wisdom teeth the day before thanksgiving? why not.

well i don't really have much time to write today, and i know this post is a little late, but exam week is drawing near and that means that every teacher has made everything due this week! but oh well i'll make it. anyways last wednesday (the day before my beloved turkey day) i got my wisdom teeth taken out. somehow i only had the two top teeth, so the surgery was pretty simple. and thank goodness the recovery was too. my mom said i was a little loopy on the way home from the oral surgeon's but that once i got home i fell right asleep. waking up with your mouth chocked full of gauze is a strange feeling, but it was good to know i was still alive. my teeth were feeling snazzy and i was even able to eat a full thanksgiving meal the next day (in very small amounts and only chewing with my front 4 teeth of course)!

who doesn't love death valley on a saturday?

i claim that i'm not that big of a clemson football game, but there's nothing like the allure of death valley on a perfectly crisp autumn day. this past saturday, i don't think we could have asked for a more beautiful day to have our last home football game. i woke up at around 11 after a good 9 or so hours of sleep expecting to look out my living room door and see a grey landscape drizzled with puddles and rain droplets, since that seems to be the theme of the weather for clemson football this season. but to my surprise, the sun was shining bright and the yellow and orange leaves of the oak trees had never looked so resilient. i showered and went out to tailgate, and tailgate i did. i think i consumed for mini sandwiches, chicken nuggets, apple slices, and dr. pepper's than i ever have in one sitting. but boy was it worth it. with the warmth of all that food i just engulfed sinking in, my friends and i headed into the game to witness greatness. there's nothing quite like sitting in the student section amongst 80,000 of my closest friends. the game was awesome, CJ Spiller is awesome, and clemson is awesome. it really is the best place in the world.

thanksgiving is my favorite season.

i guess technically thanksgiving is not an actual season like winter, spring, summer, or fall, but thanksgiving is most definitely my favorite season of the year. one of the main reasons i love thanksgiving is because it lies in the real season of fall, which just happens to be my favorite season of them all. anytime that i can get pumpkin cream cheese at einsteins on a bagel and eat said bagel while speeding down a mountain road flanked by orange, yellow, and red-leaved trees is a great time. but anywho, let me give you a run down the rest of my favorite things about thanksgiving (in no particular order):

1. cornbread dressing

2. football

3. family

4. no school

5. tryptophan

6. cool weather

7. autumn leaves

8. pumpkin pie

9. friends

10. more cornbread dressing

yes, i know. most of those are foods. but lets be honest, who doesn't love a huge thanksgiving meal?

i promise i have a good reason.

so the reason i waited till today to write my blog for last week was because i knew something epic was going to happen last night. and boy was i write. since tl hanna didn't have school yesterday, we figured it would be a good time to do a little old fashioned younglife scavenger hunt. and of course, as you probably guessed, it wasn't just any old fashioned scavenger hunt. the plan was to break them up into teams and give them a checklist of things they had to do around the anderson mall (if you haven't been there, don't bother) ranging from having a makeup lady in dillards put eye shadow on a boy to gathering 10 toothpicks from food court free samples. and for a little added flair, 5 of us leaders were disguised and hidden around the mall and were worth extra points. i of course was dressed as a janitor and was carrying around my cleaning caddy in the men's section of belk polishing mirrors and cleaning windows. well, as awesome as our plan was, we ran into a little difficulty. two words: mall cops. well they quickly shut down the scavenget hunt, saying that roaming the mall in groups of 6 or more is considered gang activity. real cool anderson mall. we were also told we couldn't take photographs in the mall due to protecting homeland security. what? that doesn't even make sense. one cop was nice enough to sympathize with us and share that even though he's taking crime scene photography classes at tech, they still wouldn't even let him take pictures in the mall. what a travesty. but nonetheless, the cop call threats and name-taking threats subsided and we cleared out to chickfila, where the love and milkshakes flowed freely. you may think we counted the night as unsuccessful, but you'd be wrong. after going to lunches at the school today and hearing people talk about younglife getting in trouble with the cops and getting kicked out of the mall, i'd take on the mall cop anyday. bring it on paul blart.

corndogs and candy apples

well this entry is a little late, but i figured i'd tell you about my weekend. i don't know how often you frequent columbia, sc, but if you make it there at all, it should be during the week in october when the sc state fair is there. now you think a museum has culture? you haven't seen anything until you visit the state fair. the fair has a flair for bringing out the best of south carolina. people come from the woodworks just to make it to the fair. pretty much everything about the fair is great, but here's my list of the top 10 things at the sc state fair(in no particular order):

1. Fiske french fries

2. foot long corndogs

3. ginormous sand castles

4. mullets

5. fake hypnotists

6. 200 pound bunny rabbits

7. teenagers in action

8. carnies

9. strawberry lemonade

10. funnel cakes (duh)

i hope you're inspired to make it to the sc state fair at some point in your life. its NOT real life.

scattergories brings out the best in people

who knew that the board game scattergories could produce such a good time. well, this was something thing that i figured out last night while team tlh was on our team overnight to liz's lake house on keowee. normally i dread these types of team events, but for some reason i knew this one was going to be eventful. needless to say, dinner and the shenanigans before the game were fun, but when scattergories got into full swing, the laughter started to roll in like a tidal wave. answer after answer from certain individuals were some of the most ridiculous things that I have ever heard. let me just give you a few of my favorite answers. for the letter A, liz's answer for color was "orangoutang orange". let's dissect this: one "orangoutang orange" is not even close to a real color, and two, its spelled with a O not an A. sweet sweet liz. she thought we were all laughing at her because it was a ridiculous color. she soon figured out how to spell it. liz struck again with the letter H, saying the "heltics" were a professional sports team. kelly chimed in during the letter P, using "pink ponies" as her answer for things you find in a souvenir shop. she was so embarrassed by her own answer that she couldn't bring herself to say it. i don't think i've ever seen her laugh so hard. so all in all, i think i have a new favorite board game. and a new favorite color of course.

take that art loeb.

so for fall break a couple of friends and i went on a 3 day backpacking trip to the Pisgah National Forest outside of brevard, nc. and what a 3 day trip it was. it started off well on friday afternoon. after leaving clemson we stopped in the burg to eat at the infamous wade's. i'll admit despite my skepticism, it was good, but still no lizard's thicket. we made it to pisgah by about 6:30 but this was just the beginning. the ranger station was closed, so we just took some pictures of the map and went on our merry way. we had to head back to town to get pipe tobacco and stop and dolly's ice cream parlor. bad decision #1. this little detour used up the last of our daylight, meaning that we had to do everything else, like find a campsite, set up camp, make a fire, etc, by artificial light. you'd think every person would bring a flashlight or something, but no. somehow we ended up with my headlamp and dkal's $0.50 clunker of a flashlight. needless to say we were up the river with no paddle and wearing a bookbag of rocks. somehow we found a campsite, made a fire, and got semi-settled. and of course, it decided to rain. i think if our night hadn't already been so stressful, we would have persisted, but we folded, climbed in the car, drove to the nature center down the road, and spent a long and uncomfortable night sleeping in the car. the good thing is that this was our lowest point. we woke up the next morning determined to make this backpacking trip one to remember. we headed to the ranger station, got a map and a game plan, went to walmart to get a compass, and headed to the art loeb trail, a 20 mile round trip out and back hike to the top of cold mountain. yes, the cold mountain. the weather was testy, but the rain held off for the most part, making the trip out there great. the views were unreal and the time with friends was even better. camping on top of cold mountain was awesome. good conversation by flashlight makes any situation awesome. after a good nights sleep, we made the trek back down the mountain in an hour less than it took us to get out there. that would be due to the bojangles that was awaiting us right down the road. too many great things happened to list them all, just take my word, it was the best trip i've been on in a long while. i can't wait for round two...