The 30-Day Blogging Challenge, Day 18: A Time When I Felt Passionate And Alive

• Day 18: A time when you felt passionate and alive.

Well, ‘passionate and alive’ basically mean ‘happy’, right? So I’m going to write about some times when I felt really, really happy.

1. November 2011, NaNoWriMo

I really enjoyed NaNo. I loved doing creative writing every day, and it was fun to see how my wordcount slowly but surely added up to 25,000. I was happy because it was fun to create my characters. I didn’t get writer’s block that much, so I wasn’t too stressed out about my novel.

2. Late July – early August 2010, Dunes Camp

I enjoyed Dunes Camp (at the Indiana Dunes) in 2008 and 2009 as well, but my last summer there was amazing. DC is an overnight camp that starts on Sunday afternoon and goes until Friday morning. My 3rd year there, we did the same things we had the previous two: hiking, going to the Dunes a lot, learning and performing skits about nature, having a cook-out on the beach, doing the ‘Walk through Time’ (a hike where we walked ‘back in time’ and some of the counselors pretended to be people from the past), doing the ‘Dune-Mazing Race’ (like the Amazing Race), doing the all-day hike, and camping in tents on Wednesday night. But in 2010, everything was just so much more fun. I think a major reason it was more fun was that I made more friends. I wasn’t that shy when I was younger, but I was a little bit shy, and I remember being pretty quiet at DC the two years before. In 2010, I made a lot of friends, including my Spanish friend/penpal, Ainhoa, who is awesome and who I really, really miss. We still write to one another, about once a month. Yes, Dunes Camp in 2010 was great, even more fun than the first night of DC in 2009, when we used soap, water, and shaving cream to turn our cabin floor into a slip-and-slide. Ha ha!

3.  April 2011, the ‘Reaching the Stars’ Discoveries Unlimited event

This DU event was awesome! It was so cool to meet an astronaut. At first, I had been disappointed that Sally Ride was sick and couldn’t come to our event. However, Captain Wendy B. Lawrence was really interesting! I got to talk with her and listened to her give a speech later on. I felt so happy that I stupidly agreed when Cathie Dull, the then-leader of DU (I miss you, Cathie!! I am including all these exclamation points for you!!!), asked me to talk about my experiences in DU at the reception, in front of a bunch of adults. But I did just fine!

There have been many other very happy times in my life, but I don’t want to bore you, so these were some highlights!