What are your favorite autumn rituals?

• mornings/afternoons/evenings/whatever sitting at B&N with a hot cup of coffee and a book
• raking leaves, then jumping in the pile (a childhood ritual that I desperately want to revisit)
• baking/eating pumpkin pies
• rainy days stuck at home
• decorating for Halloween
• Thanksgiving at my aunt's amazing house
• crocheting new scarves

Oh, God, I love this time of year so much.  It's starting to cool down just a tad, and walking across campus the other day, I caught a very slight chill in the air.  It made me smile.

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I'm back and ready to bring you all the latest in Aubrey news.

Hope everyone who was in Hurricane Ike's path is okay.  It was, for the most part, a non-event here in Tyler (some power outages and a few downed trees)...I only left to avoid the crazy, panic-driven assholes in this town who push and shove their way through the aisles at Wal-Mart to grab bottled water and canned corn that they didn't need.  The danger here in Tyler is not the hurricane itself, but the idiots roaming the streets.  That sounds mean, but it's true.

School.  So fun.  We're studying Ancient Greece in Humanities, the Colombian Exchange in U.S. History, and the final draft of my first English paper is due tomorrow.  I'm pretty confident that I'll get a decent, if not excellent, grade on it...we had "peer reviews" of the second draft and mine got quite a few glowing remarks from my classmates.  Yay for me.  I know I've already mentioned this, but my professors are flippin' amazing.  My history professor teaches in the style I love best, zany and creative.  Case in point: while discussing the livestock and other animals that were brought to America during early colonization, she gave a very accurate (and hilarious) impersonation of a charging wild boar.  Good times.

Face Off

And how are things going with the fella, you ask?  Just swimmingly!  He's introduced me to a lot of really great places in the DFW area.  We went to Central Market last night and picked up a bunch of nice things for a home-cooked dinner.  I've started to feel quite at home in Dallas; even the driving isn't as intimidating as it was at first.  Getting onto 635N is the most interesting part.  If you're in my car, it goes something like this:

"Come on, come on, come on.  Speed up!  SPEED UP!  F*cking GO!!!!  GO!  Let me in here....dude, move the hell over, there are other people trying to drive here.  GOGOGOGOGO!!!  WHOOOOOOOOOO!  WHO'S YOUR DADDY!  Hell yeah!"

Then I light a cigarette.  Interstate driving: more like sex than you thought. *snort*

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It's been a great week.  Next week looks even better.

Loathing:

• waiting for school to start
• having to trim my nails for work
• hydroplaning
• baby formula...smells terrible

Loving:

• my textbooks (more below)
• no lines at the ID/Parking Permit registration at TJC
• taking a decent student ID photograph
• hanging out with my dad and nephew
• Greek pasta salad
• all this rain
• having a temporary window seat at work
• spending time with a certain fella:)

Looking forward to:

• school...only five more days!
• pretty much everything else.

On the textbooks, I received my final one today (US History...*yawn*), but I got online to check out the contents of the titles I can't open just yet. 

DUDE.  My Humanities text?  Freaking awesome.  Check out these chapter titles (these are just the ones that really grabbed my attention):

• The Beginnings of Civilization
• Byzantium
  
• Charlemagne and the Rise of Medieval Culture
• The High Middle Ages: The Search for Synthesis
• The Fourteenth Century: A Time of Transition
• The Early Renaissance
• The High Renaissance in Italy
  
• The Baroque World
• India, China, and Japan: From the Medieval to the Modern World

I'm so excited to take this class.  I didn't think I'd get a chance to study these periods so early on.  I hope that the professor will put as much detail as she can into the lectures.

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Currently reading:

On hold at the library:

Noticed at B&N today:

On the wishlist:

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"Hey, a birthday cake for me! Who are those two hot guys?"

"OMG it's Brandon Boyd and John Frusciante! This is the best birthday cake ever!"

Wednesday, we celebrated Brandy's birthday at work with a lovely cake that included pictures of her two favorite musicians.  She was so excited that she made us eat around them.

Tonight, I had dinner with two old friends.  I've known Laura since kindergarten, Jill since ninth grade.  I hadn't seen them in about five years, but once we started talking, it was like no time had passed at all.  They're both finishing up their degrees...it still amazes me that we're actually old enough to earn masters and doctorates.  I hope that we won't go so long without seeing each other again.

Laura, Aubrey, Jill

Laura's Birthday, 1990

Laura found some old photos from one of her birthday parties and brought duplicates for me to keep.  This is us back in the day.  I'm on the right.  You can't see it, but I'm wearing acid-washed mom jeans and a NKOTB belt.  Stylin'.

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We drank a lot.  Not as much as we had planned....well, maybe Leslie did:)  That's really all I can say about this portion of our adventures, so enjoy the pictures.

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DAMMIT.  I had this awesome post all finished, detailed and full of pictures, and Vista crashed.  I hate Vista and the bastards who made it.  Anyway, let's try this again.  Less detail, but pictures are at the bottom, and I've included locations in the picture descriptions, in case you ever want to visit:)

I'm home.  I'm sunburned, lethargic, stuffed with food, and severely, severely freckled. 

I didn't want to come back.  I would have been happy selling everything I own, buying a bike, and moving into an apartment in SoCo.  I'd have to live with about a dozen people, though...those apartments run about $1200 a month just for an efficiency.

The thing that really struck Leslie and I was that everyone in Austin is active and healthy.  Everywhere you go, there are people walking, jogging, roller blading, and biking.  I suppose this is just city life, but pair that with the remarkable ease in finding healthy, delicious, and cheap food (vegetarian or not), and you've got a winner in ATX.

We ate very well.  We didn't overload on anything other than coffee and alcohol...I'll talk about the latter in another post.  We ate mostly Tex-Mex, and we refused to eat at any chains or any places we could have eaten in Tyler or Denton.  Chains suck, local is best.  The staff is friendlier, the food tastes better, it's generally cheaper, and you get a more authentic experience than you would get in boring-ass Friday's or Applebee's.

Once I get all of Leslie's pictures, I'll do another post.
 

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We've decided to switch hotels in Austin.  The Omni is beautiful and ritzy, but I mentioned the other day that I'd like to hang out in SoCo, and Leslie did some research and found us this kitschy little place literally down the street from everything we want to do.  Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock have both stayed there, and we got the VERY LAST ROOM.  Must be pretty awesome.  I'm just happy that we won't have to worry about sobering up to drive after hitting Sixth Street, and we can just stumble on back to the room. 

Oh, and it's listed as a "Green Hotel"!  Yay for that!

Look at all the stuff there is to do!  Coffee shops, galleries, boutiques, fresh produce, bars, clubs, music, food, AGH!!

I'm prepared to fall in love with Austin again.  Who knows...between Dallas, Ft. Worth, Austin, and San Antonio, I might find a place to set some roots down someday.

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Julie and I were chatting after walking at UT tonight, and I think I'm going to recruit her as my unofficial college advisor.  She gave me lots of inside facts on what classes to take, which professors to get to know, and told me about some fellowship programs that I'm very interested in.  When I get my B.A., whenever that is, I can go submit an application to teach English in Japan and make a cool $60K, plus all of my living expenses for a year.  Wow.  Or I could apply for the Archer Fellowship in Washington D.C.   I'm not planning on majoring in Political Science, as Julie did (she just graduated in May), but it sounds like an amazing experience. 

The next few weeks are going to be spent taking my placement tests, and I'm considering CLEP-ping out of a few courses.  Then I have to go up to UT, meet with the History Department's Chair, and get a list of what I need to be "core-complete" when I transfer...I want to get out of having to take Statistics.  UT also has a Classical/Medieval Studies curriculum that looks incredible. And I can minor in Anthropology, which makes my little heart go all fluttery.

LOL, you know me...yet again, I am getting ahead of myself.  I haven't even started my freshman year, and I'm already looking into things that I probably won't get around to for quite a while.  Even if I have to completely bust my ass and have no social or love life for a few years, I swear that I'll have my B.A. by thirty-two.  I've misplaced enough time, and I'm not losing any more!

SO EXCITED.  I'm doing a happy dance right now in my chair.  This is something I've been waiting and waiting for, and its here!  I can't wait to walk around with my nose stuck in a textbook, leaving a trail of index cards everywhere I go.  Just like old times...

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I think this is a pretty good list of our plans in the capital next month.

• visit my sister
• go shopping
• watch some live music
• get trashed on Sixth Street, then try some public transportation
  
• stay in a kick-ass four star hotel (and it was CHEAP)
  
• watch some bats at the Congress Ave. bridge and try not to get pooped on
• more shopping
• swimming (our hotel has the largest pool in the city!)
• take corny touristy photos
• oooh, we should play some frisbee golf!
  
• walk a lot
• shop some more
• make fun of locals
• see some celebrities?  Austin seems to be a hip place right now.
  
• sit in a coffee shop until we've "solved the world's problems"

If anyone wants to tag along or meet us there, let us know so we can sneak you into the hotel in our luggage.

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