Importance

I am switching things up today. I'm tired of writing about my days sitting at home or at work because I don't need to re-live the day right after it happened. Today, I will answer a journal prompt that I found online. I have bookmarked several pages with writing prompts, so hopefully this will become a "couple of times a week" type of thing. I will always list the prompt first and then answer it underneath. 

Journal Prompt: Describe the five most important things in your life. 

1.  My fiancé, Dan, is the single most important thing in my life. Yes, I know he's not a thing; he's a person. But I love him more than anything, and we have been through so much together in just under three years that it seems crazy. We’ve made it through an entire year of long distance after being together in person for just three short months. We’ve survived two basic trainings together (well, he was doing the tough work while I was sitting at home writing two letters a day each time). We’ve traveled around the country and to one other. We’ve lived together for several weeks at a time and not killed each other. But most of all we have supported each other 100% throughout lots of trials (him at the Academy, full of stress, me applying for 85 jobs and interviewing for several of them) and made sure we both know how important we are to each other. It hasn’t been an easy journey, but it has been worth it.

2. My furbabies (aka my four year old kittens), Gilligan and Stormy, hold the second closest place in my heart. Without fail, they know when something is wrong and comfort me by not leaving my side. When I’m sick, they sense it and stay near also. Gilligan puts me to sleep every night by sleeping on my head, purring like a motor. They are ALWAYS there, no matter what. They are like the children that I will not have for several years, except they don’t smell (too) bad, they don’t talk back, they soft and cuddly, and they sleep 80% of the time. Easy.

3. My friends, ranging anywhere from the ones I met in Kindergarten, like my beautiful Maid of Honor and best friend, Megan to my college friends and fraternity Brothers (yes, Brothers!) all the way to the ladies I have met in recent years from a wonderful USAFA Girlfriends group, have kept me sane. I don’t know where I would be without any one of them, and I feel so happy to have so many friends in my life. Even though I don’t get to see them much, social media (read: Facebook) has made it possible to stay in touch with everyone. Living in Colorado is tough for only one reason: being away from the people I am closest to. However, that leads me to number four on my list. 

4. Skype is something that I could not live without now that I live 650 miles away from my family. My grandma bought a laptop shortly before I moved away so that we could communicate easily, and now we e-mail and have Skype chats all the time. It’s really cool being able to talk to her (and my mom when she decides to join in when she’s there) even though we are 650 miles apart. Who knows how people survived without all this technology, but that leads me to another unrelated thought about how teachers got ANYTHING done before there was Google to help… but I digress. Video chats are awesome. End of story.

5. My camera is the fifth and final thing of importance in life. I guess it’s not necessarily the camera that I appreciate and value so much, but rather it is the thousands of pictures it produces each year, allowing me to capture every memory and be able to document them forever. Dan sometimes gets annoyed with the amount of pictures I take because he’s a guy and simply just doesn’t understand the appeal. He’s a good sport about it, though, and he always smiles when I say smile and he moves to the other side when I need him to. He poses for pictures when the situation requires it, and he doesn’t complain until afterward, and for that I am grateful. Since we’ve been dating, I have scrapbooked over 200 PAGES of pictures (yes, pages, not pictures… think about it… each page has three to four pictures on it… that’s a LOT of pictures, huh?). My dream is to learn how to REALLY take GOOD pictures. I will do it sometime in the future before we have kids of our own. I want to be able to take actual photographs of them and not have them turn out horribly. I also would love to be able to take decent looking photos with a decent (aka not my Sony Cybershot) on vacations and trips in the future, since we’ll be traveling and moving a LOT. I think I will get into that when Dan graduates from the Air Force Academy and I have some downtime while he is (hopefully) in pilot training. I can’t wait to get into that creative side of me, but I want to do it just for fun.

Wow, can you guys believe I didn’t mention books? I was going to just continue on when I realized that I already completed all five from the journal prompt. Oops. Just know that books hold a near and dear place in my heart, and I don’t go a single day without one.

Okay, well that post was extremely too long. Don’t expect much from tomorrow. I will write, but it will not be anywhere as lengthy or detailed as today’s.

Janelle