"If I don’t know it, I don’t answer it!"

I'm sipping on a delicious French Toast Latte from the Sandbar in Ashland, Wisconsin. There's an older man sitting at a table on the lower level who is none to happy that he keeps receiving calls from 'local' numbers he doesn't recognize. "Your phone number just isn’t private anymore!"

I mean, he's not wrong. But regardless, I'm putting in my earbuds.

This two story café does it all: coffee and pastries, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If I'm studying here long enough on the weekends I could go from sipping on a coffee to sipping on a cocktail--which I have been tempted to do. Multiple times. The Sandbar shares the same, boat-shaped building as the Blue Wave Inn, and Solstice Outdoors shop, and it's located maybe ten yards from the Lake Superior shore.

This place has become my favorite new getaway when I don't feel like going to my usual spots in downtown Cable. I've noticed that there tends to be an unspoken trend whenever I come here: business men and families enjoy a lunch on the lower level, and us stressed out college kids hide away in the upstairs loft. That upstairs loft saw me through 90% of my seventh semester. I'm now about to start my final semester of college in two weeks, but the fact that I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Wisconsin and not in California doesn't make it feel real.

I felt like I really made the most of spring quarantine. I gave online-school a week long trial run and decided at the time that just wasn’t for me. Afterall, I was going to a music theatre college that didn't offer a single course online prior to going remote, so it was a really hard transition for everyone. For the first three days of online learning I was clocking well over 12 hours a day in front of my computer and even then I was barely keeping up with everything. By day four I'd reached my limit and decided to take a leave of absence instead of holding off to see if we would return to in person classes.

Once I no longer had school to occupy my time, I had to wait patiently for the worst of the pandemic to ease up before I could go back to Wisconsin and try to find a summer job. I also decided to use this time as an online respite and make the most of every wide-open day as I could.

So what did I do?

I started reading for fun again.

I read everything you see here and then some! The Mortal Instruments is perfect for YA fans of fantasy/adventure. Don’t watch the Freeform TV show Shadowhunters after you read the books, watch it before. Trust me. The All Souls Trilogy has quickly become my all time favorite and highly recommend it to people who liked Twilight as teenagers, but want something a little more mature now. I also read Elixir by Hillary Duff—yes, Lizzie McGuire wrote a book!—however that was more like a Wattpad fanfic and so I would actually recommend to a middle schooler. I’m currently enjoying Jane Eyre over my morning cup of coffee.

I kept studying French

When I wasn't reading, I was doing another French lesson on Duolingo. I've been flying through the lessons, listening to French podcasts and music, and keeping a journal to try and maintain my progress as best I can.

I watched all of Gilmore Girls (and started drinking more… oops.)

In the early days of the pandemic, my mom and I watched three or more episodes of Gilmore Girls at every cocktail hour. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but… we drank a lot. It kind of felt like, “why not? The world is ending.” Initially we were trying different White Claw flavors (why is it that we can only ever find the worst one, Black Cherry?), then we moved on to trying out different kinds of beer. To this day if I hear Carol King or drink a Bent Paddle Coffee Ale, I'm immediately brought back to those early quarantine days.

Despite ^that^ I also started taking care of myself!

I introduced my LA morning routine to my Minnesota lifestyle. By April I started getting up at the crack of dawn and taking the car to go watch the sunrise over my old high school, and while I sat there I would read my Bible and sip on some coffee. I would then work out in the basement and go for a long walk around Lake Marion. Going for those walks and listening to music is what saved my sanity as my siblings and I all learned how to live under the same roof again--something we hadn’t done in over three years. There were some days where I went on multiple three-mile walks just for something to do.

“Then I rediscovered some semblance of normal life”

Come late May I was itching to get back up to Cable, Wisconsin and get back to work. Luckily, my boss at the Brick House Café (aka Food Network star Heather Ludzack) is also the executive director for the Cable Area Chamber of Commerce, so she offered me a job over there. So come June, I moved into my grandparent's cabin and life changed all over again!

The summer semester at AMDA started, and although it was online, I gave it a shot. I didn’t want to have to postpone graduation any later than I had to. I know myself too well, and I knew that if I kept waiting for in-person classes, I would loose my drive and not go back. Online classes were so much easier this time around than they had been when we first made the transition back in March. (I'll talk more about what it's like to go to a theatre school online in my next post!)

I turned 21!

I celebrated my 21st birthday in style by getting on a boat and bar hopping all the way around Lake Namakagon with just my family and my closest friends. I'd been hoping to celebrate my 21st that way for at least a year and a half, and I was so grateful that despite everything going on I was still able to have a proper 21st. I know so many of my friends who turned 21 just before I did that didn't get the celebration they deserve, and to them I say: buddy, I've got a shot with your name on it.

I moved out of my home.

Fall and winter came and went, with the biggest thing being that my family and I moved out of the home we've lived in for the last 16 years. Emotionally, that was an exceptionally hard thing to do--especially right now. How on earth do you tear your roots out of the ground and start a new life in a year like 2020? Given the fact that I'm about to graduate and go into a world on pause, the idea of also saying goodbye to my childhood home was difficult for me to deal with.

It was also hard still being at the cabin 3 hours away, and having to plan weekends to go back home and pack up my things. Especially given hoe much progress was being made in between those visits. Every visit the house was less and less the home I grew up in; furniture vanished, the walls of our bedrooms were painted a different color, all the carpeting was torn out and replaced. I went down one last time to help my mom do some last minute deep cleaning, and by that point the whole place was empty save for a card table and some chairs. I think that was the hardest visit because at that point I was all cried out, and the house simply didn't feel like ours anymore.

Within 48 hours of the house being on the market, my mom received the offer she would eventually accept, and we'll be closing on it in a couple weeks. I'm excited for my family and I to see what's next for us, and I'm so grateful to have grown up in such a great place. I had a very good childhood there, and that house saw me through all the way to adulthood. Not a lot of people can say that, but I'm glad I can.

I'll be graduating from college in June

I'm still sticking with online class, and my seventh semester at AMDA LA will be finished tomorrow. I'm on track to graduate in June with my bachelor's degree in musical theatre.

The last twelve months have been absolutely insane. For me and the whole world. I've learned a lot about myself, I've changed, I've found some peace, and I've had some struggles. This year was a lot of pressure, but I don't think I would trade away everything it gave me for a year that was less… historic.

Until the next cup of coffee!

Ken