Happy Halloween

It doesn’t seem to matter how old I get, I still love Halloween.  What is better than dressing up in a costume and collecting mountains of candy?  As a child, we would always trick-or-treat with the neighbors, ensuring that we hit every house in the neighborhood.  Then we would methodically count, sort and record our candy before trading it.  Quite the little business professionals my brothers and I were.

Today my mom sent me some Halloween pictures from the past so I thought I would share them with you….

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Taking First

My roommates and I decided that for senior year we will try to always say “yes” and take full advantage of every opportunity we come across.  So when I was talking to my roommate Bekah at 1:30am on Friday and learned she was running a 5K in the morning, I decided to say yes and join her. 

The 5K benefits CASA, a charity which promotes volunteer advocacy for abused and neglected children.  By 8:30am on this chilly Saturday morning we were up, all registered and ready to run.

We started off at an even pace, nothing too fast.  For the last mile we decided to pick up the pace and play catch-up to all of the runners ahead of us.  This turned out to be a good idea because before we knew it the race was done and guess what??...  Well I ended up taking first place for my age group and second for women overall and Bekah took fourth place for our age group; pretty impressive considering our last minute decision to even run. 

We finished...

And still had energy!

I even got a medal.

Had to snap a pic with the Chick-fil-A cow.

The 5K was lots of fun and inspired us to take a look at the Disney Half-Marathon!

Kappa Kruise

You learn a lot from being the social chair of your sorority….

1. Buses will always be late and always get lost.
2. Plan, plan, and plan and then on the actual day you just wing it.
3. Not everyone will always be happy, but you can usually get about 99% of them to be so that counts as 100%.
4. Being in charge of an event and still partaking in it is an art to be mastered.

My friend Tessa and I have learned these lessons and plenty more over the past year from being social chairs.  And I do have to say, we make a pretty good team!  Last night we had our second to last function that we will be in charge of….Kappa Kruise!

The Social Chairs



For the event we rented a boat on Lake Travis for dinner and dancing.  We decided to make it a black cocktail event, but then have all the seniors surprise everyone by wearing blue!  Everything started off smoothly….

1. My date Reece was on time.

2. Everyone arrived to the parking lot for the buses and to take pictures.

BUT of course the buses were a bit late AND then they got incredibly lost.  Imagine a bus doing a 10 point turn on a 1½ lane wide road….terrifying!  We eventually made it to the boat; anyways it wouldn’t be a Kappa event if we didn’t get a little lost and arrive on Kappa time.

For some the bus ride was sunny...

For others sleepy...

And for others they just wanted to scream.

The boat of course made up for all of that.  After trekking through a gravel path and down a steep flight of stair, we were greeted by the booming voice of The Captain.

The Flagship of Texas

The rest of the night was filled with fajitas, fun, and plenty of dancing.  Unfortunately for the big Ranger fans on board watching the game on an iPad, the night didn’t go quite as planned, but the rest of us had a great time!!

Wilson drinks Dr. Pepper 10 while Kristen chooses regular...

Dr. Pepper may need to re-think their marketing.

Little and Grand Little!

And of course none of this would be possible without our wonderful advisor Tommye Lou!

Selling Indiana University

The other weekend I had the opportunity to travel to Indiana University for the National Team Selling Competition sponsored by Altria.   Along with the 14 students in my Advance Sales Class and our professor, we created two teams to compete.  We ended up winning 4^th and 5^th place out of the 21 schools participating in the competition.

The week prior to the competition, we spent prepping; anticipating possible questions and practicing with role-plays.  After making it through a 5:30 am wake-up call, flights and having 16 people crammed into a 15 person van (which was more like a 12 person van) for an hour, we safely arrived at our hotel.  The first night consisted of a networking dinner and guess who I came across?....My 4^th grade teacher’s son who I went to high school with.  He attends the University of Washington - Small World!

Discussing strategies....

Can sometimes be exhausting!

Friday was competition day.  Our goal was to help the natural foods store “Wildly Fresh” develop a packaging, sampling, and social media plan for our all natural “Nature’s Junction” popcorn.  In the morning we had a 15 minute call with their VP of Operations and in the afternoon we had a 20 minute call with the VP of Operations and the VP of Compliance.  The challenge was adapting to the specific needs of the company that they threw at us during the call.  We all enjoyed working together as a team and truly bonded over our hours of prep.

Spencer was pumped about the many fun things to do in Bloomington, IN!

Trying to make a style statement with brown shoes and blue socks....

Mother Bear's Pizza...voted 9th best in the nation and it really was!

While the competition did take up a lot of our time, we were still able to explore the University and town which were absolutely BEAUTIFUL in the fall.  We all jokingly said that we would come to IU in a heartbeat based off of the campus alone.  But don’t worry, once a Baylor Bear, always a Baylor Bear.

Found the Kappa House and even got to go inside.

And some frat that had the words to our Baylor Kappa Rap on their steps.

While I was at the Kappa House, the boys thought it would be the perfect opportunity to meet some Indiana sorority girls....what they didn't realize is how a herd of them in suits is quite intimidating!

The beautiful campus!

Some Things Mom Just Does Best

There are some things that moms just do better; one of them is cleaning.  It doesn’t seem to matter that we are 21 and 22 years old and have lived on our own for over 3 years; we still can’t manage to keep our house clean.  It is almost as if there are little fairies that come and mess everything up right after we clean to make us appreciate all our moms do around the house.

For example, several weeks ago we spent several hours scrubbing our floors in the kitchen and dining room.  We learned that the tile is not a grey stone but rather a creamy stone.  We were so proud of our work, but only a few days later our tiles were grey again.  And it is not like we are messy people; our floors just don’t stay clean.

If you look closely, you can see the darker, dirty tile in the area I am in....

Part of that may be due to a little problem Emily discovered today.  Turns out that when 5 girls live in the same house they shed their hair; and I mean A LOT!  The vacuum didn’t seem to be sucking up any of the dirt on the carpet so Emily decided to turn it over and found a literal web of hair spun so tightly into the bottom brush that nothing could pass through into the vacuum bag.

We proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes cutting it out and ended up with a monster of a hairball.  Good news is the vacuum started to suck dirt off the floor again.  The bad news is that it no longer disposes the dirt in the vacuum bag and spits everything out again every minute or two.  Emily took vacuuming by hand to a whole new level by periodically picking up the little piles of dirt the vacuum left behind.

The shoe is there to help you put the size of the hair ball into perspective

Moral of the story is maybe one day when we become moms and actually have cleaning equipment that works properly, we will be able to keep a perfectly clean house.  Until then, we consider a dirty floor normal and are much more thankful for the effort our moms put in to keeping the house clean.