Beergasm, Fall Memories, Leafy Shirt

It feels like fall outside! I am just so excited I can't express it with words. The weather lately has felt sort of like:
Warm, but exuberant. Like a beergasm hot tub full of boys, or beakers full of bubbly champagne. And the evenings feel a bit like this:Like a feeling of being in a hot tub full of boys and then hopping out into the chilly night air. Autumn (or at least the promise of it) makes me very optimistic, reminiscent, nostalgic. So does the time of my birthday, which is next Monday. This time in September also causes me to wax poetic about a string of very strange and random things:
1. Fancy pens. Every year from K-12 I'd buy some fancy pens for school. Color-changing, pens with aquatic animals on them, mechanical pencils, and pencils with trolls on the top.
2. Back to school, walking down the long driveway to the school bus.
3. A shirt I had with autumn leaves on it, circa fifth grade. It was strangely similar to this beauty from tobicollage.com:
4. My semester in Scotland. Better in hindsight than in actuality, considering the strange cultural differences to be overcome and the lack of a quality educational system. But I would love to go back and teach, live/work, or maybe just soak up the essence there.
5. One chicken tandoori sub. (Or hoagie.) Eaten in Princes St. Gardens, Edinburgh. I was famished, a stranger in a foreign country, with pulled tendons in my feet from cobblestones and jet lag. A chicken tandoori sandwich saved me.
5 1/2. A tomato and olive pita pocket which did not save me. It was disgusting and I spit it all out on the ground.
6. Vassar.
7. New apartments, and making a home for your few precious things.
8. New and amazing friends!

It's the same every year, when the wave of 'fancypensback2skoolleafyshirtscotlandtandoorivassarapartmentfriends!' hits me suddenly and unexpectedly. The list grows longer with every autumn, but I certainly look forward to it extending with new and wonderful things. I've retired the leafy shirt, though...I don't want to be too cool for school and intimidate all the new kids.