I Wanna go to San Antonio!

Nicolas will be in San Antonio working on my birthday in a few weeks. Since it’s on a Monday, we decided to both fly out on Friday and hang out for the weekend. This has brought back a lot of memories from when I was a kid.

While growing up, I was obsessed with going to San Antonio. Neither my family nor I can recall what started my obsession where I would walk around the house and repeat, “I wanna go to San Antonio!” in a horrible imitation of a Texan accent over and over again. Did I mention this went on for YEARS?

The other thing that I used to accompany that phrase with was the fact that I was going to die in an alley in San Antonio before my 30th birthday. This fact has Nic slightly freaked out, and he’s now planning on taking his knife and possibly his nunchucks (that’s right...my boyfriend has nunchuck skills...I’m such a lucky lady) and avoiding any alleyways we may come across.

I believe, in typical youngest child fashion, I was going for attention and shock value, rather than actually believing that I would die in an alley in San Antonio. However, this has made me reflect on the things that I would like to accomplish in my life. This all culminated last night with a meeting I attended where we discussed how to meet our needs and reach for our wants in order to be happy. I’ve been thinking a lot about the reasons that I’m too afraid or too overwhelmed to go for the things I want. Some of them are quite small, and some of them are life-changing. I’ve realized that not only do I need to get over myself and make my dreams come true, but I also need to quit putting them off, thinking that I have a whole lifetime. After all, 30 looked a lot further away when I was turning 10.

Great Interview

I just heard a great interview with Greg Mortsensen and thought I'd share. He wrote one of my favorite books, Three Cups of Tea. You can find information about it here. It's all about Greg's mission to promote peace in the middle east one school at a time. You can access the interview with Greg here, but a couple of my favorite quotes are:

"...if you fight terror, terrorism, it's based in fear. But if you wanna promote peace, it's based in hope."

"If we put one percent of the money that we put in the war on terror into education, it could have a profound difference."

He's such an inspiration to me because, as he put it, he was just a dirtbag from California who followed his heart or his intuition and has changed many lives because of it.

It gives me hope that any of us truly can make a difference.

African Children's Choir

Nic and I went to see the African Children's Choir last night at Kingsbury Hall. It is a choir made up of children from Africa between the ages of 7 and 11, most of which have lost one or both parents. They are part of a program by Music for Life which educates a lot of kids in shcools across Africa. They pick a group each year to go on this trip. They tour all over the world singing to raise money to send more kids to school. It's such a great program and the kids did a phenomenal job. You can learn more and see videos here.

It really made Nic and me excited to go to Africa in May!

Proud to be an American