top ten of the oh-oh's: #10

ok so this is a little daunting. i am attempting to put together a top ten list of events/moments/things in my life from the entire decade. brace yourselves.
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the decade started out rather inauspiciously. i was on a snowboarding trip my senior year of high school in crested butte, colorado and managed to break my wrist the 7th time down the mountain on the very first day of the trip. so my friend lacy and i watched a "crocodile hunter marathon (RIP)" and worked on her little sister's pokemon puzzle while we counted down to the millennium. party like it's 1999, people.

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ok this is not from the colorado trip, but this is right around the turn of the millennium (we didn't have digital cameras back then so the photographic record is spotty)

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from there things really picked up. i defy time to hand me a better decade in my life ever (though i wouldn't mind it trying). i got to shake off the dregs of high school life to attend my dream college, meet almost all of my best friends in the entire world, stumble across the meaning of life, meet my dream guy and start a family with him all before the buzzer rang on this ten year span. here we go.

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10. georgia tech august 2000-july 2004 and forever in my heart! ok this one almost doesn't even need to be on here because it's the portal for pretty much every other item on the list. every single day of 7th through 12th grade i drove right by tech (coming within yards of the volleyball gym and CCF) on my way to school. never did it occur to me that i would end up there.

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tech was my "safety school" when i started applying to colleges. the one i knew i would get into just in case all the other ones rejected me. the academics were a little less than what we were aspiring to for my college education (we had be searching and going on college tours all over the nation since my 8th grade year...but never visited tech...IRONY!) but mainly it wasn't a top choice because i could never play volleyball at a D1 school in a major conference like the ACC. even though i was very good in high school and highly recruited it was only by nerdy schools that definitely didn't give athletic scholarships and whose teams were about the level of a california high school team.

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celebrating the centennial olympiad at the bronze medal baseball game just before starting high school (yikes). i have already visited several colleges at this point in life. (hopefully not looking like this: a patriotic beagle).
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i was too short (only 5'7) to play my best position of outside hitter and i wasn't a good enough setter to play that position that normally goes to shorter girls. this is funny to me because tech wasn't even good at volleyball at this time, not even ranked in the top 30, and yet we knew it was too lofty to even hope to play there. so tech was the "if all else fails" route.

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my junior or senior year of high school. i see now that god didn't want me to date until college. thus he smote my face and hid the knowledge of mascara from my eyes.

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i remember one time i got a deficiency in calculus my senior year at woodward because i had a C average and my mom was sitting in the study in a high-backed, winged reading chair when i told her and she said, "you keep that up and you'll end up at georgia tech like some of your other friends!" i don't know if it was loyalty to my defamed "other friends" or some foresight planted deep in my heart, but a flame was fanned within me that made this a grievous insult. i stormed at my mom at a full sprint and plowed into her chair, just intending to give her a bump. i then watched with glee and horror as she went tipping slowly, slowly over while still in the chair and squealing for my dad to get me in major trouble. ahhhh the golden years.

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this little anecdote is also ironic because my mom, a former UGA cheerleader (she used to run uga the bulldog out right before the team came storming on the field also), would become the most ravenous georgia tech fan to ever prowl techwood drive. her die-hard superfandom even got her in a fistfight with and elderly nebraska-fan gentleman during my senior season at tech. sweet, sweet irony.
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notice my mom's embroidered GT novelty vest. worn with pride after a tournament our freshman year at colorado state. my hair is a weird color because i had recently dyed it red (which came out purple) and then black to fix THAT. and then i had to spent 6 hours getting it stripped and re colored professionally so that i wouldn't look like a freak at my cousin's wedding and for the 3 years it would've taken to grow out.
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i came to tech right when they were starting to renovate the entire campus and bring it out of the dark ages of architecture and design. i would come to appreciate the rarity of our beautiful, spacious, green campus that was somehow also nestled right downtown in the largest city in the southeast. so cool! i mean where else is like that?

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i stupidly attempted to major in mechanical engineering while (spoiler alert) playing volleyball full time. note to incoming freshman: if you attend only two calc II lectures and one physics lecture the entire semester at tech you will get a D and an F, no matter how smart you were in high school or what you got on your SAT's. so i waved the white flag of surrender and switched to management after losing my academic HOPE scholarship (for in state students) for falling below a 3.0. this was the major for me. i literally attended maybe 5% of my classes in my 3 remaining years there and managed (pun) to get dean's list every semester. FUN! this is not bragging, it's really that easy. but hey a tech degree is a tech degree. especially if you have no professional aspirations.

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i don't know if i would have enjoyed tech as much if i hadn't played sports. i definitely think to go there and have a good time you need to have something besides academics to be involved in whether that's a fraternity, a campus ministry, a service group or a club. i do know that i have the best friends in the world, the perfect husband for me, a flawless little 7 month old and eternity with jesus to look forward to because god decided to play the ultimate joke on me and send me to a school that was closer to my parents than even my high school had been.

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something to get involved in: just a normal weeknight in our dorm my freshman year.

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dear god, i hope you enjoyed laughing at me all those time i talked about moving far, far away. p.s. thanks a million.