After the early morning and walking to the museum and around the museum and back to the car and a little Pokémoning, this happened on the way home.
She was fighting it.
And then this happened.
Uncle Rob wasn’t fighting it. But look at my little happy and wide-awake photo bomber!! 😀
A rock hit his windshield on his way home last Friday and not only created a divot but also a 5″ crack. By the time we called USAA that evening the crack had grown to about 10″. By the time it was scheduled to get fixed today, it was halfway across the windshield.
The bad thing? It was estimated at $1000.
The good thing? We had a $250 deductible.
The bad thing? We had a $250 deductible.
The good thing? They come to you to fix it. 🙂
He’ll want to drive the car.
I have a lap buddy for this leg of the trip. Normally we’d never do this (and never have) but it’s crazy hot and even with the A/C on she doesn’t get much circulation tucked into the back in her crate. So she now has the best seat in the house.
And then of course she had to move into the sun.
Spoiled girl.
Waiting for daddy and Owen to get back from the bathrooms, Katie jumped in the driver’s seat and had pretend lessons.
None of us had ever been up Brockway Mountain, so we did that after mini golf.
Owen took a selfie!
The kids are buckled into Papa and Grannie’s car to head to the UP ahead of us! They were excited!
They’ve been doing construction on our main road for almost the entire two years we’ve been here (widening a 2-lane to a 4-lane, redoing bridges, creating new portions of road) and it’s been pretty decent until now when they have it down to one lane right at our community entrance for most of the day.
At the nearest traffic light, they have a big flashing light truck set up in one lane (obviously indicating that lane is closed) so you either get in the left lane (to go straight through the light toward our place) or in the right lane to TURN RIGHT. It’s not a difficult concept. Yet every GD time I’m at the light, some asshole from the right-turn-only lane cuts across the intersection and wants to cut into the other lane to go straight.
This crap makes my blood boil. Seriously.
The intersection is a constant irritation to me anyway because the way it’s set up, the leftmost lane is straight through and the center lane also goes straight through but goes directly into a right-turn-only lane–but about 75% of the yahoos don’t turn right and cut off people in the correct lane who are actually following the rules. (I thought about alerting the police, but have seen multiple police cars do it as well!) And it’s not like this is new. This intersection has been set up like this, I’m guessing, SINCE IT WAS CREATED MANY MOONS AGO.
And it’s only gotten worse with the construction. Of course these assholes never even use blinkers—either to signal an actual right turn OR to signal that they were an ass and now need to merge back into traffic—so it’s always a surprise as to what’s going to happen. Most of them just force their way over regardless of who’s in their way, and I’ve almost gotten hit about five times. As in inches from getting hit. Because of course, most of these times, there’s plenty of room behind me to get into traffic, but god forbid the assholes wait for an opening due to their mistake. And lots of them flip me off as well because, you know, it was obviously MY mistake for following the traffic rules. And, if you actually decide to be nice and let someone in? No wave or thanks of any kind, because, you know who cares that someone did something nice for them because they deserved it.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
They love riding back from the pool in the back of the car but we haven’t been able to do it with all of Owen’s baseball stuff…but since baseball is over I cleaned it out!
I couldn’t resist making a meme out of this when it happened again today.
Because this is where she was today!! Not perfect, but a definite improvement! (The lead car could also have moved up at least another two car lengths.)
We ran a bunch of errands today and this happened on the way home about 12:30. So I sat in the car with her and read. 🙂
Yes, I’m glad we got it and I’m quite used to it. But I still look forward to the day I can get rid of it. 🙂
It was also fun seeing both cars in the driveway all weekend! We did see one or two strange looks from our neighbors. 🙂
This pic was taken at the mall—we took two cars so the boys and kids didn’t have to spend all day shopping for my new wardrobe.
The dealership has been a comedy of errors trying to get our van fixed. So, we still have the rental Highlander.
And we didn’t even think when grabbing a 5′ plastic storage bin at Walmart…yeah…no room in the car! Well, no easy room. This is how we had to get it home.
She fell asleep on the way home from Woodbridge (and didn’t wake up when we got home!) so I’m sitting in the driveway enjoying the gorgeous day while she naps. This is apparently what happens when she gets up to pee twice at night.
We were heading home with just a bit more stuff than we arrived with…and the kids were completely packed in.
Owen was doing his summer [school] pages tonight when he came across this. We all thought it was funny. (The object was to pick the word from the sentence that should be capitalized—learning that the first word of the sentence is always capitalized.)
Tom and I were celebrating early since he will be out of town on our anniversary. Fourteen years. Holy wah.
First, my obligatory pre-dinner selfies since I’m dressed up (and wearing a dress I haven’t worn in who knows how many years!). 🙂
Love.
We didn’t take our traditional pre-event selfie because we were running late and then of course the traffic was horrible and it took 45 minutes (instead of 25) to get there so as it was, we were 15 minutes late for our reservation.
So, as you may remember, we have a tradition of eating Chinese on our anniversary. And I’m sure there are many über delicious Chinese places in the area, but we decided to go outside our box and have a Greek dinner at Mike Isabella’s (from Top Chef) Kapnos Taverna (recommended by a friend). Delish. Three “small plates” was too much food and we each left a few bites (we did technically eat too much but it was seriously a quarter of what we’d normally have eaten!). We splurged and shared a chocolate dessert, too. 🙂
Then we got back to the parking garage and saw this:
How funny is that? You know they saw this car and parked next to it on purpose!
And then we finally took our anniversary selfie! 🙂
A 2015 Subaru CrossTrek in Tangerine Orange Pearl!
He has been researching for awhile now so this wasn’t totally out of the blue…but it was a quick decision (the dealer only had this one on the lot and wasn’t getting anymore and it was a decent deal—and someone else was coming to look at it that night). We hated to spend the money, but really wanted to trade his 2008 Prius in before it lost too much more value or required major work like hybrid battery replacement.
The car is quite cool, though I’ve only had a quick ride around the block thus far (he got home about 8:15). Tom loves it—it’s a HUGE upgrade with extras like Bluetooth and leather seats that he’s thrilled about. I kinda hate him because it’s orange and I’m the one who really loves neat colors…but I’m excited because I’ll actually drive it (I never really liked the Prius).
The only minor snag in the process is that I can’t find the title to his Prius. Normally my recordkeeping is SPOT ON but it’s nowhere—it’s not in the safe and it’s not in the file cabinet…and there’s not even a scan of it anywhere! I have an old title (with the first lienholder still on it) scanned into Evernote but that’s it. And oh yeah, of course I can’t find the lien payoff letter, either. WTF??
I know it can be resolved, but now it’s going to be a PITA. What gets me is that I scan everything like that into Evernote—or at the very least, my computer. And there’s nothing. NOTHING. I know we got the lein release letter but can’t recall receiving the title. To be missing one of them maybe…but both?!
The kids were SUPER excited! We went for a short ride around the block and they were practically giddy!
About two hours into our trip home, this came on XM.
If it doesn’t ring a bell…it’s the theme song from National Lampoon’s Vacation:
The kids had a long, busy, fun-filled weekend with our friend’s kids and the babysitter (while we were at our TiVo events) and didn’t get their normal amounts of sleep…so this happened pretty early into our trip.
Katie fell asleep on the way to pick up Owen…about three minutes before we got there. 🙁
On her last day of Fairy Camp: Mama, there’s a lot of tutu in here!
Waiting for class to start.
Recital time! Tom was able to get off work to come, and it was going to be a surprise for Katie! It was funny because she just kept staring out at me and then Tom and then me and then Tom. I was just happy she didn’t freeze up or cry like Owen has done!
The studio records every ceremony so this is from their YouTube channel:
I took a few still shots…
Getting her fairy wings:
Beautiful dancing:
Her fairy group:
Family selfie!
The post-recital lunch…which Katie walked in and thought it was all for her birthday! 🙂
She LOVED the experience. I would really like her to do another week (they have a Sophia the First camp in August), but full price is $175!! Even with their $25 discount for taking the Fairy class…$150 is too much. (We got this camp via a deal site and I only paid $89! so I’m a bit spoiled!)
So about two weeks after we got the minivan, it just hit me—I’d been liking that everything in the minivan was where I expected it to be or it just worked like I thought it should—as opposed to the Mazda which never seemed to do anything logically. I was telling this to Tom and he said “It’s a Toyota. It’s your Highlander but bigger.”
Ahhhh. That made total sense. I still hate that we own a minivan, but once I started thinking about it as just being a bigger Highlander, I accepted it much quicker. 🙂 And it is a really REALLY nice car with a ton of extras…which helps the transition, too.
The final test will be our upcoming road trip to Michigan. My plan (hope?) is that we will actually be able to see out the back of the vehicle instead of being packed in like sardines like we were with the past two cars!
Tom needed the minivan to go pick up a new (used) couch so I had to use his car to take Owen (and Katie) to swim class. Both kids were completely enamored with his car. Katie wanted to sit right next to Owen instead of sitting in her seat, though. 🙂
