It Officially Begins....

I made it! I survived my five hours of packing Sunday night and the two plane rides here after getting up at 4:30 in the morning! I can’t even believe it, I’m in Chicago!

The last couple days at home were slightly crazy. I didn’t start packing until Sunday night, something that I swore I would not do. By the end I was yelling, “I hate packing!!!!” and my dad was trying his best to console. He suggested I give up traveling but not for this trip, it was too late to back out.

The plane rides were pretty uneventful. The most notable things being:

1. There was a fly on the plane. I decided if I wrote books I would write a book about that fly who traveled the country, or at least from Salt Lake City to Houston.

2. I got my first meal on a plane and it wasn’t bad. It consisted of a bowl of Total cereal, a banana and orange juice. I had never eaten Total before and I liked it, it reminds me of Wheaties, which is my favorite cereal.

3. One of the flight attendants totally looked like a mannequin. She had very white skin, was very skinny and wore bright red lipstick. I once saw a twilight episode where the girl was really a mannequin (Marcia…) and it reminded me of that.

4. I had really heavy bags which resulted in lots of people helping me put it into the overhead. It must have been near 40 pounds and included my scriptures and textbook and guidebook and Lydia, my flute.

5. I read over a hundred pages of Anne of Green Gables after deciding that the online movie wasn’t worth my time. I like the book, thank you Jenifer. I then started thinking like the book such as, “Wouldn’t that be quite lovely….?” and naming lots of things.

6. I slept in strange positions. I was having a hard time completely falling asleep but once I did and I couldn’t remember what was going on when I woke up.

So things went well. After flying into Chicago I then took the blue line train to connect with the brown line which was an elevated train and amazing to Jim’s place. Yay Jim! We have had so much fun so far. Mainly we’ve just been having flute talk but it’s the best. I feel like I’m a better player just by listening to him! He also made me get out my flute and gave me a lesson with the promise of one a day while I’m here. We also walked four blocks to get DEEP DISH PIZZA! The first thought Jim had when he first ate it was, “Wow, this is so much better than the pie.” There’s no words for it, nothing to even compare it to. Incredible. Life changing. Walking to get it was extremely cold although I was very happy to discover that Chicago isn’t a completely awful place. Apparently we are the safe part of town and it was quite pleasant. Lots of little restaurants around and cute little houses and nice people walking by. It was very cold though and windy.

Jim lives in a little studio apartment, which is so fun. Tiny, but amazing. He told me over spring break five people are coming to visit and we got a good laugh trying to imagine how’d they all fit. We blew up my air mattress with my blow dryer and it worked much better than either of us expected. I also got to work on my breath support as I manually blew up the last of it….. This morning Jim is in class, which let me sleep in and later we’re meeting up and I’m coming to his band rehearsal which has much promise of being amazing. I am very excited and tonight we’re going to a concert. Unfortunately the Chicago symphony isn’t playing while I’m here but the top orchestra at DePaul is performing tonight and that’s going to be incredible! I’m excited, it’ll be great. We are also going downtown sometime and we’re going to eat lots of good food. I am so glad that I came and I’m so proud to be the first person that Jim sees from Salt Lake in eight months. Yeah, I’m that cool.