More images from a snowy Santa Fe, taken from my phone at 12,000 + feet.

8:25 a.m., SF

Here's picture from snowy Santa Fe. Bike ride home from work, saw this, almost fell off my bike, too beautiful. Sangre de Cristo Mountains...scary name.

3:13 pm, SF

Woke up to a bit of a blizzard this morning. Well, more accurately, I was woken up by a brilliantly orange colored sky at about 3:00 am, at which point, I noticed a significant amount of snow. I'm not from Santa Fe, I'm from Chicago. I've only lived here for about seven months. But, I am told that almost every time the sky turns orange we have a blizzard. Kind of a beautiful/fantastic/bizarre phenomenon.

As I read more blogs of fellow applicants I'm feeling a bit of negativity and general antsyness regarding people's applications. Let me say these words of encouragement as a person who has already been through the entire process:

IT TAKES A LONG TIME! Don't be surprised if you don't hear from them for months. This isn't to say that I haven't been feeling extremely anxious this time around, in fact I think it's worse than last time, but just immerse yourself in the present as much as you can. Those of you that are sort of putting things on hold until you feel better prepared, I think this is a wonderfully mature thing to come to terms with. I myself was guilty of jumping the gun with service last time and it ended up costing me about two years of serious contemplation and hard work. If you don't feel ready, then put it off, it will always be there. It's hard when you've told friends and family that you're doing Peace Corps and now you're having second thoughts, but it's better than terminating early. Peace Corps makes us wait for precisely this reason, 27 months is a long time and we need to be ready.

As a person who ETed, I had to go through some very serious hurdles to make it this far (nomination) again and there's no telling whether or not Placement will turn me down. It's likely that they will. It is extremely rare that a person in my position gets nominated again and I have yet to come in contact with anyone that has even tried to reapply, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. But I think it's wise to apply for a few things at once; grad school, other volunteer organizations and not put all of your eggs in one basket. I wish you all the best and I do hope that we can all make our dreams come true. Keep your heads up and whatever luck we do have is likely to work in our favor. <3

8:32 am, SF

Still no new from Peace Corps, which actually isn't THAT surprising considering I was nominated for a fall 2010 post. I'm starting to sort of accept that I won't hear back for several months and it's a relief. I submitted my application to University of London on Friday and, remarkably, I believe I hear back before Peace Corps. I'm still working on applications to a few other schools just to have a few options come spring. For those of you who have the waiting blues, I'd recommend either taking the GRE, LSAT, (other acronym for grad school test), or applying to schools. It has significantly reduced the stress I've been feeling. I know that after all of the rigors of Peace Corps application another seems daunting, but either way it's a great distraction! To those of you already getting your invites congrats! To those of you nominated for fall 2010, take your time getting your stuff into Peace Corps, we're not gonna hear anytime soon either way. Ok, back to tapping my foot and writing statements of purpose...

9:21 am, Santa Fe

I wanted to write and ask if anyone has been nominated for the South Pacific for Fall of 2010? I think we should all band together and pool our collective intellects/resources to try and tease out some sort of potential invite date and potential countries. So far I've deduced that, out of the five potential countries in the South Pacific only Tonga, Vanuatu and Samoa have education listed as work areas. I was nominated for English education, therefore it would seem that one of those countries are the match. Now, staging dates. Vanuatu (September), Tonga (October), and Samoa (October). SO, as I cannot remember if they gave me a specific month at nomination (I believe she just said fall, I'm at work so I can't check the nomination letter), it would seem like Vanuatu is the most likely....which is fine with me, that place is gorgeous. But, let's work together and figure this out. I may be the only person nominated that far out right now, I have a feeling that my recruiter did this to torture me because she was somewhat evil. Hope to hear from some of you soon!

8:53 am, Santa Fe

I just reread this in Pandey's book, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India, and thought I'd share it as it has been instrumental in my understanding of contemporary historical theory and method.

“The discipline of history still proceeds on the assumption of a fixed subject – society, nation, state, community, locality, whatever it might be – and a largely pre-determined course of human development or transformation. However, the agent and locus of history is hardly pre-designated. Rather, accounts of history, of shared experiences in the past, serve to constitute these, their extent and their boundaries” - Gyanendra Pandey

Amazing.

12:47 pm, Santa Fe

2010! I've never been one for resolutions or regrets or any of that nonsense. With that said, I plan to make 2010 the year of living in the present. It is all too often that we (humanity) get way ahead of ourselves and forget to appreciate the lives we are living TODAY. I have certainly been guilty of this, on a grand scale, since my graduation from college in 2007. Rather than marking x's on the calendar until I hear from Peace Corps, I'm going to go out, make new friends, have fun, and work on things that make me happy. Because when it comes down to it, we are going to end up missing our friends and family and everyday things like hot showers and cold weather (for those of us nominated to the equatorial regions).

In the meantime, I'm applying to a few graduate programs in History that I am almost equally excited about as Peace Corps. The first, the Masters of Islamic Societies and Cultures, through the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, sounds incredible.

So, as I said, lets make 2010 a year of contemplation, action and success. It's ok to work for the future, but lets not forget all the beautiful things that happen day to day.