Up Close and Personal

                Soft, warm, gooey, and heavenly. If you’ve never had the pleasure of eating a cinnamon roll hot out of the oven, you’re missing out. There’s nothing I love more than waking up in the morning to their smell. Every Christmas, my family would go down to my aunt and uncle’s house and right after we opened our gifts, we would eat hot out of the oven cinnamon and butterscotch rolls my grandmother made.                These days, we don’t travel for Christmas, so as the baker of the family, making cinnamon and butterscotch rolls has fallen onto my shoulders. The only problem is after years of making them, I still can’t make them like my grandmothers.                The first time I made them, was the first time that I ever worked with yeast. To this day, it is one of the scariest things for me to ...

  There’s nothing I hate more than trusting another object to keep me from plummeting to my death. It doesn’t even have to be a dangerous height and I still get nervous. This isn’t one of those small fears either, like being afraid of sharks or spiders. I’ll start sweating and my heart pumping if I ever get put somewhere too high. The thing is, it’s specific situations that really scare the bejesus out of me. Either I’m on the very edge of a very tall cliff, or I’m on a manmade contraption that doesn’t have enclosed rooms or solid ground. I can be on the 100 th floor of a building and be fine or look out over a valley on a tall mountain with no worries. This fear has been with me my whole life, but I never truly acknowledged it until the day I climbed up the watch tower in eastern Illinois for the first time. The tower didn’t even look that tall from where I was standing on the ground, maybe 20 stories or so. It looked relatively sturdy too with four big metal legs with tons o...