My U-Museum

Welcome to Fantasy Hall, a place full or memories and dreams. These are the small snapshots of my life that I will always remember, there are the moments that have made me who I am today.

The first room of my palace holds the identity that has shaped me and molded me the most, my Mother.  Who I am and where I'm from are firmly rooted within my Mother, she has been the only constant in my life and my best friend.  Intellectually, she has pushed me to my limit, creating the drive that I have to succeed and push forward.  My love of science comes from her, in addition to my love of reading.  My fondest memories of my childhood were reading books with my mother late at night, when everyone had fallen asleep.  To this day, one of the most comforting things I can do it to bury my nose in a good book and block the world out.  My mother is the most constant source of love that I could ask for, and because of that, I have a sense of security and self-esteem that is firmly planted within myself and her love of me.  Whenever I have a doubt, she is there to steady me and hold me true.  To describe myself means describing my mother and my love for her.

As you wander down the hallway you will find a room filled with the ocean and everything that goes with it.  One of the most constant joys throughout my life has been the water, whether sailing on it or swimming within it, it makes me happy in a way that few things can.  Many summers of my life have been spent sailing in Maine with my family, racing a boat in the San Francisco bay, swimming off of whatever beach I found myself at.  An ecology trip spent diving off of Andros Island in the Bahamas on the coral reef there led me into my major, Marine Biology.  To say that the water is part of my personality is a huge understatement, it is part of me and who I am.  I could never live anywhere without a coastline, and the feeling of waking up before dawn and heading out onto the water to watch the sunset from the bow of your boat is the most indescribable feeling in the world.

Next you will find a hall full of pictures of places all around the world, a room symbolizing one of the things that I am most passionate about in my life, traveling.  My love of traveling has taken me from coral reefs across the world to old castles in Great Britain.  I love immersing myself in a new culture, learning a new language, meeting new people.  I want to see everything there is to see in life, in the world.  I want to travel to places where most would rather not go, I want to live in cultures completely different then my own.  I enjoy being out of my comfort zone, I think that it makes us live.  This summer I'm planning on taking part in an endurance ride across the sands of Namibia to the sea.  Traveling will always be a part of me, and wherever I go, I know that I will take a piece of it home with me.

If you look out one of the windows of my palace, you will see a garden full of animals, one of the other great passions in my life.  I grew up riding horses since before I can remember, graduating from small ponies to huge Thoroughbreds that fly with me over jumps.  One of my favorite moments in life is early mornings in the barn, when no one else has woken up and it's just me and the soft noises that the horses make when they know breakfast is near.  I love the feeling of flying across the ground so fast that all you can hear is the wind in your ears and all you can feel is the steady beat of your horses hooves flying across the ground.  My love of horses will be a constant in my life, and one that I wish to pass down to my children as well, along with the love of dogs.  My puppies have taught me responsibility and patience, and the unconditional love of a dog is perhaps the most forgiving and generous of all.  

The room you will wander into down the hall is a huge library, full of old and new books running along shelves all the way up to the ceiling.  Everywhere you turn there are books, surrounding you and enclosing you.  Ladders run up high walls and spin around the room so that each and every book is available to you.  Every single one of these has affected me or will have an effect on me later in life.  Some I have read and some I have yet to read, but the love of reading and of books has stayed with me since I was little.  I want my children to love books the way I do, I want them to experience the excitement of being taken away from your own world for a little while to travel to another.  Reading will always be one of the great loves of my life.