Gems That I Might Share With You

Wow!  I just read through my first blog post, and thought, "Holy crap! Am I glad I just read through that or what???"

I wrote that post right after moving to the Bay Area and am now going to write one a year and a few months later :)  Let's Go!!

So, needless to say...I landed my job as a project manager for Dell! Wahoo!  Just to gush a little over this job I love, I can't help but present my awesome pics :)

 The Beautiful Campus I work At.  Isn't it Gorgeous??? Love it!

First Day of Work Pic Baby!  That badge reminds me of my feelings on the first day!

 

 There are perks to the job like endless soda, Bagel Thursday, endless hot chocolate for this Mormon gal, Ice Cream Wednesdays, the little perks make this job fun!

 My favorite part of the job is the awesome people I work with.  This started off as a small stick figure a Development Manager drew on my white board.  The other project managers slowly added to the pic to give us hair that resembles our look (including our heights) ;)

And, I'm a contractor, which means my employment will be up in a few months.  Translation: I need to job search like a mad woman STAT.  (Soundin' like a doctor up in here j/k).  So that's where I'm at right now.  I'm in a very transitional point of my life. There is the potential for so many different possibilities right now, and boy oh boy, it has caused me to really reflect on my life.


Over the past several months, I have been on a very cool journey of self discovery and woke up this morning feeling like that was going to be the topic of this blog post. So here goes!

Let's rewind to a week ago.....(insert rewind sound here)...........

There I was, sitting at a friend's house, and this amazing girl shows up to hang with the amigos and I. She just so happened to be my age, and we immediately connected as we struck up a really great conversation.  We could relate to each other about how we were feeling about certain parts of our lives.  I thought, "Heck yes! It's nice to meet another person who totally gets this point of my life journey and has a lot of the same feelings I do about it!".

You see we are both 27 and have started on our professional journeys. We have been trying to figure out what we are passionate about.  We had both been in long-term serious relationships that ended in pretty crappy ways, BUT we are both incredibly blessed to have moved on from them.  We both thought we would get married at younger ages (like 19 or 20) because many of the people around us did, but for some reason neither of us have.  Holy crap, it was nice meeting this friend who I really felt seemed to just get it!!

Since then, I have been having some pretty eye opening experiences that I feel are going to change the course of my life from this point moving forward.  What, you might ask, would these lessons be?? (Okay you may not be asking that, but that seemed an appropriate question to add a flare of intrigue. Please be on the edge of your seat, waiting to hear what these life changing lessons are because I'm on the edge of my seat, and I'm super curious what this list contains.)

Without further ado, I give you my list of life-changing lessons.


(1) God is right here, by my side, helping me figure out the best way to use my time in life no matter the current circumstance.

Like I said, my friend and I both thought we would be married at young ages and don't find ourselves in such circumstances at the current moment.

Honestly, I'm not terribly upset over this.  My mom always says, "It will happen, and you'll marry the right person.  Just enjoy where you're at right now."  My thoughts exactly, wise mother.  I totally and completely trust that Heavenly Father has wonderful plans for my life and that those include marriage to a wonderful man and having beautiful children who I will love with my whole entire heart, with whom I'll share in the most incredible and life changing experiences.  So I'm going to continue having faith and taking steps to help that process along as much as I can, but I'm also not going to stop living my life because I'm single.  I'm single, not dead. :)  (Singleness isn't even a terminal illness, at that.)

So, I'm in this place where I have a wonderful job that I love and big dreams for my career because I've been given this chance to be a kick butt career woman right now, and you better bet I'm gonna take advantage of that.  I've always wanted to see what I'm capable of professionally, and I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to get to excel in this part of my life.

I feel God reminding me on a very regular basis that I have so much potential.  I feel his excitement for me to tap that jar of potential and see what comes bursting out.  It's so cool to have a daddy in heaven who is excited to see his daughter shine.

Another cool thing about this time in my life is that I can live anywhere I want to, so this job search is not limited to one place, and my travel plans aren't limited to just the United States.


(2) How I use this time can either significantly improve the quality of my life and the lives of those around me, or it could be a meh-just-one-day-after-another-and-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of experience.  I choose whether it will be the former or the latter.

I am in a place in life where I don't plan my schedule around a husband and children, so I literally have the daily experience of choosing how I am going to use my time each and every day.

Welp, I can either idle away that time with countless hours on hulu, or I can pick up some new skills, travel, volunteer to help those who are less fortunate than I, get a certification, explore this amazing area I live in and surrounding areas...the list of possibilities is endless.

An impression I have felt over and over again has been, "By golly Julie, you have been given this precious time of life. Use it wisely to embrace these plentiful opportunities surrounding you".  This time of life is pretty cool in that way.

I can grow as much as I want to spiritually, professionally, in relationships with the wonderful folks around me, in opportunities to learn about this beautiful world.

Even if I do encounter cynics along the way who will tell me I shouldn't do some cool things, at the end of the day, it's my choice how I'll live from one day to the next.

Repeat with me folks. Choose wisely. Choose wisely.

(3) Look at any time in life as a formative time.  Embrace every part of it.

This time in life is shaping up to be a very formative time.  Transitioning to a new place has been harder than I thought it would be.  Who would have thought that moving to an amazing place like the Bay Area would be such a hard transition?  I mean, I did grow up on a farm in a town of about 500 people.  I went to a University located in a city of 100,000 people.  Many of my close friends from there came from small towns and also grew up on farms and ranches.

Take a girl form a life like that and throw her into a place where there are 7 Million people, and her head spins.  Needless to say, there are not a lot of George Strait fans in the Bay Area.  For goodness sakes, I love me some beautiful George Strait, but something tremendous has happened.  I have fallen in love with this place where, at first, I wondered if I would find my place here.  I'm kind of in love with living in a place where everyone is working their hardest to be their best.  There is a definitely a competitive feel to the Bay Area, and Holy Wow do I love it!  Heck Yes! I live around a whole bunch of people who know that they can get better and better at what they are doing and are willing to work incredibly hard to get there.  I cannot even begin to express how inspiring that is to me.  My fire is lit, and I'm starting to see that I have potential that I had no idea was there.

In summary, this last year has been harder than I thought it would have been, but I feel it has changed me for the better.  It has been beautiful to see those changes happen.

Every experience in my future will be an opportunity to be molded into a better person. I fully intend to use this gem of a lesson as my life winds down a cool path full of unknowns.


(4) Being a nerd makes for a much cooler life than thinking that, for some reason, you're above all that "silliness" that someone else might think is weird or risky or stupid (think of every reason someone will give you to not do something you really want to do and insert that word here.)

Okay, I'm excited for this part of the blog post!  I had THE COOLEST experience in Home Depot yesterday.  Did I mention it was the coolest thing ever??? Oh wait...yes I did, but IT WAS PRETTY DANG COOL!

I went in to get some paint mixed.  The guy that ended up helping me was an older gentlemen of retirement age.

He seemed to know his way around Home Depot really well and was super friendly and helpful.  I could tell the guy was really good at his job.  He intrigued me.  I asked him if he had experience with a lot of remodeling projects.  He said that yes he had.  He had completed several remodeling projects and had even created a bedroom setup where the bed would pop down from the wall the way they used to in the 60's and 70's.  This man continued intriguing me, so the conversation continued because this guy seemed way too cool to stop learning about him.  I mean, when someone tells you they did something that awesome, you know you're about to hear a lot of really cool stories.

So, then I asked him if he had run a house building business or something of those sorts.  He said that no, he hadn't.  These were just projects from his wife's Honey Do list.

He had worked at NASA Aimes as a software engineer.  (Most people I meet here are software engineers because Silicon Valley churns those out like there's no tomorrow).  He told me had a photo of ultraviolet spectrometry of a trip astronauts had taken to somewhere near another planet.  I thought, "Oh my goodness, this guy has had the coolest career ever."

He then told me that when he was young, he wanted to work at the gas station like all of his buddies did, but his dad told him that he couldn't.  So he started studying a lot and learning a lot, and that was how he became an engineer.

He also shared some other crazy things he did in his past like being in the coast guard and saving people from hurricanes.

And, now, he has a fun retirement job at Home Depot where he knows that store like the back of his hand and will teach a class about flooring tomorrow.

Needless to say, we covered a lot of ground while he mixed my paint.

His insatiable appetite for learning inspired me.  I could tell that this man was someone who was curious and loved to learn and would learn all of the details of anything he was doing and had some pretty dang cool stories to tell because of that.

It made me start thinking about how much I LOVE learning.  I fully intend to continue studying chemistry and physics throughout my life because they fascinate me.  I loved my Business Law class in college.  I loved learning about the sciences, history, reading renowned works of literature, attending art exhibits in my high school french class, learning how to speak to people in Spanish.  The list is endless.

Take home lesson here:  Later on in my life, I want to look back on my life the way this guy can and talk about awesome experiences I have had and all of the fascinating things I learn along the way.  I want to study the ins and outs of the things I do and never stop learning.  If I'm as awesome as the Home Depot retiree worker, I will have a pretty dang cool life!  

(5) My mantra right now is "Girl, you may be tall and have a personality to match the height, but if you harness all of the awesomeness that comes with that, you can really change this world for the better".  (I think mantras are supposed to be shorter than that, so I'll call this my mission statement.)  


You know, I was taller than a lot of people at New Mexico State University, but I'm guessing I'm taller than a larger portion of the people in the Bay Area because I feel like Goliath on a daily basis here.

People never commented on my height when I lived in NM, but I get comments every day in the Bay Area.  (I'm 5' 11" barefoot, and in heels, usually about 6' 3".)  When I get onto the elevator at work, there is always someone who says, "I feel really short next to you."  Then I'll usually say "Yeah, I grab things off of shelves at stores for old ladies because of my height", I dust off my shoulders and exit the elevator with swag.  No, I'm just kidding, we'll usually have an interesting conversation about height, and then exit the elevator and go about our days of engineering computers. 

Pictures with girls at church always look like a continuous string of females, and then BAM!! There's me, about 1 or 2 heads taller than everyone else.

So I guess you can say I stand out, but I don't just stand out when it comes to height.  I'm also continuing to see that my personality hasn't stopped standing out, and my gut tells me that it's never going to stop standing out.

I love to laugh, I feel like life should be lived to the fullest, I love to love with everything I have inside of me.  I tend to be passionate about everything. :)  So there I am....Tall Julie With Her Go Big Personality.

Gotta teach the kiddos (my niece and nephew) while their young how to take great photos :)

Some people love it, some people think it's quirky, but for the most part, I honestly don't think people stay up at night trying to label my personality.  They have their own lives too :)

I truly love the person that I am and pretty consistently feel pretty happy about it.  There are the occasional times where someone makes a comment that kind of pokes at my self esteem and makes me feel kind of uncomfortable, but I try to take those moments, harness the energy of the moment, and remember who God made me into.  I try to let those moments be opportunities to help others see their potential as well.

I am quickly learning that people who might label you as weird or might express a voice of cynicism are a valuable tool in your toolbox.  They can honestly be motivation for you to be an even better version of you.  Think of all of the people in this world who accomplished really big things and used their critics as pieces in their strategy to prove the naysayers wrong.  They became even better as a result of any negativity in their circumstances.

Think of things you could accomplish by owning the talents God gave you!  Think of the example you'll set for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands or millions.  You just don't know!

Don't let one voice of negativity ruin the opportunity to change the world, even if that change may seem small.  You never know how big of an impact that small effort might make on another life.

And you are unique, by Golly! There is only one of YOU!  So own it, wear those heels if you're tall, love your short legs if you're short (heck there are super cute shoes available to women with smaller feet!).  Own your shy personality, or own your outgoing personality.  But OWN WHO YOU ARE.  Use it to make the world better!


(6) Enjoy those spiritual moments.  Cherish them and act on the promptings.

In all of the craziness of life, it can be hard to stop and listen to those quiet promptings where God is telling you about little (and maybe even big) changes you should make in order to weed out things that are keeping you from feeling closer to him.

He also blesses you daily with reminders of his love.  I'm reminded of the words of George Strait's "I Saw God Today":

I just walked down the street to the coffee shop
Had to take a break
I'd been by her side for eighteen hours straight
I saw a flower growing in the middle of the sidewalk
Pushing up through the concrete
Like it was planted right there for me to see
The flashin' lights, the honkin' horns
All seemed to fade away
In the shadow of that hospital at 5:08
I saw God today

I've been to church
I've read the book
I know He's here, but I don't look
Near as often as I should
Yeah, I know I should
His fingerprints are everywhere
I'd just slow down to stop and stare
Opened my eyes and man I swear
I saw God today.

George Strait's experience of seeing God in the little things is one that we can all learn from.

I learned a little about what George Strait was singing about in this song last night. As I was loading up my car with boxes and getting ready to head home on a Friday evening to pack up my house and work until about 1 AM, I got a prompting to go to the get together we were having fro the woman's organization for my church.

Even though I had completely different plans for my evening originally, I found myself following this prompting and driving to my friend's house for this gathering. 

Once there, we ate dinner, I met a new friend, and we shared in lots of laughs together.  We ended up moving the party downstairs where we shared about ourselves so we could get to know one another better.  In that moment, I knew why God had prompted me to go there.  In this room, there were pictures of Christ and the temple.  I felt this overwhelming feeling of the spirit.

God reminded me of the importance of being in places where I can feel him with me.  He reminded me of the importance of filling my life with things that will remind me of him on a daily basis.  He was reminding me of the importance of acknowledging him and taking moments to stop and feel his love.

I am so thankful that I have an all-knowing Father in Heaven who knows me intimately well and knows that my to do lists tend to become long.  I am thankful he loves me enough to stop me and remind me to remember him.  It was a good reminder to consciously seek out those opportunities to draw near to him.
(7) God still loves me each and every single day that my life journey continues on this earth.

We all mess up and make mistakes in life.  I recently found that I was not forgiving myself for mistakes I had made a few years ago.  As a result of that, I felt I wasn't worthy of some of the blessings God was trying to give me.  In essence, I was blocking him from giving me those blessings because I hadn't forgiven myself even though he had forgiven me.  

I remember the exact moment when it clicked in my head and heart that I could forgive myself.  When I started to feel that way, I started to feel these feelings of faith that I could do the things that I have felt God telling me I needed to do differently in my life.  I felt like it was no longer a big struggle to overcome weaknesses through my own efforts.  It was now a hopeful journey of becoming who I knew God was telling me I needed to become.  I had his help.  It no longer felt like lonely battle for me to fight by myself, but instead a loving walk with my father who was going to help me pick up the pieces and become better in moments where I stumble and do things imperfectly.

On a day to day basis, I make so many mistakes and mess up over and over and over again.  I keep waiting for that moment when God is going to be like, "Julie when are you going to learn this lesson? I've tried to tell you several times.  Stop being so stubborn."  But he doesn't say that to me.  Instead, he reminds me that he loves me, and that he is here to help me.  He constantly reminds me that he loves me.  He isn't expecting me to get it right the first time.  He is there to help me continue improving until I do get it right.  

He does this while loving me every step of the way.  Have I said the word "love" enough times?  I can't say that word enough to even begin to express how much of his love he has shared with me at ever step along the way. He is the most patient teacher I have.  In all of my short comings...When I get frustrated with someone, when I say things I shouldn't, when I laugh at something that I probably shouldn't be laughing at, when I say a curse word, even though I try so hard not to curse, and the list goes on and on....He keeps loving me.  He helps me overcome sin and weakness over time by continuing to love me and remind me of my potential.  He doesn't plan for me to make this journey on my own. He is by my side the entire time.  

This is how I see myself...as a child of God who has my savior by my side to hold my hand, help me, and simply love me.

I love him so much for that.  I am so thankful that he is so willing to share his love with me at every point of this journey.  His love overcomes everything.  When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING.   I am the luckiest girl in the world to have a Heavenly Father who knows me so intimately well and knows how to love me perfectly.

I think this message of my Father's love is a great way to end this blog post.  After all, this is the most important lesson that this part of my life has taught me.  I believe it will be the most powerful piece of knowledge I will ever have at my disposal.  It will help me find the greatest joy, the greatest peace, overcome all obstacles, love more fully, learn more fully, and progress more in this life than I ever could without that knowledge of my Father's love.

Thanks for following these wonderful adventures and lessons of this awesome thing called Julie Nielson's life :)  Your life is awesome too!  I look forward to continuing to be part of your great adventures too!

My Eight Years of Paying Dues.. j/k! It Was My Adventure!

This is the picture that was selected by yours truly to be the picture that would stand out the most upon initial glimpse at my college graduation announcement.....an event I had really and truly hung in there for.  It took me eight years to get there, and no, my name is not prefixed by "Dr.".   I am the incredibly happy and relieved recipient of a Bachelor of Business Administration degree.  BUT before you start thinking, "This gal is a real dead-beat", let me tell you a smidgen of my story in this first blog post.

(Let me just preface this blog right quick....I don't intend for it to be a log of all past experiences.  I decided to start a blog because I tend to have hilarious and awesome moments along the way that I always think are worth sharing with others.  I never got around to sharing them in the past in a way that quite satisfied me, so here goes! I'm finally gettin' it done!)

OKAY, so back to the smidgen-of-my-story.  I call this eight year undergraduate period "My Adventure" and tend to think of it as a time that I had some of the absolute best times of my life and some of the absolute most difficult.

A lot of people go into college thinking, "I'm going to  get this thing done in 4 years or less, so I can land my dream job, have tons of adventures along the way, and end up in my dream home with my dream spouse and perfect dream children".  I must admit I cared enough about what I thought people expected of me when I started college, so I had those same goals initially.  Then a little....wait...hold on a second....I feel it more appropriate to call it a big thing. This big thing called life hit me.  With all of it's ups and downs, I went through experiences I never thought I would have at a young age and ended up having some of the most exciting and fun times of my life so far.  This is why it doesn't bother me that my undergraduate experience lasted eight years.

I went through a year of my first major (Human Nutrition), and quickly realized it wasn't at all what I wanted to do.  I then went through a series of changing my major more times than I can count because I discovered I could do anything I wanted to.  AND, there were a TON of very interesting things out there that I truly enjoyed learning about.  How could I pick just one???  The cure for my indecision came along when my little sister joined me at college.  Her and her high school friend lived in an apartment maybe 300 ft. from my front door.  I would hang out there a lot, and over time, her friend became one of my close friends.  We had a long conversation one night, and she said to me, "You have always wanted to become a wedding planner.  Why don't you just do what you really want to do and go for it?"  This was a life-changing question she had just posed.

The next morning, I was driving to campus, and I still recall the exact spot of the street I was driving on where I had that pivotal epiphany.  I realized that the entire time, I was having such a hard time picking a major that was going to stick because, up to that point, I had not believed I could really accomplish the goal I had wanted to accomplish for such a long time.  I loved planning events and had dreamed of being a big time wedding planner for as long as I could remember.  It took my friend almost bluntly pointing out the obvious for me to realize that I had been selling myself short every day of my life up to that point.  I came to see after this how much time I had wasted not believing in myself, and this changed my entire perspective on life.

Needless to say, I changed my major to Business Management.

The next year or so of college was filled with adventurous trips to arcades, fun and refreshing hikes to gorgeous locations in the mountains of New Mexico, lots of exciting sporting events where I would cheer especially loudly at rival games, and plenty of other rewarding experiences. I had also landed a job in the catering department on campus where I had been promoted twice and was working as the Lead Catering Sales Coordinator.   I had the exciting opportunity to work with several brides to plan the menu for their weddings, so I was well on my way to learning a TON about weddings!  This was a time of excitement and fun, and so many experiences that blessed my life in ways I could have never imagined.

A good friend's wedding I got to help direct after gaining all of that wedding-related experience in my catering job

I went through two majorly difficult times towards the end of my time at New Mexico State University.  I won't go into great detail.  I'll briefly mention them, but I mostly want to focus on what I learned from them.  In the summer prior to my last three semesters, my father had a massive stroke, and three months later, my brother's life ended tragically to suicide.  I learned through these experiences about how important it was that I take time to process the emotions I felt throughout these experiences.  I knew what it felt like to go through the deepest pain I had ever felt in my life.  To this day, I cry when I think or speak about it.  Going through something that painful taught me a lot about the atonement and God's love for me.  It taught me just how powerful his love is.  I believe that my family will be together forever, so I know I will see my brother again, and that brings me more comfort than I ever thought it would.  I also learned that, while going through experiences like these, you wonder if you will ever be happy again because the pain is very deep.  Thankfully, along the way, I have felt him urge me forward.  He has reassured me several times that it is okay for me to move forward in my life and be happy.  I also learned that there is almost no better feeling than emerging from the most challenging time of my life to find the greatest joys I have ever felt.

My Daddy-Kins who I love with my whole heart.

My baby brother.  He was learning how to fly and loved other adventurous things like motorcycles and such.

Emerging from this incredibly difficult time in life steered me in a direction towards the most fulfilling experience I have had in my life so far.  In my last semester, I had the opportunity to take part in an ordinance my church refers to as the endowment.  This was an incredibly life-changing experience for me.  The three decisions I have made in my life that have been the most important  so far have been the decision to be baptized, the decision to go to the temple when I was 12, and then the decision to get my endowments.  The biggest reward for me has been an increased desire to live my life in the best way that I can and to feel closer to my Heavenly Father every day.

The best day of my life so far!  My lil sis' sense of humor is one of the parts of my laugh that makes me laugh the most.

This was the best experience of my life so far, and then only a few months after that, I finally graduated.  I am surprised none of my family members fainted watching me walk across the platform to receive not a degree, but a paper that told me that I would be receiving my degree in the mail shortly.  I did it!  I finally did it!

Graduation day with one of my close friends.  We actually worked together as well, so go us!!

I decided to be adventurous and go for my dream.  I have always wanted to live in California, and upon receiving confirmation from God that this is where I am supposed to be, I am here!  San Leandro, California.  It is in the Bay Area, so lot's of opportunity surrounding me. Yay! I have been job searching and think I am close to landing my dream job!  We'll see how it all goes, but for now, my take home lesson from this experience has been: Don't be afraid to go for your dreams!  Life is too short to not experience the things you want to experience!  Let God be your guide and best friend.  The life plan he has designed for you is so much better than anything you could have spent hours and weeks and months carefully drafting.

By the way, I know I can't just mention that I am getting close to maybe landing my dream job and leave it at that.  There is more to talk about there.  There is plenty more to come with that adventure and so many others. So, until next time.....

Peace and blessins!

P.S. And just so ya'll know, I realize the title of my blog is"This Tall Gals' Life: Did I Just Snort When I Laughed?? Can I Give You a Hug While We're At It?".  This is a pretty good description of what I am like when you are around me. So stay tuned for highlights of the hilarious moments I have that cause me to occasionally snort when I laugh, and want to give people hugs because I love them or just want them to feel happy :)