Vegas Vacation 2010 Part 3

Thing 1 giving Thing 2 a piggyback ride - it's amazing that those pipe cleaner legs can hold them both up. I love this picture!

When Dad and Stepmonster bought the house with a pool, the Things decided our housewarming gift to them would be a floating ping-pong table! They found out it was harder than it looked and quickly gave up but Dad and I got the hang of it after awhile. It's just a matter of time before Chuck the Party Animal organizes a game of floating beer pong on it.

Daughter and I ran away one evening to the strip where we shopped at the Caesars Palace Mall, ate dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and laughed at all the weirdos who come out at night in Vegas.

The Paris Hotel at night is beautiful!

To be continued...

Vegas Vacation 2010 Part 2

Ok, I planned this out better so these are in chronological order!

Here are Grandmother, Thing 2 and Thing 1 excited to get on the road! Daughter was in the backseat but didn't want to climb out of her nest for the pic. Party Pooper.

Here's Thing 1 jumping into the pool with a neighbor kid on his back. Dad & Stepmonster's buddy was babysitting four kids that night so it was a party! We had to tell the Things not to unlock and open the side gate for all the other neighbor kids who wanted to come swim without their parents supervising them. A pool is a kid magnet but also a liability issue! LOL

Thing 1 looks like he's delivering a speech here but he was just getting ready to jump.

And here is a teeny-tiny lizard Dad found the next morning. I'm holding it and Dad took the pic. He obviously needs new glasses because of the three pics he took, none of them have the lizard in focus. GO TO THE EYE DOCTOR DAD! Heh.

To be continued...

Vegas Vacation 2010

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this year's road trip vacation was the best one ever. (Now next year's will be an unmitigated disaster, I've jinxed it for sure.) After last year I swore I was never taking my demon-spawn on another vacation. Ever. They bickered constantly, talked back, and were generally awful. It was WAY worse than the year before when Thing 1 had a broken leg! I don't know if it's the year's worth of maturing or just all the valium I snuck into their food but this year they were WONDERFUL!

They goofed around with each other instead of fighting, were attentive and helpful to their Great-Grandmother, were polite to Grandpa, Grandmonster and all their friends, and followed the house rules beautifully. (Except Daughter who was caught EATING UPSTAIRS and made to perform penance at the feet of her Grandmonster or else face certain and utter doom.)

I took the Things to Gameworks on the strip where they happily made faces for my iPhone camera. It was lovely - they ran around like loons playing video games while I sat in the restaurant with a succession of $2 beers and made out with my new Kindle.

Then we went to the M&M's store next door. Have you ever been to Toys 'R Us on Christmas Eve? Neither have I but the M&M's store was a pretty close approximation to what I would image such an experience would be. It was INSANE! I wanted to yell at everyone "They're M&M's! You can buy them at the damn drugstore down the street for a tiny fraction of the cost here! Why are you losing your minds?"

This is totally out of chronological order due to Blogger's weird picture rearranging habits.

When we arrived in Vegas, Dad had just arrived home from work and turned on the waterfall and lights in the pool. It took the Things approximately four nanoseconds to change into their swimsuits and jump in. They spent hours in it every day and are cleaner than they have ever been in their entire lives.

This was taken at a rest stop in Eastern Washington. Grandmother did amazingly well for a 94 year old on a 1200 mile road trip. She's absolutely NO company for me in the car - she slept almost the whole way - but she had a great time. The kids took really good care of her - opening doors, getting her cane, making sure she drank enough water - and I am so glad they have the memories of this trip with her. As much as I complain about the old fossil, I love her dearly and was happy to have her join us!

And I spent a large amount of my time like this...

Amazingly I didn't get super sunburned. There was one day that I turned pretty pink but compared to Sunburns I Have Had it was not even in the top twenty-five. The weather was perfect. For me that is. 100+ degrees every day. Vegas does have a weird habit of getting very very windy in the evenings. Dad explained it to me - something about cooling air, rising warm air, weather patterns, zzzz - but I didn't quite get it. Of course my non-understanding had NOTHING to do with the margaritas Stepmonster and I were imbibing. Ahem.

I have a few more pics so will follow up soon. But right now I have to unpack, do my laundry, and re-pack for a road trip to Berkeley with Marvelous Mom. We leave tomorrow.

Yikes!

Vacation

Well. Ahem. I've been whooping it up in Las Vegas for the past week - hence the lack of posting. That and the fact that the Things are hogging my computer.

It's ok, I bought a Kindle DX and it is my new friend with benefits. *swoon* Husband is going to kick my ass from here to Mars when he sees the Amazon bill for e-books. Heh.

The rugrats, Grandmother and I will all be home on Tuesday the 10th after driving for two days. Goody. Then I leave again with Marvelous Mom on the 12th to move Scientist Genius Brother out of his Gollem-cave in Berkeley.

So who knows when I might actually get to post something.

Dad and Stepmonster's new house (especially the pool with the WATERFALL) kick all kinds of ass though. Give 'em a call if you're in Vegas, they have lots of room.

Smooches!

Slacker Grade

Apparently I worked my ass off to graduate with honors for nothing. Slacking in the Washington State History class got me a 3.8

Summer School

I did it - I finished the Washington State History class without going totally insane! The amazing campus at UW Seattle had a lot to do with it. C'mon, is this not completely gorgeous?!?

This is another iPhone photo that I took with one of my new photo aps. They are Old Camera, Hipstamatic and Tilt Shift Generator. I read about them on ONE of your blogs but now I can't remember whose it was so let me know if it was you so I can give you props! Any ap that can make even me look like I know what I'm doing while taking pictures is sheer genius - and for less than two bucks!

No I'm not being paid for my endorsement of these aps, I just happen to think they rock and would like to share that with y'all.

The class was very interesting and I really liked the professor. Being a lecture class it wasn't exactly exciting, but his dry sense of humor and powerpoint slides that ADDED to the information instead of simply REPEATING it kept the lectures from being sleep-inducing.

We read a book that I highly recommend for anyone who likes the outdoors, history, or sailing. It's called "The Northwest Coast: Or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory" by James G. Swan. He was a Bostonian who bailed on the East Coast (and his family but that was pretty common at the time) in favor of exploring the Pacific Northwest in 1849. Despite being over one hundred and fifty years old, it is a fun, exciting, and informative read. It's fascinating to see the difference in attitudes back in the day. For instance, he and his fellow explorers started a forest fire while celebrating the fourth of July and he nonchalantly adds that it continued to burn until the rains started in November. And by that I mean that it was almost an afterthought on his part to even mention the months long fire!

What's more, this actually happened TWICE!

We also read some of Capt.George Vancouver (snore) and the Hudson's Bay Co. employee George Simpson (double snore). Their writing hasn't held up nearly as well as Swan's.

Another good book I can recommend is "Native Seattle: Stories from the Crossing-Over Place" by Coll Thrush. I literally couldn't put it down. VERY unusual for a book I've been assigned to read!

All in all it was a good class. I wasn't *quite* as type-A about my papers or getting to class every single day - after all I just need this class for my teaching endorsement and the grade isn't going towards my graduation GPA since I already GRADUATED (woot!) but I'm glad I took it.

I'm also glad it's over. Heh.

Now I am done with (my) school until the beginning of October when grad school starts. On Thursday I am driving to Vegas with the kids and Grandmother (god help us all) for our annual road trip. Then Marvelous Mom and I will be driving to Berkeley to move Scientist Genius Brother out of his apartment so he can jet to Melbourne, Australia *sob* to do his post-doctoral work. After that it's back to school prep with Thing 2 practicing with the marching band, Daughter practicing with the dance team, Thing 1 getting ready for student government work, the fair, and the parade that will have TWO of my offspring in it.

I'm tired just thinking about it.

My Boys