it's such, it's such a perfect day

What I thought was going to be a boring weekend with all my friends and family out of town has totally turned into something else. My family stayed in town...and so did my roommates!

I had dinner with my parents last night and talked about life and my potential trip to Australia. They are all for me going, basically all that stands in my way is finding out from the university whether or not I CAN go, haha.

The roommates and I watched the Grinch last night, the Jim Carrey version, which I do not like as much as the classic one, which reminds me of my childhood.

Today has been such a great day too. I went to the Market Square farmers market, which I think is one of Knoxville's redeeming qualities. I came home with some cookies, muffins and a pumpkin to make a pie with from my old friend Colleen :-)

The ladies I live with had decided it would be a good idea to take a little trip up to Pigeon Forge and get one of those old timey pictures made to display in our apartment. Borderline risque dresses, fishnets, garters, guns...that was an adventure!

We capped the day by going to a pancake house, which are synonymous with that whole area, and visiting the Incredible Christmas Place! That place is so crazy and at the same time puts you in the best christmas-y mood!

I also did one of my favorite things ever today, which is go to the downtown library. Being there reminds me of going to the library with my mom and sister as a kid and doing the summer reading program and getting so excited about getting stickers for the books we had read.

It's been a great weekend and it's not over yet...I just have to study and write a little paper now.

Oh and the Vols won today, who knew they still had it in them?!?!

vacuums, bikes and wax museums

I have been saying I'll clean out my pit of a car for a couple months, so when a semi-nice day rolled around, I was forced to finally commit to the lovely task. Armed with trashbags (did anyone else besides me NOT know there were scented trashbags?!) Armor-All wipes, and $6 in quarters I set out to clean up Goldie-my car, of course.

My trunk was a sight to see, and ended up being home to:

• 5 coat hangers
• 2 pairs of ski gloves
• box of colored pencils
• 2 umbrellas
• assorted shoes and dirty socks
• 3 legal pads
• annnnd...a shell from a Ninja Turtle costume??

After Goldie was good and vacuumed, the next activity was trying to find Melissa a BIKE!! So I wanted one last year for my birthday but I ended up having to spend the money on oh, groceries and rent...sigh.

One stop at Dick's Sporting Goods and I found exactly the bike I wanted-in my favorite color!



Ok that was easy! The salesman checked my new bike out and pumped up my tires and then I rode out to my car!

Then later on Saturday evening, I am sitting at my friends' apartment and we go through "where do you want to eat/oh I don't care/what should we do" routine, when one of us mentioned Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg...

There is just something about the lights of the pancake restaurants and tattoo parlors in Gatliburg that make you think of Christmas...so we listened to Christmas music, it just worked.

After passing up old time pictures, airbrush/camouflage/redneck/marijuana/hunting t-shirts, Ripley's Believe it Or Not and two haunted houses...we stumble across the Hollywood Wax Museum.

This place was hilarious! For $12, we walked through and took pictures with the wax lookalikes of Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, Spiderman, Batman, Hugh Hefner, Orlando Bloom. Austin Powers, Charlie's Angels, I Love Lucy and others.

To end the night, the four of us shared a funnel cake, my very first one! Yeah!

Not a great experience though. I later threw up.