a thousand thank yous to the mysterious ms. hopper who posted the road construction link. I've been looking for a website like that, since ncdot's main site offers precious little info.

in ireland, stores charge a tax equal to $0.15 on each plastic bag given to you. so if you buy five bags worth of groceries, $0.75 is added onto your total bill. bring your own bags and pay nothing.

that is such a good idea. when will america get with the program? I never put my stuff in a bag if I can carry it otherwise. what I don't understand is why I get treated like a criminal for doing it. take harris teeter, for example. I go though the self checkout, skip the bagging, and take my stuff. I've gotten everything from weird looks to yelling cashiers for doing this, and ALWAYS get my receipt checked. if I was stealing something, wouldn't I put it in a harris teeter bag to make it look less suspect? the logic seems completely wrong to me.

went in the browsery bookshop for the first time in years yesterday and bought a couple of books that I'd been wanting for ages. I love edward mckay's, but so many greensbohemians seem to think it's the only used bookstore in town. not so.

I adore the new wheels, but my finances are in the worst shape they've been in for a while. no more major purchases for me until I get back on my feet. so much for the villa in the bordeaux region that I've been scoping out.

people seem to be into halloween a lot more this year. more elaborate haunted houses, bigger pumpkin patches, more crowds than ever at party city. but that could be my impression because there are few people more halloween crazed than justin. any day I expect to come home and find the entire house covered in synthetic spider webs. it's adorable.

I wish that I'd liked halloween more as a kid, but it's just a testament to my laziness that I didn't. I mean, why dress up and walk around the neighborhood to get candy when my parents could just buy it for me? of course, I was also cripplingly shy. I guess I could always make up for lost time. my last attempt at a costume, though, was "disheveled man." thankfully only justin, nadine, and several thousand strangers in chapel hill witnessed that caper...although the legend lives on.