Oops Where Did July Go?

Uh-oh, August is almost gone already too! Where did the time go!?

I left off with end of June and now it is almost end of August! I've been applying to jobs like crazy all summer with random interviews and random things thrown in there! It's been crazy!

4th of July was great time hanging with friends, followed up by an amazing 45min long firework display in some hick town in Connecticut! To help with the no job scene I began pouring my time into the Rescue Mission and Parrot Sanctuary. The Parrot Sanctuary located about 40 min away from my house is a refuge for abandoned parrot types of birds and other funky animals such as porcupines, wallabies, rabbits, tortoises, frogs, geese, chickens, ducks, and others. I usually help with the food/water changing of dishes and reloading and cleaning cages.

July ended with my time at Soulfest which was wonderful! Soulfest is a 4 day festival jam packed with Christian music and booths of Christian ministries along with some Christian colleges. I went up on July 22nd to help with pre-festival for a week then the actual festival was July 29th to August 1st. It is located at a ski resort in New Hampshire, absolutely gorgeous up there! All the volunteers camped out on one of the ski slopes (volunteer hill!) and this made quite the adventure as it rained a vast majority of the time and a lot of people's tents got flooded or a mini river would form and shoot under tents! During setup, volunteers would report to breakfast at 7:30am and get their assignment(s) for the day. I usually bounced everywhere from kitchen duty, hauling stuff around, setting up artist reception areas, stapling drapes to the ceiling (oh fun times!), put up fence sections, digging trenches, running data cable, hanging up signs, and so many things! Our days usually ended with dinner at 6 and then sometimes I would help clean up the kitchen. We also had about 3-5 stages to build of various sizes that other volunteers helped build.

Overall, it was just intense and a lot of fun! During the festival, I was a runner meaning if an artist needed to be picked up or their driver or if they needed something, I'd get called to do it. It was kind of entertaining to do this!

Some of the artists/groups singing at Soulfest were Casting Crowns, Newsboys, Skillet, Third Day, Sanctus Reel, Thousand Foot Crutch, Phil Wickam and the list goes on! I also met this wonderful guy who was also volunteering up at Soulfest, his name is Peter and we have been dating for almost a month now. He is studying film and production type stuff in Massachusetts and is in his last year at college. He loves photography as well and takes gobs of pictures everywhere we go.

In August, I went camping up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was great being in the mountains again and almost felt like being in the mountains of Idaho, even though I think Idaho's mountains are bigger. It cracked me up to see a site labeled "Boise Rock" which was this boulder the size of 2 living rooms that a man named Thomas Boise used for shelter in a horrible winter storm.

School begins again in September and so does my work study job! Happy to see though that end of my summer hasn't been as bad as the beginning of it, haha!