Sunday in the Borders

Ah yes, yet another idyllic Sunday spent driving around Scotland, admiring gorgeous scenery in the company of seolta & funkyplaid. Even better, this time we had spiffington with us too! Mathew (edit: now known to me as mxhaunted) also came along for the ride, but his bad knee limited him to the car for part of the day. Bad joints = no fun.

We got off to a bit of a late start, on account of everyone (except me) being out the night before until 4:00 AM at a dance party. Nonetheless, we got rolling in good time & proceeded South into the Borders, with the destination in mind being Traquair House, one of the oldest inhabited houses in Scotland.

We never made it. Instead, we wended our way through delightful little towns, narrow B-roads, sheep & cattle pastures, over hills & through dales. We proceeded through alternating 15-minute bands of rain & sunshine. When we realized that our late start meant we wouldn't get to spend any decent amount of time at Traquair House, we drove up to its famous Bear Gates, took some photos, & headed to a pub in Peebles for some grub. There we were harassed cheerily served by two extremely bored & garralous waiters. We proceeded from Peebles with no particular destination in mind, & ended up at Scott's View, a fantastic overlook near the River Tweed.

The order of the day was "Stop whenever we feel like it." We drove across one bridge three times in order to capture the perfect photo of it (not posted here). We stopped to play with a Giant Schnauzer (eeeeeeee!) whose owner probably wondered who these crazy people trying to kidnap her dog thought they were, anyway. We skipped rocks under a 230-year-old bridge. We checked out the ruins of a Roman fort.

As we were starting to wind back towards Auld Reeky, seolta directed us to one last surprise destination: the town of Legerwood! That's right, there are now a few MORE photos of me standing under that little iron sign near the kirk, & one more entry in the visitor's log in my handwriting. I was very happy to have my good friends there with me & it made a fantastic finish to a fabulous day.

( Click here for amazing views of the Borders )

comment whoring

I can't speak from experience, but I'm betting that every heroin user would give you a different reason why they love their drug so much. The LJ addiction is much the same. Some people are addicted to posting every lil' detail about their lives. Others must obsessively check their Friends page to see what everyone else is up to. Me, I'm a comments whore.

Getting a comment on one of my LJ posts has become one of the most sublime thrills my life has offer these days (which is, in a way, itself a comment on the state of my life). I love the LJ feature that emails me whenever anyone comments on anything I've said, anywhere. It's great because first of all, I instantly know & second of all, I get to enjoy the comment buzz twice - once when I get the email & then again when I follow the link to the comment itself & actually see it there.

I've come up with many schemes for increasing the number of comments I receive. The most obvious one, I suppose, would be to make more public posts. But I can't do that for reasons discussed previously & let's move on (just in case they're listening OMG OMG OMG)

Ahem. I could attract more attention to my LJ by becoming an opinionated, divisive ranter on some LJ community. Or I could create some meme that circles LJ, endlessly generating new comments (see this post for the canonical example). Getting posted on ljdrama.org also seems to be a great way to increase comment traffic. But generally I don't write well enough or controversally enough to attract comments that way. I admire people who do. I also like the writers who post other kinds of great content, like quizzes & surveys & other regular features. I've made some stabs at that sort of thing, with Friday Fives & whatnot, but to no avail. Perhaps when chaosvizier & I get our act together & bring the Daily Quiz to LJ, we'll see some comments. Lovely, lovely comments ....