the joys of applying to college from a different continent

I knew that applying to be college would be stressful. I knew that auditioning for all the college dance programs would be stressful. But I didn't anticipate having to coordinate and complete it all from 6,000 miles away.

The applying to college part wasn't too bad... once I arranged for letters of recommendations (BIG thank you to Ms. Dudley :D ) and transcripts sent from both California and Switzerland, and once I realized that I would have several extra hours on all the deadlines because of the time difference, and once I stopped panicking about express mailing applications from across the world (and my mom stopped panicking about the price of express mailing applications across the world), it turned out hardly more stressful than your average college application process.

Auditions are another story. First of all, it just seems to be a pattern with ballet that there are always conflicting auditions. Luckily (luckily??) I'm only auditioning for 6 programs, so you'd think it wouldn't be too difficult to arrange. Had I still been living in California, though, it would have been plausible to fly out to Indiana or Utah or New York or wherever on Thursday or Friday, audition that weekend, and get back in time for school on Monday morning, but it doesn't work like that since our move. So we've had to figure out how I can make it to the most auditions while missing the least school... not an easy task... especially since my last audition is conveniently on my first day of ski week, so I can't even use my vacation to audition. So I'm taking three weeks (!!) off of school to fly all over the United States visiting colleges and auditioning. I'm really excited, but I'm also sooo nervous. But that's another story.

I'm also really excited because I'll get to spend my ski week in California. While I loved my winter break in California, it was disappointing because there were still so many people I wanted to see! So I'm really looking forward to catching up with more of you.

On an entirely separate note, we got about 6 inches of snow yesterday! Apparently that was a really big deal, and it hasn't happened in recent years. Up until now, we've only had light snow, a couple inches. But this was incredible... I love it! (I'm ready for some warm temperatures, though. Why isn't it possible for it to snow when it's, say, 80*F out?)