Positive Thinking! Positive Thinking!

I leave for New Hampshire in eighteen days, which is very strange. I feel like I just got here. As many of you know, New Hampshire isn't exactly my favorite place in the world, but I am trying to keep the blog-whining to a minimum. To that end, I've decided to talk a bit about things I'm actually looking forward to (!!) about returning to the Live Free or Die State.

• Living free or dying. I intend to live free.

The other option is dying hard. This kind of shit happens in New Hampshire all the time.

• Teaching. Oh man did I miss teaching this last year. I can't wait to have students, to be in front of a classroom again, even to grade papers--Smarthinking has made me realize how awesome it is to grade and evaluate on your own terms.

• Writing and reading. Sure, I'm writing and reading this summer, but it's going to be fun to have myself exposed to stuff I wouldn't pick up on my own, and to have a dedicated writing schedule. Writing over breaks always feels kind of like a dalliance or a hobby, even when I'm really cranking it out; in school it's basically all there is, so it feels much much more important.

• Shipyard Summer. I know this is weird, since I'm in the land of microbreweries, but I have been totally craving Shipyard Summer Ale. I've been enjoying a lot of Northwest summer ales and IPAs (apparently there's a very distinct "west coast" style of IPA, pioneered by WA and OR microbreweries, that has a lot more kick to it than its east coast cousin, which explains why all the IPA in New England sucks except for Smuttynose) but the Shipyard Summer is kind of like liquid crack-beer. It accompanies hot, muggy weather quite nicely. I promise I'm not cheating on you, delicious Northwest brews! It's just a fling.
  

• Having a car. New Hampshire is going to suck a lot less when I can get around it, or leave any time I want to go Boston or Portland or the mountains. Thanks for the car, Kate and Adam! You have noooooo idea how awesome this is. (Fingers crossed the Civic makes it across the country incident-free.)

• My new apartment. I can't wait to have my own space and fill it up with books and video games and brand new kitchen stuff and the things I like. Plus, it's in downtown Dover, right next to an awesome used books store and a bunch of nice bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. Sweet.

My building. I'm in one of the studios on the corner.

• Fall in New England. We haven't had a ton of summer weather in Washington, which I'm just fine with. I'm already done with 85-degree-plus weather, sweating myself to sleep, sitting in front of fans, etc. (And has anybody else noticed how the red lights in Seattle are one or two minutes longer once the temperature gets to about ninety? I swear I'm not making this up.) I know that once I arrive in New Hampshire I'll have even more miserable weather to deal with for awhile, but then fall will be here, and it will be nice and cool and pretty-colored, and I can eat apples and candy corn and wear coats again. Huzzah!

Yeah, it's pretty there.

• Hiking. I hear the hiking in New Hampshire is great, and they do have lots of woods and mountains (sorry, "mountains"). I'm going to buy a best hikes book and use my newfound transportation to travel the state and walk all over it.
  

• Seeing my cat. I miss her.

Clementine circa early 2007.

See, positive thinking! Maybe I could follow this up with a list of things I won't miss about the Pacific Northwest. It might be short, but worth it.

The Kanc Picture Dump

Yesterday Ashley and I drove into the White Mountains to tour the famous Kancamagus Highway. It's a huge fall foliage spot, a thirty-four mile drive through the mountains and forests. There were lots of tourists, and the traffic to get there was pretty bad, but it was worth it. The leaves here are amazing!

Getting out and looking at nature and mountains made both Ashley and I very homesick. I couldn't help but compare the Kanc to Chuckanut Drive, and Chuckanut wins. Yeah, the fall foliage is amazing, and Washington just doesn't get leaves the way New England does, but give me the rugged Pacific coast and evergreens any day. Here's a bunch of pictures, in no particular order.

Blustery New England Morning

The view from my balcony

BONUS PICTURE: Ashley dressed me as a hipster and I don't know what to think.

I look like freaking Chelsea.

Fall Traditions

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.


I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.

First Fall Color on the UNH Campus

Sarah from the Office of Conduct and Management (where I work, casually known as the OCM) told me I needed to see the fall color early when the first leaves started to turn, then again at the peak of the season. I had wanted to hike up Mount Major near Lake Winnipesaukee to check out the trees and the views of the lake, but unfortunately, the homework load didn't let us. Instead, Ashley and I drove down to campus, which he hadn't had time to really check out yet.

It was family weekend, which meant a ton of parents and little kids, and an inordinate number of students out and about for a Saturday afternoon, but it was still nice. We wandered through the trails and looked for the College Woods, but could not find them. We guessed that they were the little woodsy breaks between clusters of buildings on campus and wrote off the grandeur of the name College Woods to the tiny New England scale of things ("Guys, this mountain is huge!"), but a quick Google search proves us wrong. We actually drove through part of them on the way home, to avoid the family weekend traffic; it's a big 250 acre nature preserve that the campus shoulders up against, with plenty of hiking and biking trails. Another time, College Woods, maybe deeper into fall or after the first snow.

Anyway, here's pictures from around campus.

We've got wicked oak trees here.

The camera doesn't really capture how vivid these red leaves were. Some of the trees look like they're on fire.

These little dudes are all over campus, and love to run under the feet of passersby, stand paralyzed with fear for a second, then run back under the bush they came from.

Hitchcock Hall, on the upper quad, where I work.

Groundhog! Woodchuck1 Whistle Pig! Land Beaver!

The backside of Thompson Hall, which is the cool old building they like to show people on the website.

Defacing signs is big here.