With a little help from my friends

I promise, you guys, posts about my trips to Dublin and Sicily are coming soon. I promise. Really. It might be helpful that I'm on Spring/Easter break right now so... maybe? Maybe you can expect me to get up to date in these next few days. Or, well, tomorrow. If I feel like it. Because after that, Sunday's Easter so I might be busy and then my cousin Sarah is coming to visit me here Monday - Friday. Anyway, I know I'm behind and I'll get on it ASAP probably.

In the mean time, I have a favor to ask you.

I was super excited a while back to find out that a poem I wrote about Venice entitled "Venezia" had been accepted for publication in the National High School Poetry Quarterly. I knew this involved some scholarship possibilities, but I was mostly just excited to be published.

Turns out, my poem was selected by the editors as one of five nominees for "Best of Issue." I'm totally excited and honored by this. And here's where you come in: the Best of Issue winner is selected from the five nominees by an online vote. It would mean the world to me if you'd consider voting for me. You can read the five nominated poems at http://www.justpoetry.org/internet_voting and then if you think mine's the best, you can vote for it by sending an email to votejustpoetry@comcast.net   with the poem's title (Venezia) in the subject line. Only one vote per email address is allowed. 

I would appreciate your votes so so so so much. I found out last week that I have been accepted to NYU, which is crazy amazing and ridiculously exciting. If I go there, though, (or really any of the schools I'm looking at) I'm definitely going to need some help from scholarships. So, thanks for assisting me in that.

I owe you some really excellent blog updates complete with breath-taking photos and descriptions of places and things and feelings and whatnot. It's coming. I'm on it. And for now:

(because it seems like an appropriate song for favor-asking)

I Reduce, Reuse and Recycle in Italy

Hello, everybody!

So, as you probably already know/assumed, I'm going off to college in the fall. I'm not sure where I'll be going yet. I applied to six schools. I've gotten into four so far and I'm still waiting to hear from the last two. In order to pay for college I'm applying for several scholarships! Luckily, being an exchange student in Italy hasn't made it too hard, because almost everything is online.

Right now, I'm applying for a scholarship that's all about ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle on http://www.castleink.com. (Anyone else looking for scholarships should totally check it out!) And for part of the application I'm doing this blog post about a way I like to do this.

The "Three Rs" are an incredibly important part of keeping our world healthy and beautiful. I take part by tossing my paper, cans and glass in the recycling bin, as everyone should, but I like to get a little interesting and crafty with it, too. It doesn't have to be something boring, it can be fun!

I'm about to show you my most recent crafty-recycling endeavor. One store where I like to shop has the cutest cloth bags for carrying your new clothes home. For a while, I used one of these bags as a purse, but the sheer material quickly began to rip. I guess it was better suited for carrying light-weight clothing than the sorts of things that go in purses. Not much can be done with a ripped bag, no matter how cute it is, so I decided to give it new life in a different form. I ripped it into shreds, which I braided into bracelets. They turned out really cute.

I'm very excited to now how have a bunch of new pretty little bracelets. I'm thinking they'll make good "friendship bracelets." I can give them to all the new friends I've made this year that I'm going to miss when I go back to the States. Yay for reducing, reusing and recycling!!!

I'll be back very soon with a blog post about my trip to Ireland, as promised. I am hoping to get it posted before I go off for my week in Sicilia on the 24th. Until then, I hope I've inspired you to get crafty! Reduce, reuse and recycle!

~Chandler