ooo. first i have to say, new blogger is very pretty. i had clearly been roughing it using blogger on mozilla. but now it’s just as good as what they had for IE. go blogger.

secondly i have to say my dad drove 22 hours wednesday and thursday all the way from texas to see me and help me move into a new apartment. how cool is that?

thirdly i have to say we finally finished our $70 million dollar budget proposal at work. it’s done! done. done. done.

but now i can say that today, after finishing the $70 million dollar budget proposal, i skipped out on the rest of the work day and went hiking with jean, betsy, and my dad. unlike the previous hike-til-ya-drop event at umstead park, this time we had a mission. to go some place high. with a view. “some place like the highest point in orange county,” you ask? what a terrific suggestion. so we went out to occoneechee mountain state natural area on the eno river in hillsborough.

ok, it started out kind of lame, and then it got better, but when we got to highest point, essentially walking up a road, we found a cell phone tower at the top, dwarfing what used to be an old lookout tower (imagine metal structure with 8 flights of steps on top of a mountain). except this lookout was closed. sadness. and all we could see was trees.

so we marched onward, decided to get off of the almost-paved “brown elfin knob trail” and onto the much more exciting-sounding “overlook trail”. and that took us to the edge of a cliff. very cool. awesome view. and a sense of impending danger as we could see the result of a recent ‘rockslide’ that claimed a massive chunk of the mountain. but it got even better when we looped down around to the base of the cliff and got to stand at the bottom looking up at this recently sheared off white and pink cliff face.

and then the long hike back to the car. sweaty and enjoyable.