While I was sitting here waiting for the big yellow Twinkie (as Jenny says) to arrive at my house (yes, I realize I still have 5 days…), I discovered a slide show program that works with Flickr. I’ll just leave you with the slides for viewing right now as I’m in one of those moods where if I just let my fingers do the typing, all that would come out would be venting and complaining. These are photos that show some of the fun things we did while in Michigan.

Here is a fun game for you while I recover from 10 days of vacation and a 10-year-old birthday party (of which the sleepover part is currently occurring). We saw a lot of water on our voyage. I’m going to list them here in the order that we came to them, please feel free to guess in my comments if you know any or all. (Not a contest so please feel free to help each other out and ask for clues if you need them.) (eta 8/27: answers posted in comments)

1.) 36 miles long and 618 feet deep at the deepest point…

2.) Waterfall between Goat Island and Luna Island…

3.) The view from our hotel room on the 15th floor of the Marriott…

4.) This was a drive-by shot…

5.) This one we had to get off the highway and hunt for a good view…

6.) Waves just as high as the ocean, but warm with no jellyfish…

and another view of #6 from a distance…

7.) This one we saw on our way home; we had to go a bit off the beaten path to find a good view…

Good luck and have fun guessing!

We are going to be on last-chance-for-summer vacation for a while and when get back, this one is turning 10.

Yes, not only did we both hit 4-0 this year, but our youngest child is also a decade old.  No wonder we are falling apart left and right.  Literally.  Just as we are about to leave for our longest driving vacation ever, IHA had a lower back incident.

I bet you are wondering where we are going on vacation.  I may have alluded to this trip previously.  This is no mystery trip, but a long planned journey to Michigan to visit Crops-a-lot and her family.  On the way, we are stopping in Geneva, NY at the top of a finger lake (Seneca Lake?) and in Niagara Falls.  I am so organized that I already have our calendar up on the fridge for the week we get back (and believe me, it is a busy one!).  We have all our summer appointments done. We have been to the doctor, the dentist, the orthdontist, and the candlestick maker. We have been to tell the king that the sky is falling.  We have figured out how to get K’s “blue card” from the nurse to the field hockey coach without us being around on the proper days. We have have spent oodles of money on school supplies.  We have even bought new sneakers.  We are so ready!  The only hitch is that our main driver (and usually our only driver) is not up to par.  It will work though, right? We will just take one hour at a time and eventually we will get there.

Breaking Dawn.  What did you think?  Are you done?  Did you love it? Hate it?  Have no idea what I’m talking about?  As the fourth book in the Twilight series, I would have to say that if you were playing “which of these  things is not like the other,” it would be the one that stands out as a bit different.  It does follow the typical Stephanie Meyer trend of a lot of build up (that goes on and on and on) to get to an action (though not quite as much as The Host).  I did enjoy much of this book, but what I am enjoying most about Breaking Dawn is watching Agent K as she reads it.  She is loving it.  She is just so excited over every little thing and dying to find out what happens next.  Since at almost 14, she is a lot closer to the intended age of the target audience, I would say the book is a winner.  I can’t wait until she gets to the end and we can talk about it all.

Well, I better continue on my packing way and tie up any loose ends I shall encounter. Hope you all enjoy your mid-August. “See” you when I get back!

We are back from our quick little VT weekend trip. We didn’t do much, but trying to narrow down what to say about it is becoming difficult! I guess that even though we didn’t really go anywhere, we did a lot of stuff just staying in. On Friday, I read Speak (which is the kind of book that once you start, you have to read through to the finish) and I photographed hummingbirds. LFG has millions of hummingbirds. They are really tricky to photograph and after a million attempts, this is the only one I have that is really in focus. I wanted to photograph the males as they are more striking with their red chests, but they are not as plentiful and very tricky. I mentioned to LFG that there seemed to be a harem quality to her hummingbird population and she said that there are typically 3 females to 1 male.

This photo has 3 hummingbirds in one frame, but not really much focus going on.

The girls all slept in a tent on the deck which was really nice and cozy! The last night it rained, so they moved the tent indoors.

On Sunday morning we ate breakfast at the Dam Diner. Agent B had a field day with that one – “Dam Diner!” she said. (OK, so we all did, not just her….) The wait was pretty long but the toast, bacon, coffee, and hash browns rocked!

We had our annual Family Film Festival on Saturday night (ok, so my storyline is a bit out of order…).

This year’s theme was “Good for the environment, good for you, and good for our family.” We had some really good entries this year. Agent J worked hard editing her videos all last week. She even went back into the archives and pulled out some really funny footage. LFG and I made our first video ever. We did a cooking show called Cooking Veganacula with Sparkle and Sunshine where we demonstrated how as vampires we must refrain from eating meat and how vegan food can be oh-so-lovely. It was a lot of fun to make, though I think we cracked each other up more than our audience. (Well, except for IHA, I think he really appreciated it.) Agent K made a music video to the song Stop and Stare. Agent B made some exercise infomercials. J and B made a series that was really funny. They went around and asked us our favorite things in the morning and then came back in the afternoon and asked exactly the same questions again to see how much our answers changed (we were under the impression that they had lost their footage). Mine were very consistent, but IHA – he really changed things up. They concluded that he doesn’t really know what he likes. IHA had another winning entry (last year’s was a music video edited to the song Summer of 69) – It was called Little Surfer Girl and it used Beach Boys songs in conjunction with footage from our Nantasket trip. LFB and Agent J threw together a last minute entry which featured talking llamas and fancy editing. I’ll have to check with IHA and see if we can get a couple short clips to put in our blogs…

I have bucket loads of pictures, but I just want to highlight this one with LFG and Agent J as I think it came out rather nice…

Moving onward, it seems like we are barely going to have time to get ourselves pulled back together from this trip before we have to start preparing for our next trip. This one is going to involve quite a bit of driving and we will be gone longer than we have ever been gone before. Next week we are going to Michigan to visit Crops-a-lot and her family via Niagara Falls. We are going to take 3 days getting to MI and 2 days coming home. We are going to have to stock up on our books on tape, that is for sure!

Now, I have a couple of questions for parents (or anyone who has opinions) about a couple of “pop-culture” type things that are really “in” right now with the early tween/teen crowd. I was just wondering what the thoughts are out there about The Clique Books and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Both of these are just driving me nuts. Maybe I can just hope that my children (only Agent K is allowed to watch The Secret Life) will see them for what they are and just move on…

At least that is what we did!  We went to Nantasket Beach to be more precise.  It is in Hull, Massachuesetts which is south of Boston and north of Cape Cod.  I think that Cherylz had the “best-est guess” with the South Shores.

So, on a completely unrelated note, we upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 last night and, apparently, I have lost all my categories.  They are there but invisible.  I think the fix for that is very time consuming, so I may remain “category-less” for a while.  It happened because I was so far behind in my upgrades that we should have upgraded to 2.3 and then 2.6 but we didn’t read about that until after it was too late.  There is some info in the Ravelry groups that tells how to fix the problem.  I swear, I’m just going to skip the whole general internet thing and just look things up on Ravelry.  Knitters know everything!  Anyway, please just excuse any strangeness in my blog for a while.  I think I may be changing themes soon. As soon as I find a new one that I like that is.  I’d like to go for a plainer, less busy look.  I love the 3 columns but it just looks so crowded to me.  I’m thinking of Cutline 2 column because it is easy to change the header photo, but it is missing a couple elements that I really like. (Btw, IHA uses Cutline 3 column just in case you want to see it in a real life blog.)  If anyone has any favorite, easily customizable Wordpress themes to recommend, I would love to hear from you!

We’re back! And once again I’m low on time before I have to leave for work. I guess it is the typical Monday morning thing. I’m having a hard time drumming up the motivation to get myself to go. Does that ever happen to you?

So, would you like some clues before the big Mystery Vacation Reveal?

Clue 1: There were waves. There were even surfers riding the waves. I’m assuming with the presence of surfers, I can actually upgrade my claim and say that there were indeed big waves.

Clue 2: There was a carousel. This was a rescued carousel from an old-time amusement park torn down to make way for condos. (Carousels remind me of high school freshman English class. You too?)

Clue 3: This is the view from our hotel room balcony. There was beach, pavement, and lots of eating establishments.

Clue 4: There were boogie-boarding lessons. Oh yeah, and the air was HOT and the water was like ICE!

Clue 5: Huge difference from low tide to high tide. At high tide the remaining beach area was very tiny and compact, but at low tide, it felt like it took minutes to walk down to meet the water. This was a huge beach and even walking along the beach, we never reached either end.

Clue 6: The girls stayed in the water so long that I read an entire book in 2 days — The Society of S, in case you are wondering, and it was excellent; a cross between Twilight and Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Clue 7: We rode a ferry and saw this skyline. I actually still feel like I’m riding on the ferry and that was yesterday morning. (Does this ever happen to you?) I wish this darn computer would stop swaying back and forth.

OK, that is all the clues I have time for right now. It took about 4 hours to get there. It could have been shorter but as IHA’s usually very efficient and helpful navigator did not know where we were going, we had some rotary issue problems. (Oh wait, that could be Clue 8: Lots of rotaries!)

OK, I’m off to get ready for work, but please feel free to go ahead and guess. I think it is only LFG who knows where we went…