First Day of Summer!

Today is the first official day of summer! Summer time is my favorite time of the year: plenty of barbeques and pool parties and of course my birthday! I’ll get to spend most of my summer working in Manhattan Beach after I move down.

My 22nd birthday is coming up and I still have yet to compile my “22 Things to do before turning 23” list! I’m hoping to maybe run another half marathon but I don’t have anything else to put on it yet. I’ll have to keep brainstorming. Oh one should definitely be to visit the bestie in North Carolina. Two down, twenty more to go!

It really feels like summer is upon us now. I’m going to spending most of my first day of summer driving down to LA and then tomorrow is a day of apartment hunting. I’m keeping my fingers crossed about one place in particular and praying with all my heart that it’s available!! Wish me luck!

This is the only picture I can really find of me from last summer. All my summers have been spent dancing! No wonder this one has been feeling particularly strange...

Summer Cleaning

While most people are more familiar with the term “Spring Cleaning,” I’m going to be engaging in some “Summer Cleaning.” I fear calling it a purge because of that terrifying movie that’s come out. But after graduation, I think it’s as good a time as any to clear away the cobwebs and clean up all digital/electronic things I own. Here’s my starting list that I’ll be going through this week and hopefully by the end of the week, I’ll have completed most, if not all, of them:

Cleaning out Facebook – I currently have 1,160 “Friends” on Facebook and I know for a fact that I don’t keep up with/even read the things that some of them post about. There are some people that requested me that I’m barely even acquaintances with but added because I felt a need to boost my friend count in high school (is that when Facebook came out?). There’s really no need to keep that many people in my newsfeed, especially when I skip over half the things people write anyway. With Facebook’s newsfeed, I find myself needing to scroll through all the stories (much like my Tumblr dashboard) so it’s better that I cut down.

I think I might go through and untag myself in some of those photos too...

Cleaning out iTunes – I have 7,331 (the opposite of 1337!) songs in my iTunes library currently and I know for a fact I don’t listen to all of it. I have whole albums that I only have because I like one of the songs so it’s ridiculous to keep all of it on my computer. Also, I’ve subscribed to Spotify (you can follow me on the sidebar! →) so keeping a music library (both on my computer and my phone) is somewhat moot – except for the fact that I am sentimental about some songs and some songs aren’t always released on Spotify. I guess my phone library is more of a play list of all my favorite songs and my computer library is more of everything I might feel like listening to ever. And well Spotify? It’s pretty much the best thing ever.

26.5 days of music??

Clearing out (my personal) Tumblr – Over the four years (has it really been four years?) that I’ve had my Tumblr, I’ve accumulated a whole list of friends/television shows/actors that I follow but some of them have either fallen off the grid or I just don’t look at it that much. So I’ll have to go through and filter out some of the stuff I don’t want to follow anymore.

Clearing out Twitter – I did this a little bit ago but it’s good to go through it one more time. I made lists to put people in like a personal list, Cal list, news, etc. That way I can read the tweets in a more organized and categorized way.

LinkedIn – This is kind of the opposite of cleaning, I guess. I’ll be updating my resume, adding personal connections, and hopefully, finally a profile picture. I’ve been at a loss for what to put in my little grey box since I don’t have any “professional” pictures. I’ve been meaning to take one but I rarely take photos while in business clothing.

iCleaner – I didn’t know about this app/tweak on Cydia before but after some research into the Top 20 Cydia apps you need, iCleaner was coming up on quite a few lists. You need a jailbroken iPhone to download and run this but it basically goes through and deletes unnecessary files on your iPhone – things like cookies and in app data. There’s a similar app by the same name on the AppStore but it’ll cost you. It’s still a nifty tool nonetheless to clean up and free up some space on your phone.

iCleaner

iPad – I’ll be going through my iPad cleaning up apps that I don’t use (I’m a bit of an app hoarder) and organizing my library. I have things separated out into PDFs and ebooks and weird folders. I think I should be organizing them into categories by genre instead. I’ll have to come up with book genres, or maybe I can just steal them from the library system.

Hard drive – My external hard drive can hold 2TB of data and I’m definitely making good use of them with dance videos and old school work etc. It’s also a backup of my computer so I try and keep it updated. I also like to move things from my laptop to my hard drive to clear up space and make sure my computer is running too much at once. Speaking of which, I need to get the fan on my laptop cleaned (do people need to do this often?). My laptop has been getting really hot and the fan has been in overdrive. I’m thinking of taking it in and seeing if it’s just dirty or if I’m really running too many things on it at once.

Well here’s my to-do list for “Summer Cleaning.” Anything else you can think of? Leave me a comment!

Summer Reading Lists

Just a quick follow up on my summer reading post. My school sends out a summer reading list ever year to the new, incoming freshmen class and it’s not required reading but it’s a list of books recommended by staff, student and faculty to tide you over while you anxiously wait for school to start. I didn’t know about this until after I graduated but it doesn’t lessen the quality of the books!

This year’s theme was “What Would Seniors Read?” It’s a bit of a strange theme and I’m not even sure what exactly it means – I’m guessing books that us graduating seniors would read? These lists contain everything from old classics to expository writing and it’s a really comprehensive list! Some of my favorite lists are “Banned Books” and “Favorite Book When I Was 18.”

If you’re looking for some new reading material, I suggest take a look at these lists!

I really wanted to use a photo I saw a while back with these people reading books and the books each had different scenes that were popping out of them and engulfing their heads but I cannot for the life of me find it. So this one will have to do instead.

Summer Flicks

Summer time means summer blockbusters! Have you ever wondered why they’re called blockbusters? Well thanks to some help from wiki:

“The term began to appear in the American press in the early 1940s, describing the largest of aerial bombs: single bombs capable of destroying a city block, also known as "cookies" during the firebombing of Hamburg. Later figurative use referred to anything making a public impact: "Broadway reacted to the request of War Mobilization Director Byrnes to close all places of entertainment by midnight Feb. 26 as if a blockbuster had landed on Manhattan" (Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1945). Some entertainment histories cite it as originally referring to a play that is so successful that competing theaters on the block are "busted" and driven out of business.”

I’ve borrowed a list from Pop Culture Brain for movies to watch out for this summer and I’m happy to say I’m well on my way to watching a majority of these.

‘Iron Man 3’ - May 3

‘The Great Gatsby’ - May 10

‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ - May 17

‘The Hangover Part III’ - May 24

‘After Earth’ - May 31

‘The Kings of Summer’ - May 31

‘The Internship’ - June 7

‘Much Ado About Nothing’ - June 7

‘Man of Steel’ - June 14

‘This Is The End’ - June 14

‘The Bling Ring’ - June 14

‘Monsters University’ - June 21

‘World War Z’ - June 21

‘The Heat’ - June 28

‘The Way Way Back’ - July 5

‘Pacific Rim’ - July 12

‘RIPD’ - July 19

‘The Wolverine’ - July 26

‘Blue Jasmine’ - July 26

‘Elysium’ - Aug 9

‘Kick-Ass 2’ - Aug 16

‘The To-Do List’ - Aug 16

‘The World’s End’ - Aug 23

So far, my favorite has been Monsters University. How did I already watch this movie, you may ask? As part of our senior week at Cal, our senior class council was able to pull some strings and get in contact with Pixar to come show the movie early. It was amazing seeing our campus translated into the Monsters University film and it made the movie all that more special to watch. I don’t want to give away any spoilers since it’s a Pixar movie and all of their movies are amazing. I’m probably going to watch it again when it comes out in theaters for the short in the beginning and the little extras that are going to be added in the public release version.

Should I write some reviews of the movies I’ve seen or should I stick to the musings of my post grad life? Leave me a comment and let me know what you want to read more of!