Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Weekend

Yesterday I continued to plow through some cleaning out. It mostly ended up being cleaning up, not quite as much out as I would have liked, but a good day none the less. At some point I slipped outside to take some bird pictures. What day would be complete without some bird pictures? Plus, the trees are starting to bud and once the leaves come out, my bare tree, sky and bird combinations will be a faint memory and a hope held for next fall.

Ten birds. I photoshopped a half bird out of the far right of the picture. I figured a whole number worked best for birds- Saturday, March 4.


Then My Husband's brother and his wife came down for the afternoon. They are expecting their first baby in May. She is an adorably cute pregnant person (she is adorably cute when she is not pregnant, but carrying the little guy around, the cuteness goes through the roof). They came down so My Husband could do their taxes and then they watched the kids so we could go out for dinner. I must say, I love the barter system, especially when I don't have to do any of the work involved in the barter and I get a nice dinner out with no kids.

So with just grow ups to think about, My husband and I decided to eat at a place that does not boast of french fries as one of its main menu items. The first place we stopped had over an hour's wait. We almost stayed since we had no kids to fill the entire time with whining, but I was hungry so we moved on. The second place we stopped had only a 45 minute wait, so we got a buzzer and headed outside to watch for the flashing lights. But it quickly got colder than our lack of jacket planning had anticipated, and we went to wait in the car. For some reason (I think it was the hunger pangs. I've heard people can do crazy things when they are hungry.) we started driving away. Now that I think about it, the idea of going to one of the stores across the street was mentioned, but we ended up going out an exit that you could only turn right and before we knew it we out of the shopping center and driving right by a bill board for another restaurant in town. Something looked really yummy on the bill board and we decided to see if we could get in with no wait there. I was feeling angst about the buzzer from restaurant number two that was still in our possession, but My Husband assured me we would promptly return it when our bellies were full. Hunger outweighed my guilt and I began to have images of me cutting into a crab pretzel. When we pulled into the parking lot of restaurant number three, the lights started flashing on our buzzer and it began singing an annoying tune that would not stop. We weren't sure if it was a built in anti-theft mechanism and we had just left the safe zone, or that our turn at restaurant number two had come a whole lot quicker than they told us it would. (It is times like those when I am glad to have a common last name. They would only have had 10 full pages of the phone book to comb through in order to track down their buzzer by the name we gave to secure our table.) We figured even if the buzzer meant our table was ready, there was no way they would hold it until we drove back. So we left the singing buzzer in the car and headed into restaurant number three, where we were promptly seated and consuming a crab pretzel faster than I could count the fake plastic sea gulls tied to the ceiling.

The whole of restaurant number three is decorated, to the point of being overdone, in seaside items. For the most part they work and make you feel a tiny bit like you might be eating at the beach instead of in the middle of a landlocked town. But the plastic seagulls, they are a bit much. I tried to avoid looking at them as much as possible, but no matter how much I ignored them, I kept fighting sudden urges to cover my food in order to protect it from swooping predators- Saturday, March 3.


After a very nice meal, made up of all things crab, we drove back to restaurant number two and My Husband wove through the still waiting throng to return our buzzer. He handed it to the hostess and told her we had decided not to wait. He didn't mention we had decided not to wait while being ushered to a table at another restaurant. But it all worked out and we even stopped at Rita's afterward, but don't tell the kids- Saturday, March 3.


Today, after coming home from church, we all did a whole lot of nothing. I love Sunday afternoons like that. After naps and rest and a movie, the kids did decide to brave the cold to jump around on the trampoline. I followed them out with my camera and flicked on the sports burst setting. I got some fun mid-air shots, but was especially surprised, in a sort of creepy way, to have captured the effects of gravity on the facial skin of The Oldest. More on that in a bit.

 Mid flip- Sunday, March 4.


On her way down- Sunday, March 4.


If you click to enlarge the pictures and then toggle back and forth between the next two images, you'll feel like you were right with us in the back yard this afternoon. Either that or you will start to feel a slight case of motion sickness.


Sunday, March 4.


This next picture is not for the faint of heart, or for those of you who are feeling at all queasy from experimenting with the last two pictures. I caught The Oldest just as his body was starting to enter its upward motion from the bottom of his bounce. Unfortunately, the skin on his face had not yet caught up. If anybody wants to know what you might look like when you are say eighty or so, just come over, bounce on our trampoline, and I'll take your picture. Then we can go to Target together and get lots of face lotion with anti-aging serum.

The Oldest, looking a little older than usual- Sunday, March 4.


I got bored with the trampoline pictures pretty quickly, so before my fingers started turning to ice, I snapped a few pictures of the sky. There will never be a picture as beautiful as the sky in plain view. I love how God made it so simple and yet so beautiful. Blue, white, shadow, light- He really is amazing.

Sky- Sunday, March 4.


I'm glad the water tower in our town has been painted sky blue. Except for an occasional prop in a picture, it really is just in the way. At least it sort of blends in- Sunday, March 4. 


 Unlike this water tower, which does anything but blend in. I did not take this picture, I just got it from the Google. I can't think about water towers without this one sticking out like a sore thumb in my mind. This is in Florence, Ky, a town about an hour and a half from where we lived in Kentucky. It sits right along the highway in a giant parking lot. The story goes that they (This is one of those stories with the nebulous group of people referred to as 'they'. Don't know who 'they' are, but 'they' did it.) were going to build a really big mall and so they went ahead and painted "FLORENCE MALL" on their already bold water tower. Well, for some reason, the mall never came to be, and instead of  covering the whole thing in a nice sky blue, they decided to just paint over the M and create a saying that, even in Kentucky, makes no sense at all, y'all.


Since I started with a bird picture, I'll end with a bird picture. The pair of doves currently residing in our yard is quite friendly and only scared away when one of the children comes ferociously running toward them. I really love these doves, but they blink so dang much that I have a hard time getting a picture of them with their eyes open. At least they don't know how to make funny faces- Sunday, March 4.

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