhelming and it will at times, it really will. but take a breath, tell your teammates to wait for you while you (insert something related to an insulin pump, injection, or testing your blood sugar here), and jump back in. 

this program is one of the best decisions I've made in my life and I don't regret it one bit. 

morning drive

I don't think I'll ever get tired of driving through the changing fall forest on our way to/from work listening to jenny lewis and the lumineers, free hotel coffee in hand.

I've never lived (although temporarily) in some place more beautiful. I feel so lucky to have been here for more than a month already and to be here for 30 days more (unless ts karen gets dramatic and decides to hit the gulf coast and we get deployed...). 

sept 29

sitting in my shared bed (how many posts begin like this?) listening to mal playing soft music on her ipad, reading a book a new friend gave me for a gift, and already reminiscing my americorps life. I hiked a small portion of the appalachian trail with some members from my team this afternoon. today was the most beautiful day with the most incredible weather. fall is selling me on small virginian country towns. 

the other day as I was driving back from work, as the radio was on and conveniently playing every single song I like and know (I've begun to learn a surprising amount about country music and this was a rare instance where country music was absent from the station for 30 min), the sun was an unbelievable golden bouncing off of the corn fields and orange/green/red leaves, and I was thinking about how I got to this point in my life. and it was all because I had just happened to find out about americorps from a brief conversation with my dad. three days later, I had applied for nccc. which turned into FEMA corps. and now I'm here. sometimes I can't believe how willing I was to ship my body off for 10 months on an adventure that I was nowhere near prepared for. but desperately needed.

we have almost exactly one month left working here in winchester and will then pack ourselves and our belongings (let's be real, it's more like "belonging"-singular) back into our van and drive to sacramento where we will finish the program with two weeks of transitioning, finishing up paperwork, debriefs, and trying not to face the reality of real life which is slowly moving in.

I'm currently waiting to hear back from graduate programs and am already planning my permanent move out of my childhood home and into the real world. but then again, I've been living out of a van essentially for the past seven and a half months, so I guess I've already made that permanent move without realizing it? it's difficult to be completely present in these last moments of the program. because I'm distracted by future plans and the occasional frustrations that come with living and working with seven other people very closely. 

I have no idea how september creeped by...but october is here, and before I know it, I'll be graduating from the first class of FEMA corps at the pacific region campus with a little more than a hundred of the most wonderful individuals I've ever had the pleasure of learning from. I don't know how my life got to be so wonderfully strange and different than what I had ever imagined it would be, but I wouldn't change it for anything.

I can only hope this van ride will last me the rest of my life (not literal van ride, been there done that. it's a once-is-wonderful-enough kind of thing, you know?), dropping me off at moments I can't imagine now and picking me right back up to carry me to people and places that haven't been thought of yet. 

it's going to be a wild ride. 

fall

in between calling FEMA reservists and deploying them all over the country and shoving my face full of halls defense cough drops and blowing my nose in the hallway outside where transportation security administration works diligently away, I feel I need to reevaluate my life a bit. at age 24, I never thought I'd be working atop mt weather, battling the sickness that comes to a southern californian who hasn't experienced the changing seasons before. it's kind of glorious. despite the stuffed sinuses and the several people who ask me to repeat myself when giving them their deployment information (I wonder why...my voice is just so incredibly audible when I'm sick), I really am enjoying our deployment out here. eating lunch outside on a picnic table overlooking the rest of virginia isn't so bad. even if I do have to zip my jacket up to my ears and keep my hands wedged into my cargo pockets because it tends to get pretty chilly on the highest point in shenandoah valley. 

overall, though. I have to say this beautiful fall season is making me fall in love with small country towns.