trail blazing

went to the barn today for my routine (not unwelcome) visit while home

rode my horse, zip, and a horse who looks just like him, hershey, and spent a good two hours on both combined, including a trail ride i took with my sister, K. we took Hershey and Zip behind fox chase (the new location of MEA haven farm) and across the rolling green hills of virginia (not to sound cheesy in description but that is exactly what they are, and the scenery is beautiful!) and into the woods. i let zip take the reins at one point (oh haha, my punnery is both futile and awful this evening), and, letting the reins sit loose in my hands, had him choose his own path. zipper trail blazed for a good ten minutes before he ran us right up to a dead end at which point he promptly spun around and headed back the way he came.

...horses are remarkably intelligent in that way :) haha

in the rest our explorations, we ran up along the edge of a cow pasture and were about ten feet from a big black bovine just standing in the middle of a creek, as well as found a creepy tree with red berries amongst the middle of nothing but dead winter trees, which reminded K and i both of the movie the village...at which point we each urged our horses on just that much faster.

minus the creepy tree, the scenery was probably the best part...nature is absolutely wonderful, and the landscapes of middleburg and aldie, va make it just that much more so!

black friday

for the first time ever today i engaged in the hysteria that is black friday shopping.

K and i woke up at 5:30 and drove to fair oaks to join the shopping scene by 6am.

running on merely white chocolate mochas from starbucks and some fruity orbit gum, K and i met up with some of K's friends and co. and traversed fair oaks. i came home by 9am, successfully having purchased some fun goodies for myself, as well as completing my gift search and purchase for S :) (a whole month early! rare for me, when i usually prefer to buy the gift as close to christmas as possible because i hate having to wait so long to give it to him!)

later, i met up with the usual panera lunch crew, E, T, and D (missing H unfortunately) for...you guessed it, panera (tragically, the mac n cheese was a fail...curse you panera) in order to have a routine thanksgiving luncheon and catch-up sesh (not that i don't talk to T & E almost daily...). afterward, T somehow tricked me into going BACK to fair oaks for a 2nd black friday shopping spree...

i went in insisting i couldn't spend money and she'd somehow trick me into buying something i'd regret.

sure enough...

first store we enter i pick a silly little winter hat off a mannequin and buy it, without thought.

but the thing is...i kind of love it...i've been wearing it around the house ever since i got home :)

wordle

we used wordle a lot in high school (in wendy's english classes!) but i'd largely forgotten about it until today when my english professor assigned us a wordle for extra credit

so i figured today i'd blog through wordle (i know it's small, the website wouldn't let me save it any bigger)

torn

i'm really torn between teaching either history or english...

english has always been my strongest subject but i really really enjoy history courses and learning history and geography and government and such (okay so aka i love to learn social studies).....

so that's what's basically been plaguing my mind and continues to do so

suggestions?

house on a rock

i want to live here:

just another reason why rhode island is beautiful

weekend home

my weekend home was everything i wanted...

i went shopping with my mom (got a delicious cute new jacket!)

chilled with dad

visited Pk, Kpmk and Agk (oh and bailey)

watched scary movies with M, K, and Ae and made fun of everything in them (i've missed being able to do that)

ate chipotle (cravingg, clemtown needs to get one)

spent time with S and his family :)

watched clemson beat fsu!

and basically just enjoyed everything about life back in the fax

returning in two weeks!

monsters of folk

in a fit of classic college experiences...

(one of multiple gorgeous mountain scenes we saw on the way to and from louisville)

Kt and i drove 9 1/2 hours (including an hour long detour to avoid a rock slide on i-40 that involved obtaining directions from a country gas station, passing through "luck, tennessee" -which incidentally is just a store on the side of the road- driving past hot springs, tennessee -a natural spa location since the 1800s?- and on never-ending winding roads up and down and around two mountains before making it back to i-40 having bypassed the rock slide) to louisville, kentucky for the monsters of folk concert at the louisville palace theatre on halloween night.

the trip was made epic

a) by the sheer absolutely illegality of it all (in terms of....forbidden by our parents-oops?)

b) by my ability to cut an hour and a half off of our trip by certain driving skills...

c) by the complete bright eyes discography played off Kt's ipod/new moon book on tape?

d) by the car bed

-put down the seats in the back of the car, both Kt and my's bedding spread out=CAR BED

the concert was epic because of

a) conor oberst. mike mogis. montgomery ward. jim james.

b) dancing neon robots and "that fuckin' rabbit" (okay....everyone who was in costume)

c) the lousiville palace theatre

d) monsters of folk rendition of "at the bottom of everything"

e) monsters of folk dressing up as kiss after the intermission and performing dressed as such

for the record....i'm in love with monsters of folk.

Kt and i also made the obligatory trip to whitecastle (burgers are in fact amazing...in an admittedly gross way, though), and spent an hour driving around louisville trying to find the university of louisville boathouse, and ended up sleeping in the car bed in a hotel parking lot. we woke up at 8 the next morning and drove another 8 hours back to clemson in time for me to shower before my 6pm freshmen athletes' etiquette dinner :)

(bridge we drove under on the detour around the rockslide on the way home

...i think this is a cool bridge/picture)