I'm a well educated fool...

Well I finally got a day off! Woohoo! And spent it running around of course. Now I thought it'd be a good plan to go get groceries. It's mid-week, mid-afternoon, should be no problem right? I'm a foolish, foolish girl. Turns out it's the Tues before Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving here is a VERY BIG DEAL. And so grocery stores two days before said VERY BIG DEAL are worse than the mall at home on Boxing Day. Seriously. Absolutely beyond insane. Will be staying far away till @ least Mon :)

A commercial moment: today's blog is brought to you by Panera Bread. Yes indeed cause w/o them we wouldn't have a blog cause I wouldn't have Internet. There are chains from home that I miss here (ummm can we say Tim Hortons??? Pizza Pizza??? Mr Sub???) but I gotta admit I'll miss this one when I get home. Coffee shop type but with *really* good sandwiches. Not cheap admittedly, but good :) And of course, free wifi :) And VERY comfy couches to lounge on while taking advantage of said free wifi... N all the staff @ this one seem ridiculously friendly -- but I don't know if all of them are like that. So that's the commercial of the day -- if you're travelling in the states and looking for some good food and a comfy place to sit (esp if you happen to have your notebook w/ you :) stop in.

Finally went to look around Southern Pines. It's a great little town. Takes a bit to get the hang of driving there though -- if you're driving the main street (which is intersected in normal size blocks like a traditional grid layout) -- you have no stop signs, but have to yield to anybody coming from your left. Anybody coming from the right you have right-of-way over, but if they're coming from the left you have to stop... A *little* scary till you get used to it. The street looks like a normal divided road (one or two lanes going each way w/ train tracks down the center as the dividing line. However, it's actually laid out as two one-way streets. The difference? Now there's parking on both sides of each direction. Which means people randomly stop and/or pull out in front of you from either side. Tons of fun. The only redeeming factor is since it IS the south, everything moves in slow motion *g* Would NOT want to do that drive in a hurry! Walking it, however, was really nice. I took window-shopping to a whole new level as I spent entirely too long wandering along and going in any store that had an interesting looking window.

Christmas stuff here just seems wrong though. No snow, temps in the teens, and birds singing. Somehow the inflatable reindeer just look hideous -- now they're beyond tacky anywhere, but in this environment they're just wrong.

Had to laugh at the small-town-isms here. Don't know if it's a love-it or hate-it thing, but from the outside view it's just amusing. We all know the horse world is *very* small. Now when you shrink that and move said "horse-world" all w/in 20mins of each other in a small town it becomes a little excessive. Something happened at work today (while I was off exploring) and when I got home my roommate asked me about it. How did SHE know??? Well her bm also works at the tack store, and somebody in the tack store mentioned hearing about it at the feed store from somebody who'd been connected to somebody who was there. Follow that? The entire community is a game of telephone *g* They also have an email list that connects them all -- occasionally they get messages about lost or missing horses when somebody falls off in the foundation (HUGE -- like 4000 acres -- area donated solely for horse use. Denny's farm backs on it -- happy hacking for us! For the curious: http://www.walthour-moss.com/)... So anyways -- the e list does have a practical use, but I get the impression that more often than not it's mostly gossip :)

Well my day off is over :( Ah well. On the plus side -- we have heat again (did I mention it's been out the last few days??? Iffy @ night when the temps drop down to about freezing AND our hot water is connected to the heat so no heat = no hot water!). AND I'm supposed to have both phone and internet as of Fri pm. I'll believe it when it happens, but still a good start :) We still have no furniture or dishes of course, but hey have to tackle things in priority order eh?