Age 17 and 18

Well the scanner isn't wanting to work right now so this post will have to be without pictures, until later. Pretty much to sum up my last two years in high school is this:
- swam a lot
- travelled and swam in a different state
- worked during the summer as a lifeguard (I don't care what people say I did not like that job)
- started dating a new guy
- decided I didn't want to be a pediatrician after all (AP Bio was not great for me)
- decided I wanted to be a teacher
- looked for a division one school with a teaching program and a swim team I could swim on
- decided I wanted to go to Bradley. It fit all the criteria
- went on a recruiting trip and decided I didn't want to be on a team that lost a lot and didn't care
- decided at the last minute to go to CSU (even though the last thing I wanted to do was continue to follow my sister)
- decided I was kind of burnt out of swimming anyway and I didn't want to swim in college
- moved to a new house
- started coaching the neighborhood swim team (Thought for a little while I should be a high school PE teacher in charge of aquatics, then decided I'm not really the female high school PE teacher type)

When I was 18 I started college. Here is the abbreviated version of my first half of my freshman year of college.
- when I was applying to CSU and getting a dorm I decided to be a part of a diversity program. This meant that I would go to school a couple of days early to meet the other people in my program and we would take classes together and live together and everything would be great. Well...I learned a lot that semester. I didn't drink in high school. Not even once. So when I went up to college I wasn't really into the whole party scene. This isn't a great way to start a new school. All of the people on my floor, well almost all would go out to party on the weekends and I would stay home. Soon they stopped asking if I wanted to go. So I became great friends with a guy on my floor who was Mormon. He was a great guy. I would also hang out with that boyfriend of mine. I met him in high school but he was about 21 when I started college. Since I didn't go out and party and didn't really have any friends on my floor or in my dorm I had a lot of time to study. Which I actually did a lot of. For the first time ever I had time to do all the homework assigned. (In high school I was never able to get everything done. Swimming took up too much time and I was/am great at procrastinating.) This time to study ended up being a great thing because I started college with a great GPA that I was able to chip away at later.
- My roommate. My roommate and I were so different (remember we were in a diversity cohort) that we had nothing in common or at least nothing we could find. She came from Hawaii and from a family of 13. She was the oldest. For most of the year she had a boyfriend. I'm pretty sure she was determined to find her self a football player. So she didn't spend many nights in our dorm, which was great. But when she was there we both tried to pretend the other wasn't there. I love to sleep in the cold. She liked it to be hot and stuffy. I thought it was reasonable to leave the TV off if someone was listening to the radio. She thought it was okay to turn on the TV if I was listening to the radio. I thought you should replace food that you give to your friends. She thought she could give my food to her friends and not replace it. Anyways there were many things that made living together challenging.
- My sister. It turns out that having Amanda at CSU with me was a great thing. (I knew it would be but I just wanted to be my own person for awhile and not always "Amanda's sister". She so kindly let me hang out with her friends and stay over at their apartment when I needed to be away from my roommate. It was also nice because she had a car and I didn't.
- The boyfriend. I eventually broke up with the older boyfriend. Even though he spoiled me rotten. He also was getting kind of smothering. At this point I'd been a little bit of a serial dater. There was only about a year when I didn't have a boyfriend since the time I was in 7th grade. Granted I only had two different ones. I decided I was going to just date. I wanted nothing serious. That is what college kids do right?? (Read age 19 for more about this topic)