Another Year of Softball in the Books

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What a cat!?!?!?!?

What a cat!  I can't believe that it seems I have not posted a picture of our princess orange kitty!  After the sad death of our beloved Miss Kitty, I could only last about a week or two before I brought home this orange bombshell!  She has been a sweet kitty, but very very ORNERY!   She is a kitten so of course she has a lot of energy.  She loves to run and play, and pick on our other poor OLD cat, Maddie.  However, if there were to be any other positives, she has brought Maddie out of her own solitude world that she had put herself into, being a nonsocial cat that she is/was.  She actually will enter a room now that I am in!!! Progress!

Anyway, Gracie does things that Miss Kitty and Maddie never did do, so it has taken some getting used to. I do believe we were quite spoiled by the well behaved Miss Kitty and Maddie, and Gracie has arrived like the spoiled baby of the family.  One of the things that she has discovered is the fish tank with Allison's gold fish.  She goes in spurts however, paying a lot of attention to them for several days in a row, and then not bothering them for extended periods.  I wish I could have gotten a photo of the day that she was actually physically SITTING on the top of the lid of the aquarium, just pinched underneath the cabinets above her. It was quite funny.  She paws at the tank periodically.  She is very very interested when I clean the fishes' tank, as this picture shows.  She will not be deterred from being RIGHT THERE!...looking at everything that I am doing, and inspecting, very closely, these little ORANGE beings.  It is so funny! 

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The Cousins

I love these photos!   Aunt Amy came up to Alma the day that the Lutheran schools had their play day/track meet and brought Shelby and Trent to see us.  It was brutally hot that day at the track with the sun shining down hot with no trees for shade, so Amy took Trent back over to mom's house, and left Shelby with us.  She is such a sweetie, and Allison loves her little cousin!  She does so well with her, and plays really, really caring with her.  I wish we lived closer to each other so that the two could for sure develop a close relationship. As it is, we will have to be sure to make efforts to get us all together as frequently as possible.

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Dance Recital Friday Night, 5-31-2013

I "think" this is dance recital #5!...and from somewhere Allison has received a beat and a sense of linking music to dance correctly! She has always done a good job, and can follow and remember the dance steps, but this year it was extra fun!   She is starting to get more into the actual "dance" or the "feel" or "groove" of the music...not sure how to really express it in words.  It was just so much fun watching her, especially the first of the two dances, which was more of a jazz dance, and the second was more of a ballet step dance.

Gracie had to give her a good 'sniff' when she came home. Not sure what she smelled like, but it needed investigating!

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Pics from Vacay!

Here we are...promised pics from the recent vacation.  I'm actually kinda proud of myself for remembering. If I don't do it while I am actually thinking about it, there is a very good chance that it won't actually happen. 

Anytime we leave home, we have a 'road rule'...you cannot eat at a restaurant that you can eat at while you are home (i.e., Pizza Hut), and we don't eat at the same restaurant twice, no matter how much we might have enjoyed it.  Now we have actually broken both of those rules every now and again, but for the most part we use them as guidelines.   Well, this King Street Blues in Alexandria, Virginia, has done the ultimate breaking of the rules!   Not only did we eat there TWICE when we were in DC last year, but we specifically went to lunch there on the first day we were there this year, driving there from the airport!   YUM! It did not disappoint, and as I type this I really want the onion straws and the beer cheese dip....*sigh*

We really mainly flew into DC because of the cost of airefare.  We are finding that it is pretty "cheap", at least in comparison to other destinations.  We did not necessarily need, or want, to stay in DC.  We got out of town right after having lunch, heading north farther into Maryland.  I had really only been in the area immediately surrounding DC prior.

Our first stop was to the capital city, Annapolis.  It was a very quaint town, could tell that it was an older town, etc.  It was also a very busy town, as we discovered the following day was the commencement exercises for the Naval Academy, so there were lots of family members, etc., in town; plus, we discovered the President would be in town the next day to speak at the commencement. We knew that we did not want to dally too long.  We did drive by the capitol building but it was too late in the day to tour it, and I did not, unfortunately, get a photo of it.  I learned that it was the first, and only still standing, capitol building constructed of wood.  It was a lovely old building. 

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