Day 2

Hello all,

Today has been very long, and I have been feeling quite ill. Luckily, Tuesdays are a good lazy day for me to just catch up on rest and relaxation (I only have one one hour class, yippee!) Due to these circumstances I decided that, naturally, the wonderful and simple poetic form of Haiku would just have to do for today.

I decided to come up with my own prompt for today, and if any of you would want to try it I would love for you to leave it in the comments! Just write a poem involving a line from a song in any musical you like. For my particular one, I use The Wizard of Oz and give it a haunting twist:

We're off to see the wizard,
Though the land of Oz
Has long since been burning down.

I'd really like to see what others could come up with! So don't be shy.

Sarah

NaPoWriMo!

It is indeed that time of year again! The time when we who enjoy our writing and our rambling congregate to complete the daunting task of writing 30 poems in 30 days. While not always possible, it is a true test of creativity, resources, and thinking on your feet when it comes to poetry writing. Yeah, you guessed it, I will be doing this this year too as I have done every year. Long ago my friends and I formed some sort of Dead Poet Society based around NaPoWriMo and its sort of stuck ever since..

Anyway, this is usually made easier by the numbers of sites out there that will offer a daily prompt to help stimulate your creative juices if you simply can't think of anything to write about. Can be followed or not, it's poetry, who said there have to be rules? Well, for the start I decided to follow a lovely prompt from www.napowrimo.net. I'd also suggest checking out the blogs from other writers on there, seeing others work  as well as sharing your own. The prompt they had picked out today was to use the first line of a famous poem, and me, being original as I am, used a Shakespeare sonnet with a little twist, to direct it towards my lovely fiance, something which I'll probably be doing a lot of (hey, we just recently got engaged.)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Or perhaps you’d rather not be seen that way,

Perhaps you are the winter moon

In the cold air to make me swoon,

Perhaps you are the starry night

A blissful end to my toiling plight,

Perhaps you may be this crisp spring air

Eyes so blue and skin so fair,

Perhaps you are a lover’s sigh

To fill me with warmth when the day is nigh,

Or perhaps you are none of these,

And to be mine is all you please.

Such is my love poem. You don't have to be corny like me, experiment! Seriously there is so much out there, so many poems waiting to be written. So find something you like and get writing!

Sarah

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

   Remember, remember! 

    The fifth of November, 

    The Gunpowder treason and plot; 

    I know of no reason 

    Why the Gunpowder treason 

    Should ever be forgot! 

    Guy Fawkes and his companions 

    Did the scheme contrive, 

    To blow the King and Parliament 

    All up alive. 

    Threescore barrels, laid below, 

    To prove old England's overthrow. 

    But, by God's providence, him they catch, 

    With a dark lantern, lighting a match! 

    A stick and a stake 

    For King James's sake! 

    If you won't give me one, 

    I'll take two, 

    The better for me, 

    And the worse for you. 

    A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope, 

    A penn'orth of cheese to choke him, 

    A pint of beer to wash it down, 

    And a jolly good fire to burn him. 

    Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring! 

    Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King! 

    Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

Celebration required with a burning of effigy, some fireworks, and a V for Vendetta movie night.

Bucket List: Parasailing

Hi everyone!

Instead of saying hello from my lovely Outer Banks beach house, I am now back at my own home in Pennsylvania. But not for very long.

I did promise to tell you all about my last day, though. And what a last day it was. The morning before we left I convinced my parents to let me do something that has been on my bucket list for a while: parasailing. And so we did. My mother and I went 1200 feet up in the air in the sound behind Duck, which is near Corolla. It was an amazing experience. I would highly recommend parasailing yourself sometime. Here is a picture of my mother and I on our adventure:

(I'm on the left)

What was also cool, on the way back to the docking area, our ship captain let me drive the boat. It was pretty straightforward, but also really cool at the same time. Afterwards, I went to fly a kite on the beach and say goodbye to the lovely ocean once more before having to head home. And then it was time to pack up and go.

We just arrived home today, Sunday, but only because last night we spent the night in Richmond with my mother’s friend. Her son is two, and absolutely adorable.

Short blog post, yes, but, at the same time, some pretty big news. It’s exciting to knock things off your bucket list. Mostly, though, it only makes me want to add more.

So start knocking them off!

Anyone else parasailed or want to go parasailing?

Have fun,

Sarah.

The Outer Banks Part II

Hello again from the Outer Banks!

Tonight, I am taking leave of this beach and heading back to the wonderful land of Pennsylvania (but only for a day before I leave again!) This has been a good trip. Despite my musings that I could definitely see myself on a better beach, I can never deny a good vacation. Anything that relaxes me, let’s me read a good book and get some sun and swim in my favorite natural resource is a good vacation in my book. I will honestly be sad to leave it. Maybe it’ll be a good place to come back and write some day, for a few weeks at least. Beaches tend to have that effect on me. I feel as if even if I was working here I would have a certain carefree feeling I couldn’t get anywhere else.

Thursday was one of those more relaxing days, filled mostly with beaching. We also went to eat at a restaurant called Rt. 12 Steakhouse here in Corolla. As you can guess it was mostly meat, and as a non-meat eater, I couldn’t really tell you the results. My family really seemed to enjoy the selection there, though. The restaurant was recommended to us by others as well, so I’d say it was a pretty safe bet.

Friday, my dad signed our family up for a nature photography course at the science center on Currituck Beach. Now I am not much of a photographer, but I can vouch that it was a very interesting and informative class nonetheless. Basically our park ranger told us all of the basics of photography – use of lines, colors, positioning – and then showed us how to apply them to nature. I’ll show you a few of my shots. Like I said,I’m not much of a photographer, much less nature photography, but they’ll demonstrate what I did learn from the man.

An example of lines in a picture, and foreground and background.

There are bees on there, if you can't tell.

Again, excuse my photography skills.

He talked a lot about the use of vertical vs. horizontal. This is, obviously, a vertical example.

It was immensely hot outside, but we managed a good hour of taking pictures all around the wooded area next to the science center. I think my better nature photo came later in the day when we were feeding pancakes to the very hungry and very person-friendly turtles I mentioned in the last blog post:

So that’s the end to my vacation. Well, there is today. But, for the sake of keeping my blog posts shorter, you'll just have to tune in later tonight to see what it is that I did today. So just one more day. One more day that I’ll be doing something quite spectacular, something that has been on my bucket list for a while. 

Have you guys gone on vacation yet?

Have a good one,

Sarah.

The Outer Banks

Hi everyone!

My life as of late has been the most hectic. I mean, that’s not unusual in the life of Sarah Taylor. I’ve been the busiest person I know even before I could walk. I guess that’s what I get coming from a family of people who love to travel. But, there have been some rather, well, I guess they would be significant changes in my life as of late.

For starters, I am now a high school graduate!

Happy days!

It has only hit me a couple of times that I’m going to be completely shifting my life around a lot in the next few months. So far after graduation life has continued on quite normally, if not less exciting than normal, with what I have to work every day and all that goodness. But I haven’t forgotten that I am going to die at the end of this year to what I’m still hoping is going to be a zombie apocalypse. So I have been cleaning the pool I work at thanking the divines for every single disgusting dead spider I have to sweep out of my pool cleaner.

Mostly so far I have decided I am going to greatly miss my few good friends that I have made over my years in high school. I probably couldn’t have maintained even small shreads of sanity without them.

In reference to college, I received my school schedule the other day. It looks pretty aligned with the kind of thing I would be expecting to be doing in my major (marine biology); chemistry and biology and that sort of thing. But I also got put into Precalculus, even when I’ve already taken a high school calculus course. Someone help me. It’s going to be a really unfortunate semester. But only that part. I’m hoping the rest will be something worth remembering. I’m honestly not very nervous about college, which many may find surprising. I just really want it to happen already.

So now, in the midst of my work and video game heavy summer, I am sitting currently on the couch in my family’s rented-for-a-week summer home in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. More specifically, we are staying on Corolla Beach ( which is apparently pronounced “cuh-rah-lah”). So far this has been exactly what I want in a vacation. I did aforemention that I am going into the field of marine biology, and living in landlocked Pennsylvania gives me a great depravity of the beautiful natural wonder we call the ocean. If I could stay all day and night down by the big blue I would.

My days have been the perfect combination of lazy-ness and moving around a bit. My family has been running around doing this and that, tourism things and such, but I’ve only joined in a couple ventures. Mostly just hanging around the beach boogie boarding, longboarding around the neighborhood, playing Frisbee, sleeping, that’s been my days thus far with a  few other things thrown in. Oh, and sitting in the hot tub. How can one forget that. On this particular day I did a more touristy thing: we went and visited the Kitty Hawk memorial, where the Wright brothers first invented and flew their airplane. I probably would’ve been more interested if I hadn’t been half asleep, as I’d gone boogie boarding for four hours the previous day and hadn’t slept well. It was pretty cool though. The best part of my day was driving along the beach looking for wild horses (which we didn’t get to see, sad face) and feeding very hungry and very friendly wild turtles. We fed them pancakes, right from our hands. They enjoyed it well enough. They didn’t let us pet them though.

I’ve been to better beaches, but Outer Banks is not so bad. It’s pretty around here. I’ve always liked beach scenery more than other views. Dunes and waves and muggy, salty air just appeals to me. I was surprised to find how small the beach was, though, with all the popularity is has. It took me a couple days to adjust to. I’m not a huge fan of overdeveloped, suburban looking areas, especially when they are more tourist-y looking places. I would much prefer something closer to Chincoteague beach, which is much less developed. Maybe that’s the ocean conservationist in me. Or just personal preference. I don’t know.

But it’s been fun.

How is your summer going? Any interesting adventures?

Sarah.

A Couple Goals Met

Hello all.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but this was a pretty big event in my life and one that I’m so thrilled I got to do on my last year on earth before the zombies get me. Last week, the founder of To Write Love On Her Arms came to the campus that I live by to speak. Now, he is one of the few people I have honestly been dying to see over the past few years, so it was literally a dream come true when he came out on that stage and spoke. His presentation was very moving: I laughed, I cried, I was so inspired by everything he had to say. It was a pretty life altering event that will be forever stored as special in my memory. If Jamie Tworkowski ever comes to your town, or the whole entire To Write Love On Her Arms team comes, I would highly recommend going to one of their conferences. They are very well presented and very down to earth.  The honesty in the air is very refreshing, and it can help you kick start a bunch  of different changes in your communication or help seeking process.

Also, last Friday, a magical moment I have been also waiting for quite some time to witness was a live showing, called VyRT, by one of my all time favorite bands, 30 Seconds to Mars, introducing new songs and playing old ones in what they called The MARS Laboratory. It was an amazing moment, for quite a few reasons. Firstly, the band and the men who make it up themselves. They were all hilarious, and it was so much fun to feel like I was right there with them while they sang and told jokes and, yes, made vegan pancakes. And the music. The boys were accompanied by a string quartet, which, when combined with Jared Leto’s voice and the beautiful acoustic guitar, made for a stunning performance. And on top of all that, there were chat rooms while the stream was going on, so everyone, people from around the world, could talk and bond and communicate, mostly about the VyRT and the one thing we all love. I laughed. I cried. I was inspired. It was, all in all, an amazing night.

Also, now that it is May, 30/30 is done and over with. Sometime within the next week or so I will pick and choose some of the better poems that I wrote and share. I’d recommend you get out there and read everyone’s writing. It’s amazing what some people can come up with.

So, I knocked off a couple of things on my list.

How have you been doing?

Sarah.