Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

Today we went to the Fredonia Farm Festival.  Actually, I met Karen and the girls there yesterday after work too. But it was really hot and I was still in work clothes so it wasn’t exactly comfortable so we didn’t stay very long (Karen and the girls had already been there for about an hour anyway).

We went down around 10:30 this morning and stayed for a few hours. The girls watched the dog show while we had lunch. My favorite part of Farm Fest is the food. On my must buy list are the kabobs from the Spanish food cart. This year I also got the Cuban sandwich, which has quickly become one of my favorite sandwiches. We checked out all the vendors, chatted with the people we knew, and all in all had a fun time.

The one thing that I’ve never understood is that they keep the road that goes right through the main square open instead of diverting traffic a couple of blocks. At least the directions to campus coming off of the Thruway no longer divert you through town like they used to. Since it is move-in weekend the traffic to campus and therefore through town is very busy making it even worse to drive or walk downtown.

Before the semester starts and I get swamped with work, teaching, and attending class we took a day trip to the Erie Zoo. We had a great day out and about, we all had a lot of fun! I uploaded a set of pictures to my Flickr, I have a couple of videos to upload yet.

I like this picture because Bella is so nonchalantly reading her map with a tiger laying down right behind her. Too bad there was glare on the glass, or it would have looked just like she was right next to the tiger.

Last night I finally uploaded pictures off of the camera. You can see them here. Video to follow, maybe later tonight.

This past Sunday I took the girls for an outing around town. We went to 2 different playgrounds and the campus to run around and have fun. And fun we had.

On campus the girls found this leaf imprint in one of the sidewalks and thought it was really cool.

When we got home Karen had set out my cool medieval/fantasy theme chess set. Bella was interested in learning how to play so we sat down to play a bit. Not sure why I have that evil genius look on my face…

Isabella and Gillian had their dance recital right before we left for vacation. They were Caribbean Amphibians.

Here is a short video clip from their dress rehearsal. It is not the whole performance, but most of it. Isabella is in the back row on the left corner and Gillian is next to her.

Miss Isabella always surprises me with what clothes she fits into. Care to guess which sister she borrowed these pants from?

If you guessed that they are a pair of Erin’s size 12 month pants you guessed correctly!

The worst part of any vacation, unless that is the point of the vacation, is the road trip. If the main point is to get from point A to point B then I want to do so quickly. Unfortunately that did not work out on the way down. We decided to go in one day rather than two. However, AAA routed us through every small town in WV so between the miles of 30 MPH roads and the many, many bathroom stops the girls needed we wound up being on the road for 15.5 hours. Very exhausting, especially when Erin still got up at her normal time the next day.

We did get to see some interesting things on the road. We went through 2 tunnels, one through a mountain in PA and the other under the water in VA. Coming in past midnight we missed some interesting scenery that we didn’t see until we left. It is very weird coming into an unfamiliar place in the dark of night. Also surprising was that most of the gas stations were closed. Even in small town Fredonia most places are 24/7. so it never even occurred to me that this might be a problem. Crazy.

Aside from the standard roadkill of deer and cats I also saw a turtle, a turkey, and an opossum. There was also one man with a car load of Fail. He apparently took an exit curve too fast and sideswiped the metal barrier. It looked like he totaled his car, as both drivers side wheels were bent at an odd angle not best suited for driving.

We took the return trip in two days, which was much nicer for all of us. We also stayed on major highways which helped. All told the return trip took less than 13 hours so avoiding the crazy AAA route really made a difference.

We did see these weird purple boxes in the trees in PA. A quick search revealed they were to trap the emerald ash borer. We were wondering what they were for, and I guess now we know. It is not very encouraging to see that they have spread to PA from Indiana.

Here’s some pictures from the road:

We just returned from a week in the Outer Banks in North Carolina. What a wonderful vacation! My kind of vacation, we relaxed at the beach or by the pool for most of the week. Once we went to town to explore and go shopping and another day we went to the Wright Brothers Memorial. Otherwise we didn’t go far from ‘home’.

It was weird, most of the houses out there had names. I’ve never seen that before. The place we stayed was called Beach Memories. It was huge with a very nice pool and a short walk to the beach. Of course one good thing about a huge house is being able to split the cost among many people, I think we had 29 family and friends there for the week.

I could probably write quite a bit, but I am tired so will break this up into several vacation-themed postings.
I did upload a bunch of pictures and video to my Flickr site (here’s a direct link to the set). Here’s a map of where we were for reference.

Today Bella and Gilli and I went to see Ivan Ulz perform. He played at the Silver Creek Central School as part of the Month of the Young Child.

We missed about half of the show because I had trouble finding the place, but the part we did see was pretty good. The girls really enjoyed it. We picked up his CD and enjoyed listening to that as we were driving around today too.

Here’s a clip of him performing on YouTube:

Erin is 6 months old today!
It seems so hard to believe that 6 months have gone by already!

So, since Flickr added the ability to add short videos I had to try it out. Here’s one Karen took the other day in the backyard: