A Calm Saturday

Hot chocolate, Christmas movies, and Black Friday planning. That's what my Saturday has consisted of. Most of my friends are gone for the day and the ones who remain are watching football, so I decided to just sit inside and relax. Plus, this is the first Saturday I haven't had to work since the beginning of the semester, so I was pretty excited about that. I somehow accidentally slept in until about 12:30, which is the latest I've slept in probably well over two years, but I didn't go to bed until around 4 a.m., so really it's not THAT bad. After finally climbing out of bed, I came to the realization that I had absolutely nothing to do aside from waiting until tomorrow to finish the relatively small amount of homework I have to do before Thanksgiving break. So I put on some sweatpants, turned up the heater, and made myself a delicious cup of hot chocolate. I decided I'd finally make a shopping list from the Black Friday ads I've been looking at online for the past couple of weeks, because Black Friday is one of my favorite things and I am just way too excited that it's only a couple of days away. I also watched some of my favorite Christmas movies - The Year Without A Santa Claus, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, and 'Twas The Night Before Christmas. Overall, it was great just spending the day relaxing and getting into the Christmas spirit.

Why I'm Looking Forward To Thanksgiving Break

Exactly one week from today, I will be at home, enjoying the comfort of my own bed while eating a bowl of cereal and watching a rerun of some show within the Kardashian world. This is the excitement that awaits Thanksgiving break. Aside from the aforementioned relaxing evening I have to look forward to, there are a lot of things about break that I'm excited for (and not just the break from schoolwork). To show my excitement, I decided to compile a list of some of the things I'm most looking forward to about Thanksgiving Break.

Black Friday Thursday? - I always get super excited about Black Friday shopping (even though I'll probably be done by the time Friday actually hits since the stores are opening so early), but this year, I'm even more excited because I get to go shopping with my sisters and two cousins, which is sure to be a blast. Especially our mandatory IHOP stop :)

FOOOOD! - Basically everyone looks forward to this, but since I don't really get to spend Thanksgiving with any extended family, it's mostly about the food for me. And by food, I pretty much just mean cheesy potatoes. And mashed potatoes. Really, just any form of potatoes.

Goodwill trip - The city I'm from has this amazingly huge thrift store, which I haven't been to in a very long time, so I've already planned a trip there during break to hopefully expand my sweatshirt collection.

Baking - I absolutely love baking and I feel so deprived when I'm at school because I don't have the means (nor the time) to do it. So I will be baking up a storm while I'm home next week.

Target trips - Target's pretty much my favorite place ever, so I will be stopping there at least one other time aside from Black Friday.

Birthday dinners - Since I'll be at school for my birthday later this week, I get to go out to eat twice while I'm home during Thanksgiving break to celebrate a little late. And since both my mom and grandma take me out to eat, I get to hit up my two favorite restaurants without having to choose between them.

Relaxing - This will be my first complete break from both school and work this semester because I had to stay on campus and work during fall break, so I'm excited to go home and just have some time to myself to relax.

Christmas gifts - Since there's less than two weeks between the end of Thanksgiving break and the start of Christmas break, I'm going to have to have all my friends' Christmas presents ready when I come back from Thanksgiving break. I'm super excited about this because I love everything about giving gifts, especially when it comes to wrapping.

Cereal options - My house is always fully stocked with a plethora of cereal options, and since cereal is one of my favorite things, I'm looking forward to all the different cereals I can choose from while I'm home.

14 Times Lizzie McGuire Taught Us What Not To Wear

One of the greatest gifts that Disney Channel brought us was Lizzie McGuire. Back when Disney Channel was in its Golden Age, you could catch an episode of this magnificent show almost every day. And everyone knows that the only thing better than the show, was Lizzie's wardrobe. Some of my friends and I have been able to relive some of Lizzie's interesting fashion choices recently since I have several episodes on DVD. While we were discussing how strange some of her outfits were, I decided that I would make a list of some of her weirdest ones. And since it's Thursday, and Thursdays are for throwbacks, it only seems right that we would look at 14 times Lizzie McGuire taught us what not to wear.

Their faces here match my opinion of these outfits

I had to save the infamous unicorn sweater for last. 

I clearly didn't pay close enough attention to this episode...

Halloween Throwbacks

Since there are only a couple of days left until Halloween, I thought I would post about some of my past Halloween experiences.

My worst Halloween experience was, by far, when my dad took me to the Haunted Hoochie, one of the most horrifying haunted exhibits, at the tender age of seven. I won't go into the whole story since I posted it last year, so if you want to read about the most traumatic experience of my entire life, click here. Trust me, you definitely won't regret it.

Aside from that one terrible story, I have a lot of positive Halloween memories. Picking a costume was always my favorite part of Halloween, and I had a lot of awesome costumes when I was younger that I absolutely loved. My two absolute favorites have to be my 101 Dalmatians costume and my Dorothy costume, which my mother actually made because she's just that awesome. I loved the Dorothy costume so much that I wore it for various Halloween parties for almost three years. I was also Snow White one year, and that's near the top of the list because I looked quite adorable. Also, my cousin looks really cute in that honey pot costume.

When it came time to for me to decide on my costume when I was in fifth grade, I decided I wanted to be a little creative. After hours of brainstorming, I finally decided that I wanted to go as dogs playing poker, like in the famous painting. Yeah, I was (and still am) pretty strange... So my mother and I made my costume and I ended up getting tons of compliments on how creative and funny it was.



Growing up, I had some pretty great Halloween costumes that I loved, making for a lot of awesome memories. I feel like my favorite pictures of myself when I was a child are when I'm in Halloween costumes because I still love all the different costumes I had.

Also, I'd just like to point out how cool my mother's glasses are in that top picture :)

Weekend Adventures

It's a pretty busy time of the semester right now. I have four papers due within the next week (three of which I haven't started, and one of those has to be six-eight pages) and am quickly approaching the due date for a documentary that I don't even have a finalized idea for yet. Plus, I have two jobs and several other commitments this week to balance on top of all that schoolwork. Needless to say, this is going to be a pretty hectic week.

That's where weekends come in. This weekend, I had an immense amount of fun hanging out with some of my friends that I haven't gotten to spend a lot of time with lately. Friday, it was one of our friends' birthdays, so we all went out to eat and had a swell time and lots of queso. 

Saturday, one of my friends and I started out our wild night by going to the craft store, Lowe's, Walmart, Tim Horton's, and the Red Box inside Kroger. After eating donuts and watching That Awkward Moment with another one of our friends, it was only 10 p.m. and we thought our night was ending. Then, a couple of our other friends came over and convinced us to go walk around Kenyon, another college campus about ten minutes away from ours. We ended up exploring the art gallery and the cemetery, which some of us decided was haunted. Also, our group had dwindled to half the size by Saturday night, because some of our friends aren't cool enough to go play in a cemetery at 11 p.m..  

All in all, it was a great weekend that included lots of food, friends, laughter, and memories, and I definitely feel prepared to face the week ahead. 

My New TrackIf Obsession

I recently stumbled across a website that has quickly become one of my new favorite things. It's called TrackIf, and it's absolutely magical. If you ever shop online, you really need to check out this website. Basically, it tracks the price of any item you want and then sends you an email when the price drops or increases.
TrackIf has tons of different ads for almost every store, like Target, Walmart, Kohl's, etc., that you can browse through to find items to track, or you can just copy and paste the URL from any item you find on any site and it'll track it for you. Not only does it notify you when the price on an item changes, but it also shows a graph of the recent price fluctuation of an item so you can see if there is any pattern and predict the next time it will go on sale. And it's completely free, which makes it even better.
TrackIf is seriously one of the coolest and most helpful websites I have found. I'm really looking forward to seeing how handy it comes in with Christmas shopping this year, and I definitely encourage you to do the same.

My Ranking of Every "High School Musical" Song

We have been on quite the High School Musical kick in our apartment lately, which is clearly never a bad thing. Last night, we decided to watch High School Musical 3, prompting me to look up articles on BuzzFeed about the trilogy. I stumbled across one titled A Definitive Ranking Of Every “High School Musical” Song Number. It was the most wrong thing I have ever seen. For starters, whoever wrote the article seemed to have a very bad attitude toward all of the High School Musical movies, insulting a good number of the songs. People who don't like High School Musical are what's wrong with world. Also, everyone knows that the third film has the best music, by far. On the aforementioned list, only one song from the final movie made it to the top ten. To make things worse, that song was "I Want It All". My personal favorite, "High School Musical", was number twenty-two out of thirty. I think it is a disgrace to put the final song of the final movie so far down on the list. After reading that abomination of a list, I decided I would make my own. I completely left out the graduation mix of "We're All In This Together" because it is barely even its own song, it's more of a background track. So, here's MY ranking of every "High School Musical" song:

1. High School Musical
2. Everyday
3. Breaking Free
4. I Just Wanna Be with You
5. Can I Have This Dance?
6. You Are The Music In Me
7. Now or Never
8. I Want It All
9. Right Here, Right Now
10. Scream
11. Bet On It
12. The Boys Are Back
13. What Time Is It?
14. Start Of Something New
15. What I've Been Looking For (Reprise)
16. All For One
17. A Night To Remember
18. We’re All In This Together
19. What I’ve Been Looking For
20. Gotta Go My Own Way
21. You Are The Music In Me (Reprise)
22. Just Walk Away
23. Get'cha Head In the Game
24. Work This Out
25. I Don’t Dance
26. Fabulous
27. When There Was Me and You
28. Stick To The Status Quo
29. Bop To The Top