Back to School Night

Met all of Fern's teachers, most of them are decent. None will accept late work. She will have three HSAs in the spring and possibly one AP exam in Spanish. Her Spanish class is a combo 4/5AP class. The AP kids will get more work through out the year and will have to take the AP test. If the Spanish 4 kids want, they can take the AP test too. If they pass, they will retroactively get credit for Spanish 5/AP (which is worth more GPA points).

Dan met Kevin's new teacher. He has the same classroom aid as he did last year, which is good. She'll help the new teacher get to know the students and will provide some continuity to the kids.

I know, fun stuff here at Anne's House. Back to school night, oooh, fun. On the other hand, we're heading to the beach for the weekend, regardless of what hurricane Earl does. That, will be fun.



 

Happy New Year!

Both kids were up and ready for school today, one with a peanut butter and strawberry sandwich, the other with a bag of last-year's pencils.

I hope they have a good day!


 

The Anacostia River - guess we got a smidge of rain this morning.

I took this video with my phone of the Anacostia where it goes under 38th Avenue in Brentwood, MD.

While I was there I saw a large log float downstream with no effort at all. Maybe float isn't the best word, maybe fly would be better.

A Glint in the Sun

Today I found a dime in the grass just outside the 5 Guys. Before I was even half-way down to pick it up, I remembered something from my childhood.

It was summertime, in the evening, I was about 5 or 6, and we were living in Guyan Estates. The ice cream truck came by in the evenings and when my parents were feeling generous, they would give us 11 cents to buy a treat from the truck, 10 cents plus a penny for something called tax. We would listen for the beacon, the tinny music, announcing its impending arrival.

This particular evening I had my two coins in hand waiting, playing in the mean time. The adults were gathered in the yard too, my parents and the neighbors, chatting. Then I noticed my dime was gone, I'd dropped it in the grass somewhere. I tried to find it but I couldn't, and I had to hurry because the ice cream truck would be there any minute. Any minute. The adults helped me look too to no avail. After what seemed like an hour of panic, the neighbor pulled a dime out of his pocket and gave it to me, for which I was ever so greatful, still after all these years. I was all set again to obtain my long awaited fudgesicle.

The ice cream truck never came that night.


 

Went North

I am struggling to get back into the swing of things after being on vacation last week. There is so much to do, laundry, and the yard needs some attention. Dan mowed it on Sunday, but the weeds have really encroached the periphery, some of them are quite tall.

The central reason for vacationing in New England was for Fern to attend and compete in the ISI Worlds championship in Boston (really Marlborough, but whatever). She did quite well: of four individual events she got two firsts (FS4 solo compulsories & artistic), a second (FS4 interp) and a third (freestyle silver). She had at least five and as many as seven in her flights so I was extremely pleased with the results, especially after placing last out of three or four several times at local competitons in the spring.

Fern skated Monday and Tuesday and her team events were on Saturday. I thought the Bowie's production team event went well, but we got third out of four. The team that won had a "Sesame Street" themed show, big family appeal, but the skating was sloppy, in my opinion, and I thought they should have gotten third and Bowie should have gotten second. The second place team, the one I had placed first, skated a very clean, choreographed program, but the music was eerie and was lower on the family appeal scale.

In the interim, we went up to New Hampshire for a few days at the beach and took a five-hour whale-watching trip. The journey out to the Jeffery Ledge, 30 miles off shore, took about an hour and a half. This ledge is a mountain range in the New England Gulf where the fish (plankton, etc.) whales eat are plentiful. (See that wide high place in the map below.) We got to see a pair of humpback whales and a pair of north atlantic right whales. The right whales are very rare, only about 420 in existence. This pair was a mom and her calf. I saw another animal breech the surface and splash down about 500 yards away from the boat but our guide only saw the splash and couldn't tell me what it was. It could have been a minke whale or a white-sided dolphin.


View Larger Map

We had good food, luscious lobstah rolls (lobster salad, like tuna salad, but with huge hunks of lobster meat on a hot dog roll) were prevalent but Kevin stuck to his cheeseburger addiction.

I've posted some pictures from the trip from my phone. I took the "big" camera too, but it'll be a while before I can download them. I got maybe a hundred shots of the whales but I won't know if they are any good until I can see them on a larger screen.

We also fit a couple days in Boston taking in a Ducks tour where Fern got to "drive" down the Charles River, the Blue Man Group, and the Museum of Science where Kevin spent three or four hours watching George Rhoads's Audiokinetic sculpture, Archimedian Excogitation. I watched too. I want one of my own.

I think we tuckered The Boy out

The tail of a humpback whale

Vacation Shots from the phone: George Washington Bridge

Sunset Over Marlboro, MA

Kevin Engrossed in the Kinetic Sculpture

Dan's Lobstah Pie

Sunset at Seaport Beach, NH

It's Blooming! and other discoveries

When I got into the office this morning I was delighted to find my oncidium orchid (Sweet Ears 'Pacific Gold') had started to bloom.

Apparently, I have an accent. Saturday, I went to my niece's house warming party. One of her other guests asked me where I was from, that I didn't have the typical 'Maryland' accent and couldn't place what accent I did have. I was kinda flabbergasted. I don't have an accent. Moi?

A couple of trees in our yard sustained damage from the seven feet of snow we got this past winter. I finally called a tree company to take care of the damage. $1475 to remove two trees and trim some branches! Yikes. Seems high to me so I called another company and they'll be out tonight.

I have nineteen Girl Scout vests in queue to be worked on before school starts. I'm ignoring them and have been. I'm out of glue sticks and have been waiting for the stores to start with their back-to-school sales so I can stock up. I use the glue to hold the badges in place while I sew them down. I've also been procrastinating on the badge work because I want to take July off, and because I need to get other projects worked on, like the baby quilt I posted blocks for the other day.

No way I have an accent.
 

60% of the baby quilt blocks are done!

Embedded Links

It's been so long since I posted anything of substance.

I'm not sure the following could be considered "substance" or not, however.

Friday 7/9, Kevin, with his Special Olympics swim team, were honored at the Bowie Baysox game. They got a pre-game introduction, two guys got to throw out the first pitches, and many team members got to run out to the bases with the team. Kevin got to run out to second base. He stood there during the National Anthem, then sauntered back while the rest of the kids ran. That's my boy.




All the fertile office co-worker's wives have given birth and I'm still working on the last baby quilt. I have 10% of the blocks done (of 20) so I have a long way to go.

I'm trying to stay on top of the laundry instead of leaving something in the washer for a couple days or having two or three baskets of things that never got folded while warm and now need to be re-fluffed.

The kids have been back from camp for over a week now and I'm almost done with their laundry. The Boy brought back some clothes with someone else's name written inside. I still need to put them in the post.

I've been listening to BBC/Radio 1 a lot via the Internet and satellite radio in the new car. The Internet plays in real time, but Sirius time-delay's the show by five hours. Kinda messes with the mind a bit.

Wednesday 7/7 was our twentieth anniversary. Dan and I took the day off from work and played golf, then had dinner at Cityzen downtown at the Mandarin Hotel. Yum.

I took a golf lesson Saturday morning from Troy Beck. I'd totally lost the ability to hit fairway woods from the fairway and wasn't getting any real distance from my longer irons. She said I was standing up too soon because I was off balance, and that I was crowding my hands/arms. She had me stand farther back from the ball and gave me drills to practice keeping balanced. By the end of the lesson I was getting 125 yards out of my 7 wood!

It rained 1.38" on Saturday.

Back in June I went to Columbus/OSU for a Perl conference. Perl is a programming language, not a misspelled adornment. I was born and went to college not an hour away from Columbus in Urbana. Some of my college friends were still in the area so I had an opportunity to catch up with some of them. I had lunch with Piper who had lived in the dorm room across the hall from me and is now working in Columbus.

One night I drove out to Urbana and met up with Martha and David at the college. It's really a university now, but I'm having a hard time changing the name in my mind. We walked around campus remarking on all the changes made in the last thirty years and reminiscing about fellow students. My grandmother taught biology and botany there and had her lab/classroom and office in a lovely old building, Barkley-Baily Hall, which since has been turned in to plain classrooms, probably in the English department. The college built a new science/math building in which my grandmother is supposed to have a memorial classroom, but Martha hadn't seen it on a previous visit and I didn't look for it myself. While I was in town, I also drove past my grandparents old house and visited them at the cemetery.

I was supposed to meet up with another friend, but she didn't make it back into town in time. I was bummed. I hadn't seen her in years.

Fern went to ice skating camp for a week and came back pretty jazzed to skate at Worlds in Boston at the end of the month. Now she has a week to cram in all the lessons she can before she competes. Most of her events have seven girls in them. I sure hope she does better than last, I don't want her to be devastated and quit skating. She's so beautiful when she skates and I'm thrilled she has an activity she enjoys. She's been working at the snack bar at the pool and loves having a paycheck. She hates her bank because they are never open when I can get her there to cash the check. Should I let her get an ATM card?

I tried three times to get the new iPhone software to download before it was successful. The download took over 75 minutes each time and process would die with 5 minutes to go. I don't have the new iPhone 4 but I got many of the new features on my 3Gs with this download. Some of the new features are quirky and I'm still trying to figure them out. Oh well. I'd love to be a product test for Apple.

My brother and Roseanne finally opened their yarn shop in Culpeper, VA. I guess I need to visit sometime, huh?


Oh, that's enough rambling for now.

We picked up Kevin at Camp Greentop, Mr. Obama appeared to be in residence next door

I go away for a week and this is what I come back to.

See how much it's grown!

Last week:

This What Happens When

...the carefully cut pieces for our bee swap quilt block get all jumbled up. Now, to make sense of it and get it put together in time for my bee meeting.

Almost...

Ta Da!

This Will Be in the News on Thursday

The news last week of Abby Sunderland sailing around the world solo reminded me of another sailor who will be in the news this week.

According to his blog, Reid Stow has been sailing around the world solo without stopping, without resupplying for the past three years, and he is scheduled to be sailing home under the Verrazano Bridge Thursday, June 17th having been at sea for 1151 days. I am amazed by this.

Summer Games

The Special Olympic summer games were held at Towson University again this year over the weekend. Kevin and I headed out of town Friday afternoon. I went the "wrong" way going up I-97 instead of my usual way of the BW Parkway. Turns out, it was the better route and traffic was horrible the other way.

PG County athletes waiting to enter the arena for the parade of athletes into the opening ceremonies. Too bad we couldn't hear what they said when they announced us. Since I was a chaperone, I walked in the the teams. Cameras and lights everywhere.

Kevin is a couple rows in front of me. PG county had about 100 folks in the contingent of athletes, coaches and chaperones.

The calm before the storm.

Kevin in lane 5 for the 25 yard freestyle race.

We had tickets for an all-ages They Might Be Giants concert (packed with tots!) Saturday afternoon and made it down there after Kevin's 4x25 relay race. The team ended up getting DQ'd because one swimmer left early but two swimmers got staged out of order and he was confused. This is the audience area of the Ramshead Live in Baltimore during the show with the confetti machine blowing full blast. The kids loved it.

Last year Kevin didn't have any races Saturday afternoon so Dan met us at the zoo. The problem was, Kevin didn't want to go back to the Olympic village afterward, he wanted to stay with Daddy. We ended up sleeping in Bowie, then driving up early for his races on Sunday. This year I managed some heavy bribing and he went back to Towson without a lot of protest and with a burger from Five Guys in his belly.

Kevin in the staging chairs for his last race, the 241st race of the weekend.

Kevin with his bronze medal for that race.

Kevin with all his medals.

On Flying Things

Yesterday started with a bird flying into our house.

We keep the garage doors open in the mornings so we can hear Kevin's bus come. So the bird had easy entry. Thinking about it though, it's kind of surprising no bird has ever flown in before now.

Dan had the bird cornered in the kitchen near the door, but couldn't get it unlocked and open before it flew into the living room. It tried to fly out the window, which was closed. I got the front door open then used a broom to guide it out.

Last night I found a unexplainable dark purple stain on the sofa. Hmmm. Related? I don't want to think about it.

 

Quilting Pattern

Do you know this person?

I created it from this site.

 

Squealing with Joy

What you are looking at is a brand new bloom spike on my Oncidium orchid. It wasn't there last Friday. I'm so excited. Orchids are easy to grow, but finicky at the same time. They need the right light and water to be happy. I guess this one is happy.

So for the next several weeks I'll be on 'orchid watch' waiting for this baby to bloom. Of course I'll post pictures.

Random Stuff

Today is the graduation of the Bowie HS class of 2010. Nothing too alarming about that, except if Kevin weren't the Kevin we know and love, I'd be the mom of a diploma-carrying high school graduate right about now. As it is, he has four more years of school to the end of an attendance certificate, and hopefully enough acquired job skills to be employable.

The high school is closed today because the faculty and staff will be attending the graduation. I took the morning off to hang with Kevin and took the opportunity to get some errands done before I went to work.

I spent the morning at the Social Security office to get Kevin a replacement social security card. They were calling person 'A7' when I got there and my ticket was for A20. I thought it might take two hours but the pace picked up the last 30 minutes and got out in 1.25 hours. I had planned to stop by the MVA for a state ID for Kevin and to drop off the tags from the Corolla but ran out of time.

We donated the corolla to Melwood. It's our third vehicle to them. They provide job training and opportunities for people with disabilities. And, they are a local organization helping local people. And, we may need their services one day. Like, sending money to UVA to help a child get admitted. Guess we can stop that now since her grades are nowhere near good enough for UVA.

Melwood contracts with an auction company to pick up donated cars and sell them on their behalf. The corolla was picked up yesterday. On the way home from work yesterday, I remembered I'd left the garage opener and a visor sleeve of CDs in the car. Sheesh.

I called the company that handles the cars and told them my problem. The lady told me the holding lot closed at 4:30 and wouldn't open until 9:00 today. Anyway, turns out the lot is near work and I was able to pick up the CD sleeve this morning, and yesterday the tow driver saw the garage opener before leaving our house and left it in our front door.

Here's the 1999 corolla sitting at the auction lot with 168,100 miles, good bye!

Please Pass the Tomatoes

Success!

A couple of years ago I bought a cheese making kit to make fresh mozzarella and made several successful batches, even posting pictures here. Then, they changed the temperature of pasteurization. As it turns out, the difference of five or six degrees in that process is the difference between good cheese and a big vat of mess.

I was recently tipped of by a Facebook friend, the milk sold at My Organic Market (MOM) is pasteurized at the lowest possible temperature. We have a new MOM in town so I ventured in there for the first time on Sunday to try their milk. I got a gallon of whole homogenized milk for my test. (You can buy un-homogenized milk, too.)

I gasped at the price of a gallon of organic milk, almost $2 more than grocery store milk per jug. Even though the milk is more expensive, it made more cheese. My directions say one gallon of milk yields ¾ lb of cheese and I found that to be true when commercial milk worked. My Sunday batch with the organic milk yielded almost a 1 ¼ lbs! I guess organic cows have richer milk?

The cheese itself turned out good, but maybe a little stiff, almost 'squeaky.' I don't think I need as much rennet as I used. I'll have to try another batch soon. Anyone have any tomatoes in their gardens yet?


 

Pizza Bread - step 1

It's snack time here at Anne's house and we're making "pizza bread."

Preheat your oven to 425°
Unroll a tube of Pillsbury Pizza crust onto a baking sheet. Fix any tears in the dough where it tore open when you tapped the can on the edge of the counter and the dough exploded through 2 layers. I hate it when that happens.
Let the dough sit while the oven warms up.

Pizza bread - step 2

Step two:

Spread crushed garlic, snipped rosemary leaves, olive oil, and course salt over the dough.

Bake 8-10 minutes.

Pizza Bread - step 3

Ta Da!

Empty

Before I could even get the camera up there, the babies have flown the coop, the nest is empty.

Oh well.

In other news, Fern landed, for the first time, two axels at her ice skating lesson on Wednesday.


 

Cardinal Family Update

All three babies have hatched. They sit there with their mouths wide open waiting for food when their mum has flown off. I really need to get a picture of these chill'n to share, but the nest is hidden behind a lot of branches and leaves and I need a longer lens.


 

At Least One

I can see at least one hatchling in the cardinal's nest!

 

Soon to be a Mama

This mama cardinal and her mate will soon be the proud parents of triplets. I know this because her nest is right below my bedroom window and I saw three speckled eggs in there.

There are too many leaves in the way to get a picture of her sitting on her broodlets and she yells at me too much when I try to move the branches out of the way for a better shot. My iPhone needs a longer lens.

 

Picture of the Day

Curaçao

 

The Weekend and More

Wow, it's Wednesday already and I haven't posted anything of substance in a while.

Hold that thought, the fire alarm is going off, need to evacuate the building.

That was fun.

Anyway, we have a new vehicle, a silver Kia Sorento. Bought it last Thursday, got it home, and not thirty minutes later Dan was on the way to Chicago for the weekend for his mother's interment. He got home at 03:00 on Sunday morning with 1500 miles on it. I guess I need to post a picture of it, huh?

Friday, Kevin went to swim team practice and I headed off to Costco with a pocket full of camera memory cards. It only took an hour to load 1900 pictures into their system and pick almost 300 to have printed on real photo paper. And then it only took an hour to actually have them printed. I was impressed with that part. I also had a DVD made of all the pictures so now I have digital copies available at work since my work computer won't read the memory cards. When was the last time you had real photo-paper prints made? Been a while, huh?

Saturday was pretty much a blur, I cleaned the kitchen and baked a rhubarb pie, but that's all I remember I got done. I hadn't baked a pie in a long time and forgot to set the timer to remind me to turn down the oven after 10 minutes. Yup, the crust was a little dark, but not too bad. Oh well.

Blogging friend Lorraine is in town this week for a conference and had time in her schedule to hang out with me on Sunday. She got to experience the new vehicle. I gave her nearly burnt pie, took her to church, then took her to Baltimore's Fell's Point. We had tapas for lunch and swapped stories of our teenage daughters who don't turn in homework. I got her back to her hotel in time for her event. Our time was much too short.

I had Kevin and Fern and her boyfriend with me to Baltimore so after we dropped Lorraine off, I took the kids to the Mall. There were lots of events going on so parking was at a premium. I found a place a couple blocks away from the National Gallery of Art, so that's were we went. Kevin had been there before and made a bee-line for the basement. We spent most of our time riding the moving walkway connecting the East Wing with the West. The other two kids were on their own to explore for a while.

I haven't been quilting in a while, and I've missed it. After I got my quilt done for the show, I've focused on getting my badge sewing done. I've had several vests to work on since before spring break and now am almost finished with my backlog. When this last vest is done, I get to go back to quilting. I still have three baby quilts to finish for the aforementioned fertile office mates.

And now, here's a picture from our spring break cruise. Now that I've got these on DVD I can post more pictures.




 

Lorraine and Mom meet

I was there to witness the meeting of two blogging friends, Mom and Lorraine.