Well! What a lot can happen in a few days on a long weekend! The in-laws came around for a visit, and unlike their often whirlwind in-and-out, they stayed overnight nearby! YIPPEE! I like to spend time with them, but living on the other side of the mountains, and with them going away most vacations we have… well we don’t see them very often. Arriving Friday afternoon, we had supper out, then they, Tom and the elder kid went to said kid’s first high school football game…. he plays in the band. I went home with the other kid and we just “hung out” for the evening.
Here are the two boys, joking around with the little plastic football their father caught at the game (I wonder what happened to my old football? probably enjoyed by a dog sometime in the last 27 years…). You can see on the TV what we were doing when the fellows came in!
Next Day, we tootled on into town to the Farmer’s Market, acquiring a few pics. Here is the paternal side of the stidfamily….
Stidkid#1 and #1 Grandpa:
The boys with their grandfather:
Me, with the kids and inlaws — my mother in law is in profile, but the one that showed her well didn’t show the kids as well…
A pic of the “stidstuds”… look at the “wings” on the youngest!
And then the grandstids were off, and the rest of us wandered over toward the water. I had seen a few pirates in the market while we were there… And sure enough — not only pirates, but some of the Tall Ships were in port for Harbor Days! Of course, I had completely forgotten that it was this weeked, but it explained the difficulty we had finding parking!
We sat and listened to one pirate singing chanties while we drank some mango juice, then the fellas wandered up to the top of the observation tower while I waited, enjoying the music and the people.
Here is our town, looking south at the Capitol building from the edge of the actual port:
Here are the fellas, enjoying the view:
And here I am… the lovely bouquet was $8 from Dan’s Dahlias. The man who runs it got his start selling dahlias as a child younger than my boys are now, to build his college fund. He now (after graduating many years ago) sells both the flowers and the tubers (those are available through his website) and is full of great information and advice for the hobby gardener like me.
We ran into several people while we were downtown on Saturday… including stidkid#1’s first trumpet teacher! This young man was in high school when our budding trumpeter seemed to be ready for lessons (at age 8). Though he hadn’t taught anyone before, he was the perfect first teacher… and I think they had fun. Now, he is all grown up (just like Dan of the Dahlias), and finishing work on his second Master’s degree!
Here he is, with the boys on Sunday.
And finally, though hardly very important…
I have a new project going, reading the Babble Story aloud for the website. I have the introduction (called “cover”) and a couple chapters done as of yesterday, will try to get more today as I am relatively immobile and trying to rest up for the busy four days this week. I will put a review of the two software/freeware things I found to help me at LiveJournal.
Tomorrow, I start my year-long project, helping my mother in her classroom. It will also be an experiment of sorts, to see if the kids leave the house standing if they are allowed to have an entire morning unsupervised…