Beachy. :) 

We went to Charleston on Saturday! Scroll to the bottom to start from the beginning.

Then there was beach joy! 

 

 

Dig the palmtrees! 

Then we wandered around downtown. 

And we sat in a doorway in this alley and ate it. The chocolate was good; the mosquitos were not. 

Belgian Alex bought us Belgian chocolate. 

We went to Charleston and it was awesome. 

Well, I tried to hide it, but some of you found out my secret. Now that my cover's blown, I figured I'd go public... I wrote a book!














My mom is so proud.

Nothing to see here....

Just proving the moral superiority of Colorado's state house to West Virginia's.... We have gold leaf, too!! (awesome photo stolen from http://www.marysteinbacher.com)

Few things are as satisfying as an awesome weekend.

Friday afternoon kicked off the weekend with great mail. I got a hilarious letter from a friend in Oregon (which is really really far away when I think about it!) and a card from my family. All of my family had gotten together a few weeks ago and it was sad that I wasn't there! But they all signed a card and my nephews drew me pictures (one was a whale and the other two were unidentifyable) and it was awesome. Also my mom drew pictures of my fish who said hi. My family is super-cool.

I got kidnapped by my roommate Emily and friend Nanda . . .

. . . and taken to the McFly concert at Delaney's, McFly being an 80s cover band and we all know nothing is better than the 80s. Delaney's is the home of Sunday night trivia (which I'm ditching tonight, shhh) and calculations indicate that after school and home, I spend most of my Columbia life there. The night ended with pizza and sleep and waking up Saturday at a vaguely decent hour.

Saturday I watched a lot of TV. And did laundry. And read for accounting. Also received an unexpected refund check from my doctor in Boulder. Woohoo! Then today I ran errands and did more homework and watched more TV. It. was. AWESOME!

The greatness is that we are only in 3 classes right now, which is really nice. Especially since I totally ignore one of them (yes, it's decision analysis). It is so crazy to believe that this is my life now. Student life is so strange, where my days are devoted to reading and writing and listening to people talk. Meanwhile we're living off loans and most of your spare time is spent with even more reading. We're not making any valuable contribution to society. I got so sick of that feeling in undergrad which was reason #64 why I could never have gone straight into grad school. Meanwhile I can't believe that this is one month down out of 2 years... it's going to be like this for a long, long time.

There are so many aspects to my disbelief that this is my life. Sometimes I narrate things just so they feel more real (less real? who even knows). "I'm a graduate student. I'm in South Carolina. I'm studying accounting. Duuuude." And things are going to be even stranger from here on out. In January I will be in Mexico (wha?) and after that I have no idea! But I'll be hanging out probably in another hemisphere, living in another language. As bizarre as that is, it's not like I haven't done something similar before, and don't think that doesn't blow my mind. Then I'll be back and then potentially gone again, studying abroad. So while I knew all this before, it is totally bizarre that it is now my reality. I'm in total denial. The good news is this is so obviously the right thing. I complain about school and about the debt and about having no life, and I'm really not interested in accounting, but also everything is as it should be.

There was going to be more but I got distracted. :) So, the end.

General amusement from trivia night, where we go every Sunday and clean up thanks to Scott and Darrah. Except I knew the name of the dog in the first Iditarod (Balto). This week we packed the bar with about 1/4 the people in our program. Very sexy pictures below.

 

See below for (slightly) more about the nat'l park. There was a deck over this oxbow lake and there were tons of turtles there! and you looked around and there were more coming! I was talking with some other people on the deck and we decided that they hear vibrations (or something) and people have fed them in the past and so they come beg for food. Begging turtles. That would be cool (and sad) if it were true. 

There are lizards all over the place here! They are awesome. I saw this guy (there was a brown one eating a cricket jsut out of the frame) at the Congaree Swamp National Park (the newest nat'l park in the east). I went there on a Sunday by myself just to check it out and get out of the "city" for a while.






Self portrait at Congaree Swamp. Yeah, that's a spider bite on my face. I kept walking through spider webs and I guess that was ok until one time the spider was still on there and it was orange and then it dropped down my shirt! Then I jumped around and squealed. But that's not the one that bit me. ah, wilderness.





The trail I "hiked" was a very long boardwalk, which was nice because, well, .... see "Swamp" in the name.
Everything looks better in sepia. 

Standing on my balcony, here is the view.














Here is the other view from my balcony. there's an interstate right there but it's not bad at all. For some reason the sun almost always turns into a red ball during sunrise and sunset.