Foto Friday: Octoberful.

So no real theme for this week, just showing off what's been going on the past two weeks in mi vida, but first...

25,000 views y'all! (mini-milestone celebration time)

as of today, this lil blog has passed the 25,000 view mark! The views are almost all from this one concert-recap post and I can't be sure how many of these views are actual people and not just bots, but since I can't tell, I'm counting them all!

Now back to our regularly scheduled post:

The first weekend in October was filled with soccer and friends, starting with a very rainy DC United game (which they tied to clinch a spot in the playoffs)...

Yay for friends who love soccer enough to stand getting soaked in the rain with me!

...Then continued on Saturday at the RFK Auxiliary field for my coed league's All Star game #gopink! 

(we won, even if the blue team was much better at the whole organized-picture thing)

The representatives from our team also got to accept the trophy for having won our division last spring, chyeeaaah SSFC!

I also don't have any photos of it (which I guess defeats the purpose of FotoFriday) but I had my first performance on stage playing acoustic/rhythm guitar with the worship band at my church and it was great, everyone was so encouraging! And I also participated in a Chili Cook-Off with a Pumpkin Chicken Chili (recipe here)

Picture via original recipe (is this FotoFriday cheating if it's a professional picture? Imma say no, my blog, my theme,  my rules)

This past holiday weekend started out with some more soccer spectating (and another tie) with a group viewing of Landon Donovan's last game with Team USA

Saturday was spent resting up to attack the Army Ten-Miler with the family (minus 2OB, plus a Katie, who ROCKED the race with 12 hours notice) on Sunday.

The course was different this year but it was amazing as always and was the third Army Ten Miler for me and the third with AMAZING weather!

My sister and I also always run in matching shirts with HOO and AAH written on our backs. For anyone who doesn't know, in the Army, HOOAAH is kind of an all-encompassing/catch-all cheer, encouragement, response. We always get comments and cheers mid race and the best is when someone tells us it encourages them! We even had a gentlemen this year tell us around mile 8 that this was the third year he's seen us, that makes him 3 for 3!

The rest of the weekend was spent mainly recovering off my feet with #notsosecretproject14

bulky yarn = my favorite!

A (not very social) weekend's progress #bananaforscale:

My final activity this past weekend involved scoping out my soon to be new room (if all goes well)!!! 

Soon to be new room?!?!?

Lastly, yesterday I received the AMAZING news that a friend and former club and college teammate who is battling brain cancer had her first post-chemo scan return TUMOR FREE! She's not completely done with treatment but this is a HUGE positive step towards beating this disease! She is a fighter and we're all behind her, I can't wait to visit her in a little over a week! #KickAsh!

via

New Year, New Endeavor

This winter break I keep telling myself the goal is to finish the final paper for which my wonderful professor granted me an extension, prepare for my last semester of law school,  and most importantly get a job. Instead (and oh-so-obviously), my mind is filled with all the wonderful other things I could be doing with my life.

The conclusion I keep returning to is that as a person-on-the-go, I am constantly filling my schedule with things to do but not taking the time to properly reflect and meditate about them.  The problem with sitting and meditating is that I am an extrovert! While I enjoy time alone to reflect, I re-charge my batteries through interaction with other people.  This means all the withdrawal, alone, focus, study time involved in finals period wreaks havoc with my inner balance.  I become emo-Julia with pensive philosophical thoughts that lead to sadness and inertia (and a lot of web-browsing).

This particular finals led me to a Quarter-Life crisis, (for anyone who was unaware, 24 is almost 25, a shocking conclusion I reached just days ago) where I tried to examine what made me happy in life and how I ended up in law school of all places.

I also had random, not-productive-to-actually-share-because-I'm-sure-other-people-have-expressed-it-much-better meditations on how we as humans shape our own lives through Production vs. Consumption as well as the roles Reflection and Dialogue can play in our lives.

So in order to have a creative outlet, produce something for the world and have time to reflect I have created a YouTube channel that will work like a vlog, which I will connect it to this blog.  The overall goal would be to use it as a platform for connection and dialogue with other people but more than likely it will just be some sort of public outlet for my creativity until law school makes me too busy to keep up with it.

It will be about things that interest me, and I understand the whole idea is somewhat selfish/narcissistic, but really it will be a way for me to explore who I want to be and what valuable connections exist in my life to allow me to impact the world more efficiently.  This means I will examine my relationship with myself, my relationship with my peers, my connection to the activities that interest me (yoga, soccer, performing), my relationship with random people on the internet, my relationship with my environment, and my relationship with my lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Basically, there are multiple goals: reflection, and dialogue, expression, connections, sharing, creative outlet, and my favorite: productive procrastination.

Here is the first entry/welcome video:

you can go to the channel and check out what else I have up but just know the first two things I uploaded were college art projects and also happened back when YouTube videos had to be supercompressed and you can't see everything... who am I kidding, they're just weird!