"I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." -Vincent Van Gogh

We've been talking about living life to the full in English Comp and today we all worked on our bucket lists.

An Excerpt of Miss Wright's Bucket List:

1. finish my book
2. visit Italy and England
3. be a Village Director
4. go on Wilderness with YL girls
5. take Fishers kids to YL camp
6. climb the bridge in Sydney, Australia
7. see the Northern Lights

An Excerpt of My Student's Bucket Lists:

1. make a difference in the world
2. go to college
3. go skydiving
4. meet One Direction
5. speak Spanish fluently
6. make a rainbow cake
7. kiss someone on the top of a ferris wheel
8. hike the Appalachian trail
9. swim with dolphins
10. go to Carlos' Bakery
11. hike the Grand Canyon
12. never get divorced
13. kill a shark with my bare hands
14. grow my hair to my waist
15. go to Camp Tecumseh all summer
16. meet Taylor Swift
17. raise money for cancer research
18. teach a kid to swim
19. write a blog
20. go crowd surfing
21. run through fire
22. visit all 50 states
23. get punched by Mike Tyson
24. provide cleaning water for a country in Africa
25. eat a fried snake
26. blow up something
27. longboard in California

After school three girls stayed to help me start the packing process. We have 24 packing days left until the big move. I'm pretty sure I can finish everything else in one day but it feels good to start. I've only been a teacher for three years but I've already collected so much and had plenty of things I could get rid off. 

I love getting texts like this from my girls, "Ok... so say you were running and were about a mile from being done and you find an extremely large turtle crossing the street. So you grab it and it starts biting and kicking you so you drop it in the grass. You make several more attempts to carry it but it was super sassy so you sprint home, get a bucket and put the turtle in the bucket. You then take the turtle home in the bucket and put some water in it and get the turtle wet because it looked very un-moisturized. Then you travel past the next door neighborhood to the creek you like to run by and find a small sandbar and set the turtle done. It then sprints its little bootie into the water and swims away... What would you name it?"

We went to Boom Bazz pizza, where I went with Alli last week, for Young Life leadership and I got to eat the chicken, onion, potato pizza and it was so delicious. Since we're approaching the end of the year we shared some of our favorite memories together: full court basketball at club, playing paintball at 2am and climbing all over the City Museum on the Freshmen mystery trip, the kitchen rave after Thanksgiving dinner, when Tony and Tom led club together as turkey hunters, David's 6 non-negotiable truths about women and the Fazoli's leadership just last week. This team is just the best.

"Good works do not earn God's favor they reflect God's favor" -Tullian Tchvidjian

Once we got to Campaigners we had to make our group starter question about favorite YL memories too. The girls told stories about: summitting at Wilderness and then getting Mt. Dew and candy, taking out a sailboat at Castaway and getting caught in the lily pads, competing to make the best biff (bathroom in forest floor) on Wilderness, their sophomore service weekend singing Trevor Hall acoustically with a bunch of Seniors, being a Wyld Life leader, David trying to seriously lead yoga at Timberwolf when they couldn't stop cracking up, the neon white out rave this fall, Molly Too Cool and Scottie Too Hottie leading program at Castaway, the dance rave at the leader summit when only Carmel leaders were left on the dance floor, the all-city Barn Party last year when we thought the floor was going to collapse and Campaigners this year in the Millers guest room. I'm going to miss these girls next year.