[Around the house.]

Happy Friday, you guys! I only have a few links for you as this has been a busy week at work and I've managed to stay off the computer and go to bed super early for most of it. Here are five or six things that I've enjoyed this week:

I seriously almost bought this print for my son's bedroom before I was like, "Oh wait, I don't have a son."

I loved Dani's post about Method's Pink Your Sink campaign. I'm also the daughter of a breast cancer survivor, so these efforts to find a cure are especially close to my heart.

I haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I've done a bit of work with that damn Twilight "Saga," and I found this article to be really super interesting. My opinion is that an abusive relationship between two characters is going to look like an abusive relationship between two characters, no matter what kind setting and plot you drop it into.

New blog friends for you: Christine and Tif!

I'm a bit late to the game, but I've been listening to the new Mumford & Sons album and I can't get enough of it. Talk about passion eyes. The whole album plays over and over in my head and I don't mind at all.

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Rob and I are meeting in Farmville tonight, and we're staying at Longwood with my brother, then going to Hampden-Sydney's Homecoming football game on Saturday. After tailgating and stopping by all of our old stomping grounds, we'll be heading to Charlottesville for the rest of the weekend to spend the night with my dear friend Patrick (but apparently not his fiance Chad, because Chad is now in Roanoke for a month doing med school things. I hate having all my friends scattered around!). Two of my best girlfriends, Shawna and Emma, are also currently in Charlottesville, so I'll hopefully be exchanging a few hugs and a meal or two with them. I can't wait! Homecoming weekend is always the best.

[Columns in Richmond, November 2011.]

People will be going back to school soon.

On Monday, one of my college roommates posted a couple of things to my Facebook wall, and they made me laugh until tears ran down my face. It reminded me that my old friends are only one of those far away things in my life that makes me miss undergrad so dearly.

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and I think a lot of it has to do with college. The packing and moving and starting over as the leaves begin to change--it does something to me. There's magic in the new notebooks and the old books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, with treasures of underlining and notes just waiting to be discovered. When Rob and I first started dating, I was taking a Victorian class and we used to sit down together with my used copy of an extraordinarily large Norton Anthology of English Literature and read what the people who owned it before me had written in the margins.

I try every time, but I can never quite put my finger on it.

And so, for the third time on this blog, I quote:

"If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted...then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one's own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things." --Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

On Saturday morning, I managed to remind myself of all the reasons I love to run. There is something wonderful about being a runner. It's about constantly re-discovering just how strong you are. You go out there and run a race with 40,000 other people and really feel like part of a community, but when it starts to rain and your legs get tired and it hurts, all that really matters is you and that voice within that says you can still finish the damn thing, blow your goal time away, and make yourself proud. So that's what you do. I hope I never outgrow this thing that has become such a huge part of my life.

After our post-race brunch, showers, and respective nap times at Tina's apartment, Rob and I headed to Farmville to visit some friends at Hampden-Sydney. 

I woke up on Sunday morning and got in my car to drive the six miles down Back Hampden-Sydney Road, one of my favorite little drives to do alone in the morning. I always do the same thing: I play the same old Taylor Swift album, I roll the windows down, and I allow myself to be completely overcome with memories from college, like that drive between Longwood and Hampden-Sydney that Rob and I did so often that very first spring we were together. Then I get coffee.

This time, I made a friend. This dog came running up to me out of nowhere when I pulled over to take a picture of the road.

He gave me some kisses and then ran alongside my car for a while after I told him to go home.

I went to bed so tired on Sunday night, but so thankful for the chance to remember how important a few things are to me.

Life is good in the spring, isn't it?