The Doll Sweet Journal.: May 2023 Randoms

Hey yo, hey yo, here be the randoms of May!

I worked for the library for a few hours at a town event.

Here I am at 5-1/2 years old in 1986. This picture was used for a Mother's Day slideshow in Relief Society.

It was back when I went by my middle name of Josaleen (pronounced "Joe-zu-leen") and when I was "pretty as a princess." 😁

Delicious food from the aforementioned Mother's Day Relief Society meeting.

Spotted a couple of days later at a bakery on the Cape...

A pretty beach scene from down the street from the Cape house.

I never liked these chairs that much so a few weeks ago I gave them away to a charity organization and replaced them with patio table chairs from my (non-Cape) house.

I snapped a picture of this because I thought this was a really cool fact: horseshoe crabs have been on earth for at least 445 million years, 200 million years before the dinosaurs. That's amazing! We see them on the Cape a lot, usually washed up on the beach.

I saw this book at the library and I want to read it so I took a picture so I wouldn't forget. I devoured Nancy Drew books when I was young and have always liked her.

I want to read this book too.

A blast from the past from my senior year of high school! We were on a church trip to Palmyra and we went to Niagara Falls. I'm still friends with three of them, two of whom are in my stake. In some ways, old friends are the best friends because you grew up together and have known each other for so long.

A sneak peek of my kitchen-to-come in the townhouse (although this isn't the exact kitchen).

My new storage unit, nice and empty and waiting to be filled.

I started filling it in May, but only with a few things.

I was working on packing the storage room in the basement, and I got rid of a lot of things (I was downsizing, after all). I came across Sam's old Bear Handbook from third grade when I was his den leader. 💙

I'd kept a lot of my college books for twenty years because I liked them and they were a visual representation of my acquired knowledge (or something like that 😄). But it was time to finally let most of them go.

I majored in Political Science with a dual concentration in American Politics and International Relations. Had my life taken a different path, I was very interested in going into government work, things like diplomacy, policymaking, speechwriting, etc. In another life, I'd be living in D.C. trying to help our federal government be more noble like it used to be.

I fully believed back then as an undergrad and still believe ~23 years later that true and lasting peace between Israel and its enemies will not be achieved until the return of Jesus Christ. But try writing that in a term paper. 😆

I was taking a Foreign Policy class when 9/11 happened. I had been staying on top of the news for this class and was completely shocked by 9/11. So many of us, including foreign policy experts and professors at Penn, didn't see it coming at all, at least not in the way that it happened.

I used to be able to read novels in Spanish!

I bought this beautiful Spanish dictionary set early on during my time at Penn and I didn't use it a ton but I really liked it. I ended up minoring in Spanish.

This was the book for a sociology class I took with my friend Uche. The professor was a kind old man who said unintentionally funny things that made us giggle.