Little Blue

Yes, I know.  It's been a while.  I blame technology and I blame my frustration with it.

I've been trying for what seems like forever to upload Inventor's birthday post but keep running into frustrating 'photo upload errors'.  These errors had me going through every single photo and checking and rechecking it for hours upon end.  I kid you not.  Iv'e spent so many hours on it that I have since thrown up my hands in disgust and given up, for the moment anyway. I WILL get that post up one way or another, it just won't be right now.  Poor Inventor.....He turned 8 btw!

In the meantime, and yes I know I'm still back in DC in our little travel log, I bring you a sweet little story of a cat.  Yes, a cat.

This -



is Little Blue.

The photo was taken a year and 2 months ago out in the middle of nowhere TX.  He was one of a myriad of free roaming cats my loving Aunt B generously feeds on the ranch she shares with my Uncle D.

When I say a myriad, I mean A Myriad.  This is what kitty dinnertime looks like out there:



No, not all the cats have names, I think.  This one caught D&B's eye cause he was so small, so blue/gray and so affectionate!  He, like all the cats out here (well, except for the royal indoor cat) find their way to the ranch where they are well fed.  Other than that, they are on their own and have to fend for themselves when it comes to every other aspect of survival.  And out here, it's really survival of the fittest for these guys and gals.  It's wild country!

Well, this particular little kitty cat was so friendly, so small and so trusting that B didn't hold out much hope for his survival.  BTW, no, they could not bring him indoors and officially adopt him since the royal cat would surely have had a very violent hissy fit.  In other words, his survival in this particular house was not guaranteed either.

Our kids fell for Little Blue the minute they set eyes on him,



And he didn't seem to mind them at all either.

Just to make it clear, S and I are NOT what you'd call cat people, by any stretch.  We are dog people.  Cats were never on our must have list.  Nor were they on our 'even slightly interested' list.  BUT - we ALL fell in love with Little Blue.  EVEN S.  If it weren't for his severe allergic reactions to cats Little Blue would certainly have come back home to CO with us!  That's quite a statement coming from us I tell you.

B, being quite concerned for this little guy, asked us if by chance we knew of anybody who'd be interested in adopting him.  Nobody came to mind.

About a week after our visit up at the ranch my good friend H here in Austin mentioned that they have started thinking about getting a cat.  They already had a dog and have had a cat in the past, but they really were only interested in a particular kind of cat.  A very very VERY gray cat.  These kinds of cats have a name but it completely escapes me at the moment.  Well, you can probably guess what my reaction was.

Long story short is we ended up going back up to nowhere TX during that visit and brought Little Blue to his new, safe and sound and loving home in Austin.

Why am I sharing all this?

Well, we of course visited Little Blue (and our friends) again during this TX visit.  Little Blue is A. Not so little anymore and B. Goes by a different name, Sterling.

This is 'Little' Sterling today, a whopping 10lbs later....

He really is stunning.

I know, I know, you don't see his size quite yet, hang on.

This is his behind...

Getting the picture?

This is his whole entire humungo self!

He is still loving and gentle, i.e. tolerates quite a lot.....but as you can see from here, it's hard now for Inventor to even pick him up!

His coat is soooo think, lush and soft it could rival any fancy lady's fur coat!

He's gorgious and we still absolutely love him.

And he, apparently, still remembers and loves us too

:-)

Just a hangin' and just a chillin' - October 30th & 31st

So here we are on our two day 'vacation' from sightseeing in DC.  Much needed I might add.

Turning to the weather for a moment, the first two days we spent here were some of the most humid I've experienced in my life.  And I've been through summers in Houston!  It wasn't all that hot, in fact, it was even down right chilly those first couple days.  But my oh my was there moisture in the air.  Even our plants grew mold!!  Not to worry, they have dried out and recovered since.  And yes, we travel with two little plants.  The first was a going away gift from our friends in Boulder.  It's a practical gift aptly named by my friend, the magic plant.  We refer to it as such as well.  Its real name, though not the scientific one I guess, is Hen and chick.  Yes, Hen and chick is the name.  It's sort of like an Aloe plant but better in the sense that it will cure practically every ill your skin may experience.  From bug bites to burns to rashes, this plant's juice does the trick, in an instant!  Like I said, it's the magic plant.  Aloe, btw, we ingest more than we use on our skin, though it's good topically too of course.  The second plant was a gift from one of our new 'Teton friends' from Minnesota.  It's a garlic chive plant.  At the moment it's not faring so well....but we're still holding out hope.  It's delicious!

Back to DC though.

As you can see from the double pajama layers the weather turned really cold that night.  But, the next morning the kids were up and writing in their USDA notebooks again!



While S and O (who spent the night in his tent at the campground) had their morning drinks.  And there are the plants! Attempting to dry out in the sun a bit....



This one was busy working on his White House.  After five days of getting up early and hitting the road, or the pavement, everyone was really glad to have the morning, and the day, to just chill.



O spent quite a bit of time teaching Analyzer how to use Wikipedia for her airplane and rocket research.  She was expanding her aerospace studies to beyond what she found at the museum.

And there's a plant again!  I think it's a recurring theme.....That's the Hen and Chick btw.  Hard to tell, but it has the 'mother', or hen, in the middle with all the little 'babies', or chicks, shooting out around it.  They will start their own new 'colonies'.



Lots of time for giggles and fun and there's the other plant!  The chives obviously, during better days....



Sunday came and we had a family related mission.  We were going to meet the mother and stepdad of my soon to be sister in-law, M!  They happen to live about 45 minutes away from where we were so we set out in the afternoon to meet them for the first time and have a nice evening together.

K, M's Mom, is a lovely lovely woman with a wonderful sense of humor to boot.  In an email she offered up this description as to how to find them.  She said, in the driveway are two cars, one black one white, the house is white with black shutters and the couple inside, is black and white! Love her :-).



Unfortunately I don't have a decent picture of O, M's stepdad to share.  He was so gracious, shared K's sense of humor and had some very interesting stories to share with us about himself and his family history.

We took a short walk down the street to play with the dog



and kick the soccer ball around.



Inventor helped out with the dinner and we all enjoyed a serene, lovely and delicious time.



Tomorrow, it's back to town to explore more museums....no more of this rest stuff!

Money, air and space. October 29th, 2010

Well, this morning, we all woke up still very tired.  As you can tell.  No amount of sleep would have set us straight after yesterday, but we got what we could.



On the agenda today was the all important DC landmark, Target, followed by this all important building


This is the visitor's entrance though.



Not to worry, we got our tickets before that sign went up.  Again, tickets are free, but you must have them in hand with your time stamp to enter.

In the waiting area we got see, and climb on, a million dollars in $10 bills!!  Yup, that's exactly what you see here!



Just look at that face!  Oh my gosh.....'what I'm gonna do when I get my hands on that'......Drooling, just drooling.



You even get to sit on money here....



Well, not really, but Whirlwind was trying to get to it nonetheless.

"Greenbacks" were first printed in 1861 due to a shortage of coins during the civil war.  Green was selected since it was highly available AND highly resistant to chemical and physical changes.  And TA DA!  Cash was born!

Of course photography during the tour was super strictly prohibited, so sorry guys and gals, no photos of M-O-N-E-Y.  But boy did we see it!

The tour takes you along the money making conveyer belt from a safe distance above it all and behind some pretty thick glass of course.  It's pretty gosh darn cool!  You see all the steps, print one side, the other, add watermarks, slice, dice, inspect, wrap, pack, stack, etc.  I'm skipping a few steps to be sure, but that's the gist of it.  The inspector btw, trains for two years to earn that job.  And what does that job look like?  Well, he/she grabs one bill from each stack of oh, 100 bills?  Something like that.  He/she then holds it up to the light, looks for this that or the other and if all's good, sends it on down the road.  If not, well, the entire batch of God knows how much money is tossed.  I'm sure there's much more than meets the eye to that job, but that sure is what it looked like.

The tour also provides for some excellent entertainment.  From the the humorous guides to the humorous employees who see more money printed every day than they'll earn in a lifetime! You've gotta have some kind of something in ya to do that for a living.....At one point one of the employees held up a stack of freshly wrapped $20's.  1 million dollars worth of $20's.....He tossed it at the glass and kept gesturing for us to catch it.  Then he pretended to be making off with the money himself :-). Guess humor is one of those 'somethings' those workers have to have in order to get them through the day.  The kids LOVED that guy.  Heck, we loved him and loved playing the game right along with him.

The tour ends at the gift shop, but of course.  The cool thing here was that we got to see how tall we are in $100 notes.....That's a lot of money.....



And just a little bit of history here, this is an antique 'spider press'.  The machines today obviously look nothing like it, like I said, it's history.



We all thoroughly enjoyed our tour, especially Inventor, who is particularly in love with money in any shape or form :-).

Once out of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, we hiked over to the -

On our way over from 'the money' to 'Air 'n Space' we passed by the USDA, or, the US Department of Agriculture.  They had just wrapped up a fall fest and had piled us high with lots of goodies they were trying to unload.  Among those goodies were these notebooks that the kids just loved. They all spent the entire museum visit writing  up what they were discovering.....



If you're going to explore air and space, who better to do it with thnn your own personal aerospace engineer?!  S's old friend O came down to DC for the night to hang out with us some more and show off his stuff ;-).  Analyzer took a particular interest in him and managed to fill almost her entire notebook with his explanations as well as info taken from the displays.  By the end of that weekend she knew way way WAY more than I did about flight, space and various planes and missiles.

Correction, by the end of our first half hour she managed to accomplish that......



Oh yeah, Dad also played a role in explaining and demonstrating.  Though not an aerospace engineer, he is an engineer, and quite knowledgable and passionate about all things space, flight and science related.

Whew!  That meant I was TOTALLY off the hook in this place!  And it's a good thing too.....  ;-)



The boys, filling their notebooks in front of the first motorcycle designed, apparently, by the founder of the museum.  According to the sign anyway.



Soaking it all up.....



Now here's what I found amusing and entertaining, in an offensive kind of way.  But, it was after all the 50's.....



Yeah, make sure that ribbon is new and trimmed for Goodness sake!  Wouldn't want to see an OLD one, heaven forbid!

And this, gotta looove this....and this was in the late 60's, coming from a woman!  Yikes!



OooooK.  Moving on.

Gazing longingly into a cockpit we could not enter....I actually found this to be quite torturous for the kids.  There were so many cockpits and such that we could only look at but not touch.  It was so frustrating and a real disappointment as far as I was concerned.  It's not a very hands on place, relatively speaking, and I think out of all museums the air and space is the one that should be.



Here's one Whirlwind did manage to sneak into and get his hands on, but that's because there was no glass covering it, just a simple rail.  Ha!  Don't they know determined kids don't stay out of railed off places?!  So, he got to join these space guys (oh, are they not called space guys?!) on a mission.  That is until I finished snapping my pictures and pulled him out of there.  Gotta get the picture first, then follow the rules.  Priorities people!



O also proved to be a great form of transportation when little legs got tired.

Ahh!  On the flight deck!  Finally some gadgets, buttons and levers you could actually touch!  Even if most of them were behind those rails.  Rails again.  Who are they kidding?!



And here of course, you're friendly neighborhood Wright Brothers.  We love them.  We'll see much more of them in North Carolina, but this served as a nice intro.



And THE plane!  The ACTUAL one.



And, Whirlwind falling to pieces....Did you really think he'd make it all week without falling off his feet?  Literally.



And finally, the time had come for us to be shooed out of the museum.  It was closing.  These museums are very serious about their closing hours, and they make sure to boot you out as soon as the clock strikes 5!

But before we could leave, we must touch the rock!  The moon rock that is.  The real deal.  Of course it's been polished down by gobs of people touching its surface, but still, it was cool.



On our way back to the car, this time parked over by the 'money making building', we ran right into this particular governmental department,



Had to snap a photo of course.  More cause it was the Orville Wright Building rather than the FAA. I wonder if there's a Wilber Wright building somewhere....North Carolina was high on our list thanks to those two.

Another day in DC came to an end.  We were heading to Whole Foods, not ten minutes away, for dinner.  On these extremely full days we splurged and ate out, i.e. at Whole Foods, quite a bit.  There was just no time for no cookin'.  Too many other more important things to be doing and seeing.



Tomorrow and the next we would finally have some R&R, no touring!  Thanks to the HUGE influx of people into the city for the Jon Stewart rally.  We were staying far far away.....

Landmarks

A visit to Buffalo required not only a visit to the falls, but a pilgrimage to several other important locations as well.

Please forgive the pictures, they were taken with the iphone....

The first was a pilgrimage to Crosby Blvd. and the home my mother along with her two brothers grew up in.



I have no memories of this house as they moved just before I was born (I think) into their new and smaller condo. Despite having no memories of my own, I have a pretty clear vision of the house in my head from stories upon stories I've heard over the years.  It's like a gone but not forgotten family member, everyone always talks about it and keeps its memory alive.

Next on the list was the condo in Oakbrook I had spent so many summers hanging out in.



Now this place I have endless memories of!  I can clearly see it in my mind's eye, I can feel the fabric of the furniture, the carpets and even the building's hallway walls (they were textured), I can smell the scent of that same hallway (loved it!), I can taste the corn on the cob my Gramma used to make, I can hear the beloved upstairs neighbors playing piano, I can feel the dampness of the basement and sense the fear I had going down there to do the laundry (it creeped me out!)

It's such a complete sensory experience going back there again.....I loved that place!

The outside still looks the same, even their back porch (the lower one).



The hallway is no longer textured and the scent is gone, a real disappointment for me.  I was looking forward to inhaling that place again, as strange as that may seem.  I find a lot of my memories in general are tied to smells.

We said goodbye to Oakbrook and drove by our host's old house just down the road.  Another house with fond fond memories, mainly of my later life in Buffalo with S, but also earlier ones.  I tried to get a picture by the sun was exactly in the wrong place during our drive by.

We drove by the first apartment we shared during our second year at school.  Upper right.  That's where S sat and ate the caviar my Dad brought for him from Russia when he came to visit.



What a dump.... :-) We tried to find the other location we had lived in but couldn't!  We either weren't remembering it correctly or it had changed.  No matter.  By that time we were good and tired of nostalgia and were ready to move on.

Oh, before doing that though, I have to mention one more place we used to frequent and did so again,


If you don't know, Wegmans is the best grocery store there is.  It was back then and it's even better now. No wonder Whole Foods doesn't open up shop in Buffalo, there's some real competition here.  They even had a drop in playroom for the kids so you can shop in peace! What an idea!  Not that we utilized it.  Unfortunately we only discovered it as we were heading out for the last time....

We did however have fun with the Buffalo Bills paraphernalia


And loved this shirt :-)



See, even Wegmans is mentioned on it!

Our stay in Buffalo was extended by a day since we had some maintenance to do on the RV and plenty of organizing and shopping to do before we could head out again.  Oh, and when I say 'we' had some maintenance to do that'd be the royal we of course.  You don't see me climbing up on that ladder do you?  S was up there patching up the roof a bit.  Nothing big, just typical stuff.  But it did have to be done before the rain came.....




More play was to be had with our hosts



More attempts at play were to be made by Patsy -

Come on, you're leaving tomorrow.....GET up and play with me!!



Giving it up.  Again.



This is where I want to be and what I want to do.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Leave. Me. Be.



Lucky for Patsy she had kids who wanted to run around, if not a dog.

Ready? ready?

I'm ready!!



GO!!!!


Boy that dog can turn on a dime.

And finally, some rest.  And peace and quiet for the rest of us....