With the price of plane tickets on the rise and me pointing out to Alan that the longer we wait the more expensive it’s going to be, he finally gave me the ‘go ahead’ to purchase plane tickets for him to come see me in a couple of weeks. He’ll arrive in Charleston at 11:50pm on June 25th and be here until July 5th when he leaves at 6am. I can’t wait…it’s been a very long five months and I’m ready to be in his arms, see his face and be able to spend time with him; this is what I need, and I’m finally able to say I’m going to get it!

However,  I must say that planning for any trip is very hetic. I had to wait around for awhile because Alan wasn’t sure when he’d be going back to work and didn’t want to plan anything in case he happened to get called back which I completely understood but with the price of gas and oil on the rise, tickets are inansely expensive. I mean…when I originally started looking they were around $260-280, and that was about two or three weeks ago; the trip is still 3 weeks away but the other night when I looked it had gone up to $300+. Granted, we could have saved about $30 by going with an air carrier other than Northwest, but we decided to spend the extra $30 so he could fly straight through on an air carrier we’re both familiar with and like. But even in the time that I was given the ‘go ahead’ the price jumped from $338 to $353…and thinking it’d keep climbing I bought them last night only for them to drop back down to $338 today.

But you know…$353 may seem like alot of money, and really when you think about it - it is a good chunk of change and even I cringed at the thought of spending so much…but I hate seeing large amounts of cash come out of my bank anyways because I’m such a frugal spender. However, $353 is well worth it considering I haven’t seen Alan in five months and I’m ready to be in his arms again! I can’t wait - 3 weeks and counting…AND HE’LL BE HERE FOR FOURTH OF JULY, which I’m REALLY excited about - fireworks and romance, yay!

It’s amazing some of the things we will say to someone admist an argument. For me, I prematurely told Alan I had gotten accepted to Michigan State the other day during an argument, in hopes of diffusing the situation. My heart was in a good place, but I shouldn’t have said what I did. Granted, what I said doesn’t hurt anyone, the decision from MSU has played a major role in our relationship considering that if I get in I will be moving to Michigan which will change our whole relationship from being long distance to being “normal.”

I told him today that the argument we had and what had been said had scared me so much and upset me so much that I prematurely told him about MSU in hopes of diffusing the situation; I couldn’t keep the fact that I had told the white lie to myself, even though nothing had been mentioned again about MSU since that day. I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal but I don’t like the feeling of even the smallest of lies gives me, so I fessed up. He apparently has already told his mom that I got accepted too, which I didn’t know…

Bah. It seems lately I can’t do or say anything right and that I just keep disappointing myself and him. Even though, I said what I did, I didn’t do it to upset anyone especially him if it did. My letter has been sent out and it will be here next week which will give me a for sure answer…I just hope it works out the way I want it too.

When I was doing paid blogging awhile back, I changed my files around to make sure that search engine bots would crawl my site so that pages would get indexed; now it seems that they want to index everything including hotlinking to actual files on my server!

I don’t know where the hell these referrers came from, but i noticed earlier a referring link that directed me to some japanese site that had a hotlink to an mp3 file on my server. Now I know why things have been loading so slowly as well as an increase in bandwidth. I immediately went into my control panel and enabled hotlinking protection which disabled all current hotlinks out there. I also made sure that when you type in the actual address to the folder that my mp3s are stored in, that you get directed to the main site so that no one can go into the folders and download from there.

I got that taken care of, but can’t seem to get the stupid bot off my site which has been here for the past…I don’t know 10 hours?! and flooding my stats page like crazy. Hopefully, the stupid thing will go away within the next day or two otherwise I’m going to be irritated…!

There’s nothing I could say to you
Nothing I could ever do to make you see
What you mean to me

All the pain, the tears I cried
Still you never said goodbye and now I know
How far you’d go

I know I let you down
But it’s not like that now
This time I’ll never let you go

I will be, all that you want
And get myself together
Cause you keep me from falling apart

All my life, I’ll be with you forever
To get you through the day
And make everything okay

I thought that I had everything
I didn’t know what life could bring
But now I see, honestly

You’re the one thing I got right
The only one I let inside
Now I can breathe, cause you’re here with me
And if I let you down
I’ll turn it all around
Cause I would never let you go
I will be, all that you want
And get myself together
Cause you keep me from falling apart

All my life, I’ll be with you forever
To get you through the day
And make everything okay
Cause without you I cant sleep
I’m not gonna ever, ever let you leave
You’re all I’ve got, you’re all I want
Yeah

And without you I don’t know what I’d do
I can never, ever live a day without you
Here with me, do you see,
You’re all I need
And I will be, all that you want
And get myself together
Cause you keep me from falling apart

All my life (my life), I’ll be with you forever
To get you through the day
And make everything okay

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Sometimes, we get so caught up in the world around us - school, work, activities, families, etc - that we don’t take the time to seriously realize, reflect and be thankful for the people that our in our lives that mean so much to us; sometimes, it takes almost losing one of those people for us to realize how thankful we are to have them.

I always knew I loved my boyfriend, and I knew from the moment that we started talking that my relationship with him would be completely different than any other relationship I had before. Over the past year, I have grown to love him more every day and have allowed my walls to come down completely to where I was able to give him my heart for everything that is it. However, I did not realize and was not prepared for how much loving someone could hurt at the same time; it is no lie that long distance relationships are hard as hell, and it is no lie that I have said some hurtful things and have been frustrated over petty things that I should have just thrown to the way side…but at the same time, it is no lie that no matter how much I cried, how much I’ve screamed, how much I’ve hurt him by the things I’ve called him, that he has never given up on me.

We have both said at one time or another that we were done, we couldn’t do it anymore, the relationship wasn’t going to work and many of those times, one of us has believed it to be true…but this time it felt more real than it ever had before, so much so that it literally made me sick. It was at that moment that I realized just how much I do love my boyfriend and how big of an influence he has been on my life. It is no lie that in the year we have been dating, I have been the happiest I have ever been since I moved to South Carolina. After not dating anyone for three years and literally throwing dating and meeting anyone into the garbage, I met the man of my dreams…and while, we have had our up’s & down’s that can be attributed to our stubborn headedness and our strong minds and strong hearts, as well as the distance we’ve had between us - I can honestly say that he knows me better than anyone, and he’s the one person who has had my back every time even when I didn’t believe it.

It may have taken a petty argument and him telling me he was leaving for me to realize exactly what I would be losing, but I would have rather that happened than to keep taking forgranted what I’ve had all along. My goal in every relationship I’ve ever had has been to make my partner happy and for my partner to be happy with me and I realize that I do make him happy by being me…nothing added, just plain ol’ me. I take responsibility for my actions, for my words, and for my faults but I’m also taking a stance and letting the world know along with my boyfriend that: I love you Alan Goodsmith, and you ARE the most precious thing to me because you give me that hope, you allow me to keep my head up when I don’t think I can, and you believe in me when I don’t even believe in myself. And like the song says above, “all the pain, the tears I cried and still you never said goodbye,” you have not given up on me even when I felt like giving up…for every time I ever thought you didn’t love me and that you didn’t care, I truly am sorry for the bottom of my heart because I do realize now what it is that I actually have and I am so very lucky.

I love you more than words can describe and I could never thank you enough for not giving up on me. Keep being my rock, and I’ll keep being yours - life isn’t easy but it’ll be easier if we live it together.

I’m still alive, but barely; I’m barely keeping my head above water but I’m trying with all the strength I have…I went to church for the first time in ages tonight with my mom and it felt good - I realize what I’ve been missing all along. I never have been a Bible thumping Christian person, who follows everything by the book and turns over everything to the Lord, but I do miss the person I was before when I attended Church on a regular basis and was around said people - I felt more at ease and more calm with myself and life in general, it gave me another direction to turn too instead of getting angry…I always had people who had my back even when things were going crazy around me, and they were the ones who kept me above water and allowed me to keep breathing instead of drowning.

I’ll never be a Bible thumping Christian, but I do know what I believe in and what I believe in is Spiritual Guidance whether it is via God, Jesus Christ, or some other higher power - everyone needs something they can turn too and rely on when things get rough, and praise when things are going well. This is what I’ve needed all along and I was naive to think that I could handle it all by myself, instead handling all by myself only got me deeper into the things I couldn’t change. Perhaps, now I will be able to fix the things I’ve wanted to fix all along because I’ll have the guidance to do so…

The crazy thing about tonight though is this: our church, which really isn’t a church because we don’t hold church in a church building but rather the club house in the pastors neighborhood, has frequent out of town guests who come and visit. There’s a group from Florida and tonight there was a group from Minnesota; I’ve never met this group of people before, not one single person from Minnesota knows me or my situations, anything I’ve been through or accomplished and Karen (the pastors wife) asked the wife of the group, Kelly, to press in and pray for me and see if she got a word from the Lord. What she came up with was a long scripture from the Bible that I didn’t understand a bit, but at the end she said “You are qualified.” Any time that I ever thought I wasn’t good enough or wasn’t doing the right thing (IE: working, school, how I live my life in general, the opinions I have, my feelings in general about things) or just felt I wasn’t worth it - I had always been qualified and she let me know this…the Lord let me know this. I felt like so much weight had been lifted off my shoulders, because it all made sense; I AM QUALIFIED, I AM WORTH IT, I AM DOING THE RIGHT THINGS, I just need to BELIEVE IT and now I DO!

We all have our up’s and down’s and those moments in life where it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to ever get better, but you have to keep having faith and hope and keep on trying because if you give up…you will never know what could have been. I will still have my moments were I’ll doubt myself or wonder if I’m doing the right thing and making the right decision but now I can remind myself that I am qualified, that I am worth it and that I will be okay and this came from the Lord to someone who had never met me, and never spoken a word to me prior to telling me this. I am not proud of everything in my life, I am not proud of the hurtful things I have spoken in the last day or so, and for those things I am sorry and for some of those things I do not regret…I am only human and I have my down falls but I have more things about me that are worth while than things that are not. I am an amazing individual with a strong mind and a strong heart and anyone who is in my life, is my friend and has a relationship with me is a lucky person - not because I am ignorant and think I’m awesome, but because I’m qualified.

My sunburn from Memorial Day has started peeling, no wonder my chest has been feeling itchy the last few days; hopefully it won’t last too long, I’ve been really good about putting lotion on it since the day I burned. It’s nasty though and the sound it makes when pulling the skin off is weird…haha.

Off to work.

I was reading through the Yahoo! front page and it’s news like I do every day and saw this article features on the front page…I liked it and it’s ideas, especially the beginning of the article:

So you’re in a relationship and your partner starts nagging. She tells you that you just don’t understand her, and that she really wishes that you would just do more “little things.”

It’s not the big things that make her happy; it’s paying attention to the little details and showing you care that is really meaningful. She doesn’t necessarily need lavish gifts — she needs to know you’re thinking about her.

4. Send her a text in the middle of the day telling her “I miss your smile from this morning” or “Last night was amazing!” or “The conversation we had last night was great.”

5. Send an eCard in the middle of the day… something cute to remind her how much you really care about her.

15. Call her in the middle of the day and just say hello. Don’t wait for her to call you.