Weekend Trip to England

Saturday, I woke up rearing to go to a photography expo taking place at the same time/location of a craft fair. We were going to make a whole family day out of it, but when I arrived, the whole thing was fairly blasé. The theme of the photog lectures was photographing nature, so we decided to instead go out into nature and take some pictures there.

We drove through the countryside on tiny little one lane roads that reminded me greatly of England. Then we parked and climbed England Mountain at the Wildcat Mountain Natural Area, maintained by The Nature Conservancy.
Make certain that you vote in the poll of which of these two butterfly shots you prefer.
We encountered a fungus humongus.


And we saw some lovely tiny lichen.
Next we saw a stick insect. He was bookin' it across the trail.


At the 1.5 mile mark, halfway in, we came upon this little spring house.

Near the spring house was the Smith House, on old homestead, abandoned well before anyone thought of modern conveniences like plumbing, electricity, or rat poisoning. Livia went in first and then came out screaming that there were rats in the ceiling. Of course, I had to go in and photograph the place, and it gave me an extreme case of the heeby-jeebies. If you yourself don't take a lot of photos, you may not realize this, but photography is extremely hazardous. When you're looking through the viewfinder of the camera (or even at the LCD screen on a digicam), you lose all sense of everything going on around you. You could easily lose your balance from tripping over huge gaping holes or a gigantic rat could sneak right up on you. I went in aware of this vulnerability, so I had the girls guard me. I didn't manage to see any rats myself.

We had a marvelous time and appreciated our own house when we arrived home.

Movin' and Shakin' - Full Circle

So, I've been asked to quit blogging about the dog. Which has left me with nothing to say. But today, our move was finally completed, so I thought I'd update folks on what's been happening. 22 July, they came and took away my beloved car -- The Golden Calf.
6 days later, we left England. This was made tolerable by the fact that Ariel upgraded all of us to business class. The girls and I agreed that we will never fly coach ever again. Upon arrival, we rented a car and checked into Homewood Suites -- our new home. We got a great deal on a two-bedroom suite because we booked for 30 days. Just upstairs from us was Tom and Jill K. -- an American family from our post in England (Kira's former neighbors). Oddly enough, we were the K-family's sponsor when they came to England. That seemed weird, but made a certain sense since we had all come from the same State Dept office and all live in the same area stateside. But later we met a family and in our conversations found that they had also been at RAF Croughton the same time were were -- when the husband was the base commander. That was an eerie coincidence.
The hotel was only a few miles from our house, so each day we went and did some work on our house while it was still empty. We painted the entire house Belvedere Creme, which I like to call "booger." We also gave our contractor Terry a key to our house, and though he was still working on another project, he started working on our basement in August. (He's still working on our basement). Finally, I began painting our hideous orange oak kitchen cabinets. (Sorry, I failed to get a true "before" shot with the doors still on the cabinets.) Watch the refrigerator.





When I was down in SC, I suffered from some serious fridge envy with I saw my Dad's new refrigerator. Ariel mocked me until I showed it to him, at which point we started making arrangements to get ourselves one.
The movers came and delivered our first shipment of stuff -- 13 crates, 7 tons. All from England. However, all of the things we had put into storage were no where to be found. Unfortunately, into storage we had put important stuff like lamps. Our house has almost no overhead lighting, so we lived in the dark for a while until Ariel was able to get some fellows to track it down.
Did you notice in the kitchen pictures the crazy dark grout? When we tiled the floor many years ago, the grout in the kitchen never set up right. And it never sealed quite right either, so the grout had darkened considerable, and looked gross. Yesterday, I stripped the grout with sulfamic acid, and today recolored the grout with some colorant/sealant from TileLabs. It looks 100 times better.
And then my car arrived.

Dog Days

Above and below: Blitz, 7 weeks.
Blitz will be 8 weeks old tomorrow. Already his ears are starting to perk up into adult position.
He's quite the digger.

And he's a biter. He loves to play tug-of-war with his lead.


He's still working on looking menacing as a watch dog, guarding the house when I go check the mail.