Wednesday, October 5, 2011

My Future Plans



What is my purpose?

    What is my purpose?  I would say that, like many others that have gone before me and many of my peers, my purpose and goal is to be successful.  To some, this may mean a lake side resort home with a pool and a jacuzzi, a butler, using hundred dollar bills as toilet paper, a vast collection of European sports cars, and a super model movie star for a wife.  If you had all of these things, you were probably successful at one point in your life.  But do you need to have these things in order to call yourself a successful person?
    What I consider to be successful is being good at something you enjoy doing.  If you enjoy working with animals and you are a good veterinarian, you are successful.  If you enjoy cleaning up trash and you are good at it, you are a successful janitor.  If you are good at playing video games and you enjoy playing them, you are also successful.  Being successful doesn’t go hand and hand with having lots of money.  Anybody can be successful as long as they work hard at what they do and have a strong sense of purpose toward their occupation.
    Again, my purpose in life is to be successful, but at what?  I have always loved being outside and spending time in nature.  I enjoy exploring different places and looking at new things.  My love for hunting and fishing would be a great asset to something in this career.  If I chose this route, I would like to become a wildlife biologist, or a game ranch specialist, or maybe even be a clothing tester for Cabelas.  That would be the life: wake up every morning and put on some brand new clothes and go out and do something I love.
    But not to make this decision too easy, I also have a strong passion toward landscaping.  I have been designing and building different landscapes for our home ever since we moved 5 or so years ago.  I have helped build 2 berms, planted numerous plants and trees, designed a huge flower bed, built a custom arbor, and designed and built our own backyard pond.  My love for the outdoors carries over here too because almost all of the work is done outside.  I loving starting with nothing and then ending up with a really cool project that everyone will be able to enjoy.  Something that relates to this that I would really like is landscape architecture.  Their job is to create landscapes--including patios and pool areas, as well as flowerbeds-- but also to build then mostly from scratch.  A lot of creativity and design goes into this style of job, and in the end it is so worth it.
    The last career field I have interest in is engineering.  It may sound a bit corny, but all those years of playing Legos have really drawn me to how things are made.  On top of many toy creations and numerous pictures cut out of magazines of things that would be awesome to build, I have also built a few things myself.  When we built our new house, when I was only in middle school, my mom and dad told me to follow around the contractor and learn something.  Of course, I mostly just listened and retrieved small hand tools, but the things that I learned from that experience have helped shape my mind to be able to solve building problems and see 3-D designs in my head.  Recently, my family built a barn in our back yard.  I have been a very instrumental part of getting it put up because I am constantly out there working and because I have a little back ground knowledge on what is going on.  I believe that I would enjoy being a engineer or a construction manager.
    It is safe to say that I have absolutely no set plans on where I am going with my life.  The positive side to that is that I am willing to let myself be drawn to something or allow myself to see one of these options as the answer right for me.  I do know that I have plans to go to college and get some form of a degree.  After that, I would like to move back to this area because it means so much to me!  I don’t know if I will be able to stand having four years of city life.  I guess I will just have to adjust myself.  I would like to meet a girl sometime in my college career and get married eventually.  But that is getting kinda mushy, so I think I’m going to wrap this up.  All I know for sure is that my purpose is to be successful and that means doing stuff I am good at but more importantly that I enjoy.  I think my decision will be made when the time is right but for now I am going to try to keep up with the high school life.

Monday, September 26, 2011

My House


My School


My Community


My State


Where I'm From

“I am from a town where Anya is the best!”- Directly written by Kori Hixson.   Where am I from?  Wait, why am I asking you?  I should be the one doing the explaining.  So here it goes:  I am from Aurora.  That’s it, I’ve lived there my whole life.  So does that answer your question?  Does that answer my question?  Hmmm...

Well, as stated earlier, I have grown up in Aurora all of my life.  I have lived in two houses, one at 1318 11th Street  and one at 405 Jennifer RD.  I loved my old house on 11th Street.  Me and Jared shared so many memories there.  We had our fort in the back yard that always had an adventure go on or a war to battle.  We had many experiences running through the sprinkler, racing around with our 2 dogs, Beau and Jaxson, golfing on the 30 yd. backyard fairway, and constantly getting into fights.  That may be what I remember most is the fights.  Like the time the toy dinosaur went through the second story window.  And like the time I got my head cracked open by a golf club.  Those were the good old days.  And then came the birth of my brother Kyle.  And then he received most of the attention.  This solved mine and Jared's friendship rather quickly because we had to team up in order to survive whatever may come next.

So then we moved in to the house where we live now.  I really enjoy this house because I Jared and I get our own section of the basement.  There is also so much more room for activities.  The house sits on an acre and a third.  There is a cornfield in our backyard but we are still only five blocks away from the school.  It is my little piece of the country that I get to enjoy while still living in the town.  Sometimes in late fall, we are able to eat dinner on the back step and watch the combine practically turn around in our lawn.  besides that we have some ballin’ chickens in a sweet coop that I built.  And the party barn that might get done some day or another.  And when it is done, it will be one of my favorite places to go.

Being from Aurora, everyone knows everyone.  I can go to the grocery store and have people say hi and ask how I am doing.  I work at Schneider’ Hardware and there are always people coming in and asking about me or about the game the night before.  It isn’t only that you are known, but that people genuinely are concerned about and care for you.  That right there isn’t found in many places around the country.  In Aurora, neighbors aren’t afraid to lend a hand to one another and teachers go the extra mile to make sure that their students get a good education.

I am also from corn.  Obviously Nebraska is known for it’s corn and in Aurora, you can drive for miles without seeing much else.  But corn isn’t just the green sprouts in the spring or the drying leaves at harvest, it is a lifestyle.  Even I, a “city boy”, am impacted by all of the corn.  Yes, it affects the economy, but it also represents detassling.  Once I turn twelve, it seemed like a right of passage that I became a member of a crew.  Not only are the hours and the fields long, but also the corn is wet and sharp.  From 5:30 AM, i looked foward to being able to take a shower shortly followed by a nap.  It is something that goes along with the land, and i think that it is a fair trade.

I am from the outdoors.  From running through the creek bottom, to exploring the woods, to spending time hunting and fishing, I love the environment.  It gives me a very relaxed feeling to walk through the tall prairie grass trying to stir up a pheasant and to sit and listen to the many songbirds.  I enjoy helping out with SOAR during the summer because I get to share my love for nature with younger kids and help to inspire them to love nature as I do.  Even doing housework outside is fun because you still get the feeling of the warm sun and the cool breeze.

Lastly, I am from a loving family.  My parents are both very hardworking and help me in every way they can to succeed at what ever I may be doing at the time.  Even though my brothers constantly annoy me and try to fight me, I have come to realize that they will be my best friends because they care about the same things that I do.  We have big sit down meals three or four times a week so it brings us even closer together.  I think that is what it is and why I have fallen in love with this place: my community, my location, my passion, and most of all my family.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Tinie Tempah - Till I'm Gone ft. Wiz Khalifa

My Life is a Canoe

My Tradition

Every year, my family and I have a taditional Irish meal on St. Patrick's Day.

Who I Am

Trevor Sullivan: n DEF: 1. “Big village”.  2. Prudent: wise or judicious in practical affairs.  3. A good friend.  4. Hard worker.  5. A lover of nature.

I know, I know, the first two definitions don’t sound like me.  That’s because they are from Wikipedia.com.  Those two are the formal meaning of the word Trevor.  The last three are the ones that I feel describe who I am.

I have been in Aurora for my entire life.  I enjoy the small town atmosphere and the friendly greetings I get on a daily basis from the many people I know.  I am a senior from Aurora High School.  I am a student who enjoys getting good grades and doing well, but I am also a student who likes to be relaxed and have fun while studying.  The most important part of school to me is the interaction I get the opportunity to have with my friends in class, the halls, and at lunch.

I enjoy spending time with my family.  My mom and dad have always been there to help me through the various parts of life.  They are a wealth of knowledge and they at least pretend to know what they are talking about when they help me out.  Jared and Kyle are a different story.  Jared is two years younger than me and has always been my wing man.  Our childhood has been full of fighting.  When I say fighting, I mean battling.  We tend to get on each other's nerves until one of us hits the other.  This fights quickly escalated until we picked up the nearest stick shaped objects and went at it.  But do you know what, we are best friends now.  I think we needed to fight it out as kids to become the friends we are today.  Kyle is a whole different story.  Being nine years older than he is, I have always been a role model and a friend.  Every time we wrestle, I end up winning.  He says it is because I “weigh a ton” but really it is just because of my mad wrestling skill.  He is really entertaining and I enjoy having fun with him and taking him on random trips to go catch frogs at the lake or go get ice cream cones after school.

I am a lover of nature.  I enjoy spending time outside just hanging out and relaxing.  I am an avid fisherman and hunter.  I enjoy hunting pheasants and turtle doves with my friends after school (when they invite me!  Nate Bell!) and with my dad and brothers on Sunday afternoons.  I like to hunt deer in the fall because the weather is so beautiful and you get to spend hours out in the fresh air, really appreciating nature.  I like to hunt small game too, like squirrels and rabbits.  Jared, Kyle, and I have many stories about different times that we walked around fields shooting game and having a grand old time.  I am also a fisherman, though not as much as my brothers.  Typically I drive them to a lake and then get shown up for the first thirty minutes before I resort to asking Kyle for some advice.  After he helps me, I have some success but soon fall back to the same misfortune that I had earlier.  It is kind of sad that the eight year old is showing me up but I guess I take it for what it is worth.

I am a hard worker too.  I enjoy working hard to get projects done.  This past year, I converted our old garden shed into a chicken coop.  I built all of the boxes out of old pallets we had laying around.  I was the main one that wanted to get chickens so I thought it was necessary to build it by myself.  Another thing that I am still in the process of working on is my barn.  We call it the “party barn” because it was built to be half storage, half recreation.  My Dad, Uncle Jeff, and I are the main ones building it.  I am starting to think that it would be easier just to hire someone out to finish it up, but we are well over half way and I feel like I should be the one to help get it done.  

This summer, I showed I was a hard worker because I spent most of the summer taking down barbed wire fence and putting up new for Dave and Adena Kreutz.  Jared and I put in a lot of hours but when we were done, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment.

This is who I am.  These are the things that will always be with me.  I appreciate the opportunities that I have been given so far in life and I look forward to developing who I am.