First Lesson from USU

Hey there! Jackson here! It's been a while, so I decided to take some time and write about what I've been up to, what the future holds, and share some stories.

I'm Home

First off, I am now home from my service for the Church of Jesus Christ. I've spent the last two years serving God in San Diego, preaching in ASL, but that chapter of my life has come to a close. I'll always look back at the last two years with fondness, but it is time to move on.

After getting home a few weeks ago, I spent time with my family for the holidays, catching up and getting my life together 😅. It's crazy what two years detached from the world does to you. I spent some time walking my dogs, played games with my brothers, and reconnected with old friends from high school.

What's Next?

This week I moved up to Utah State University to pursue a degree in Computer Engineering. I cannot believe it's only been a week, life has been so full! There's really no better way to describe it, absolutely insane. Being back in school, hanging out with friends, very little responsibility, it's wild.

I'm taking 15 credit hours for my first semester, so I'm looking forward to these classes. Walking into my first class last Monday was super overwhelming, realizing that I was actually in college. It's that one thing that people look forward to, and there I was!

Being able to work out for longer than 30 minutes is pretty nice. During my mission, I was running three miles about three times a week, but now I'll be able to step up the distance once my lungs cope with the fact that we're thousands of feet higher than San Diego now.

My roommates are pretty cool. They're all gamers, so the first thing I did over the weekend after moving in was play Mario Kart with all of them. Turns out I still got the skillz, because I did pretty well, even after two years of not touching a Switch.

Tragedy

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, tragedy has struck in my first couple days up here. My wonderful bike got a flat tire! I rode my bike back to the dorms after class on Friday, just to eat lunch and decompress. There was an Institute activity that night, so I went down to the bike racks to start the journey over there and I was greeted by a squishy front wheel!

Thankfully I was able to get a ride with someone else who had a car, but not having a bike puts a little snag in my daily routine. You see, my classes only have ten minutes in between, so I ride my bike across campus to make some of the tighter time gaps. Without a bike, I'd either have to leave one class early or arrive to another late! No good.

So, after a bit of panicking and overthinking, I asked one of my roommates to drive me down to a biking store here in Logan where I bought some spare tubes. After an appointment with Dr. Youtube, I changed the tube out on my very own bike! That's maybe not very impressive, but it's not something I've ever done before so I'm proud of it.

After changing the tube out, I gave my wonderful bike a first test ride. There's only one song that you can listen to while testing out a new tire, and that's Test Ride in the How to Train Your Dragon sound track! I popped one Airpod in (safety, folks) and started down the walkways of campus. As the music got more intense, I popped the bike into higher and higher gears as we sped down the empty concrete (it's Saturday).

Weaving through cement features, going around tight corners at 45 degree leans, listening to epic music on an empty campus. Nothing beats it!

Outlook

Whatever happens up here, I can promise that I swear I've lived. I'm looking forward for the next 5 years and have a lot of hope. We'll see how often I actually update this blog, but here's a first look at USU! Thanks, for reading, take care!