Click here for a slideshow of all of my firework images!

*UPDATE!* 

I just discovered last week that my image of the reflection of the Western Auto building has won 2nd place in the photo walk competition!  It will be printed and displayed throughout the month of August at the Missouri Bank in the Crossroads district of Kansas City.  I also will receive a movie prize package from Screenland Theatres!  Thanks, Hello Art for selecting my photograph as a winner, I really appreciate it!

Here are some of my favorite images:

Click here for a slideshow with more of my photographs of Kansas City!

Wow, I haven’t updated this blog for a very long time!  I thought I’d give a little update of what I’ve been up to lately…

I’M A COLLEGE GRADUATE!!!  (Well, almost)

I walked at the graduation ceremony at the University of Central Missouri last month.  Now, I am doing a marketing and events planning internship with Downtown Lee’s Summit Main Street, Inc. near Kansas City.  When my internship is completed, I will officially be a college graduate with a major in Tourism and minors in Photography, Business Administration, and Marketing.

During my internship, I am working with Main Street, Inc., which is a non-profit organization that revitalizes downtown districts.  Downtown Lee’s Summit now a beautiful, thriving area with cute shops and restaurants to go to, as well a fun events and festivals year-round.  I have been here for a month already, and I already feel like I have learned so much about what goes into promoting the continuing existence of an economically strong and diverse central business district.

So far, I have been involved with many projects.  Our largest festival, Downtown Days… Streets Alive! was put on by Main Street in the beginning of June and it was a great opportunity to see what really goes into creating an event that attracts over 80,000 people annually.   There was heaps of live entertainment, vendors and other fun activities going on, including a flash mob and meet and greets with athletes, like the Kansas City Chiefs.

A unicylist/fire juggler at Downtown Days.

Now that Downtown Days is over, I am beginning work on my special project, which is to create a membership campaign to draw investors to our organization.  I also work on other projects, such as designing marketing collateral and helping to coordinate the Farmer’s Market.  I am also designing a sponsorship guide to show to potential sponsors of our events.  I get to attend committee meetings and see what goes on behind the scenes as well.

A postcard I created to thank our Downtown Days volunteers.

For more info about Downtown Lee’s Summit, click here!

I feel like this internship is a great experience for me.  I have really enjoyed working in the downtown and have met so many lovely people so far.  I also enjoy being so close to Kansas City and being able to do fun things around the city.  Now I am also searching for a job after my internship ends this August.  I hope I can find one to kick off my career!

Here’s some photos from my trip, and enjoy!

The constellation Orion from our balcony.

The ocean.

Beautiful Sunset.

Waves

Foggy morning on the beach.

New Years fireworks at The Wharf.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 47 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 72 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 157kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 19th with 43 views. The most popular post that day was RAGBRAI XXXVIII.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, ifreestores.com, mail.live.com, twitter.com, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for giant weta, weta, rivendell lord of the rings, semester in new zealand, and giant weta pictures.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

RAGBRAI XXXVIII August 2010

Orientation Day February 2010

In-Class Photo Shoots September 2009

Red Rocks at Taputeranga Marine Reserve February 2010
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Hiking in Kaitoke Park March 2010
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The opening band, FDR’s Revenge was a bit creepy and strange for my taste, but I did get some cool shots from them.

Listen to them online:  http://www.myspace.com/fdrsrevenge

Yeah this is totally creepy. And that is all I have to say about that.

The next opening band, Without a Face, was a one-man act that I’ve seen once before.  He is very talented, very funny, and very modest.  His album is even titled:  Worst Debut Album Ever.  But looking past the album name, he entertained us with some funny songs about lactose intolerance and campus squirrels in his “Your Mom Goes to College” t-shirt.

Listen to him online:  http://www.myspace.com/withoutaface

Then it was finally time for Ludo!  They were amazing as usual, and rocked out to songs about zombies and time machines and Lake Ponchartrain and robots and other Awesome Things.  They are very fun to photograph because of their crazy facial expressions.  Ludo played a few new songs from their new album as well, including “Whipped Cream”, which called for a few audience members to push up front and spray whipped cream everywhere and make me fear for the life of my camera.  But one of them was wearing a banana costume so it was ok.  I walked away from Ludo with my hair full of whipped cream and smelling really yummy after an encore of “Girls on Trampolines.”

Listen to Ludo online:  http://www.myspace.com/ludorock

We began the ride in Sioux City, where we got to watch the band Smash Mouth, who had a cool opening band called Rockestra that was an orchestra of people of all ages performing classic rock hits.

Rockestra. Yes, they are playing Guitar Hero guitars.

Smash Mouth

Every day we would pass through little towns  (as well as bigger towns), who would come alive with so many bikers passing through.  Some of the towns, such as Washta (population 270, and home of the lowest ever recorded temperature in the state, -48 degrees) had probably never seen so many people within their city limits!

The town of Washta, probably seeing more people than it has ever seen in it's life.

Every town had pretty much the same thing going on:  concerts, food stands, t-shirt stalls, bike repair stands.  It was exciting at first, but got a bit old after a while.  So, I would always try to find something unique about each city we passed through, such as the pretty lakes in Storm Lake and Clear Lake.  There were also lines for EVERYTHING, especially the toilets, which was pretty annoying so you had to be really patient.

The Line for Dairy Queen in Algona

The fountain in Storm Lake, caught with a rainbow just as the sun was getting low.

The Storm Lake Lighthouse

Sailboats in Storm Lake at sunset

The beach at Clear Lake

Or the AWESOME Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend.  A Catholic priest built a shrine to the Virgin Mary after he prayed to her and was healed from a critical illness.  He collected stones and rocks and shells from all around the world and created a grotto next to his church with scenes portraying the life of Jesus.

The sign on the gift shop for the Grotto

The riders were also very entertaining to watch as the rode by.  Some riders wore some crazy outfits, and there were some pretty crazy team names out there!

A Pie Hunter

Team Flamingo

Every day, my mom and I drove along the vehicle route while my dad and sister biked through the heat (and rain on one day).  We met in a meeting town every day, as well as met them along the bike route when we weren’t really supposed to do that.  We would set up camp every day before they arrived in the host town for the night, which would usually have a big concert and activities going on downtown.  Except for a couple of nights, when we got to stay at the houses of relatives that lived nearby, which was nice to get away from camping for a bit.

Typical RAGBRAI campground in the Manchester high school football field.

At the end of the trip, everyone got to dip their tires into the Mississippi River in Dubuque.  It is a big accomplishment to bike 442 miles, going 60-80 miles in a day.  It was a very interesting experience and I’m glad I got to take part in it!

The Mississippi River

Dad and sister at the dip site

Exams went ok, basically exams in New Zealand are full of writing essays, which wasn’t too much fun.  I did manage to pass all of them!  School was probably my least favorite part about New Zealand.  I felt that the teachers didn’t really teach enough and that I didn’t really learn much in my classes because all they concentrated on was writing essays, which I am terrible at.  If there was one thing I did get out of my university experience abroad, it was that I got a little better at writing essays. After finals were finally over and I was free from studying, I spent the remainder of my time with friends that I will probably not see for a very long time, if ever again.  I probably ate out more that week than the rest of my time in the country.  I experienced my first kebab on my 21st birthday then went to church later that night with all of my friends there and got to eat out at a really awesome Chinese restaurant off of Courtenay Place called Dragon afterwards.

Me and some friends at Dragon

My flatmates got me an awesome Flight of the Conchords t-shirt!  I saw Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords, a comedy band from Wellington who had a show on HBO, we crossed a street together when I was walking around town.  People see them around all the time since they live in Wellington.  It was the first time I ever saw a famous person, so it was pretty cool!

The Flight of the Conchords, Jemaine on left, Bret on right

I also took a nice long walk around the Miramar Peninsula one day to take a break from my finals.  There are a lot of nice beaches around there.  I took the bus up to Scorching Bay, where they have a cool cafe called Scorch-o-Rama with walls with a really cool mural made of shells, then walked all the way around the coast, grabbed a brownie at the Chocolate Fish (which was a popular cafe for Lord of the Rings cast members during filming, so I had to go there of course), and took the bus back to the Basin Reserve from Kilburnie.

Shell mural at Scorch-o-Rama

Scorching Bay

Here you can see the narrow entrance to the large harbor which Wellington is on. The Interisland ferry travels through there every day, as well as a multitude of other ships.

The Chocolate Fish Cafe. Yummy!

My friend Evan also took me to the zoo one day since I hadn’t been there yet.  It is a nice little zoo!  I got to see little blue penguins (which Freya, Emily and I had been searching for on our entire trip to the South Island), a kiwi bird (They are hard to see since they are nocturnal and endangered, and they are New Zealand’s national bird.  New Zealanders even call themselves Kiwis after their bird), baboons, tigers, and grey kangaroos.  It was a lot smaller than the zoo in St. Louis, but it was really nice and I got to see animals I’d never seen before.

A Little Blue Penguin! So cute.

Giraffes! A CheetahMalaysian Sun Bears

Funny little signs they had all over.

Evan also showed me Upper Hutt, where he lived, and I got to see the Hutt River!

The Hutt River

My flight left at 8AM on June 20th.  The night before I stayed up all night long so I could sleep on the airplane, since I usually never can!  We went out dancing at Boogie Wonderland, which is an awesome club that plays 70′s disco music and has a light-up dance floor.

The flight home was ridiculously long, but I slept a lot through it.  I was exhausted from the night before so I fell asleep before my plane even took off the ground in Wellington.  I had a few hours of layover in Auckland, which I also slept through, luckily I woke up in time to catch my flight back to America.  It took about 11 hours to get to LAX.  It was filled with sleeping, my iPod and watching dramatic movies.  For some reason, they weren’t showing any comedies, which is all I really wanted to watch.  So I was stuck watching dramatic ones and kind of got tired of them and listened to music most of the way.

Customs went smoothly after being dropped off in Los Angeles.  Then I sat in the airport for awhile, grabbed some Wendy’s and jumped on my next flight to Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas.  It was ridiculously hot there.  Hello, summer.  Then I sat some more and finally got on my last fight to St. Louis, where I was finally reunited with my parents!  We got back to Warrenton, and everything felt like it was back to normal the way it was before.  My sister got back from Germany, where she had been studying abroad also, the next week and our whole family was back together again!