Yummy foods...

Hi, people of the universe.
Ergh, I haven't posted on this blog in forever. Sorry about that.
There are a lot of things that I probably should post about--such as our trip to the beach, the fact that I am apparently now a 7th grader, and the fact that Nora and I are going to go on a plane alone to Chicago and visit our cousin Stacy in only one week (YAY!!!!!)
But I'm kind of lazy, so I haven't posted about any of those things. Whoops.
To make up for that, I'll briefly (like, really briefly) summarize both of them for you:

• About our trip to the beach--it was cool! To see all of the pointless photos I took on the trip, go to my blog by clicking zis link. (That's my photo blog, obviously.)
• About 7th grade... err, I don't really know what to say about it. It's... interesting? I'm taking Latin, which I guess is cool. And I got in the advanced math class, for some reason! Which confuzzles me, 'cause I'm not even that good at math. Eh, nevermind.

So, in the mean time...
I'm going to make a list of foods I find yummy, so you can stare at them and marvel at their deliciousness!
Obviously, these pictures are screen-grabs from Google Images. So, yeah.

Doughnuts!

Avocado sushi!

Honey yoghurt!

Poached eggs!

Chocolate-dipped strawberries!

Spanakopita!

Tea--particularly chamomile and jasmine.

Waffles!!!

Pumpkin spice lattes!!!!!

 

Yep. Well, about that last one, in case you're wondering...

I actually drank COFFEE yesterday! And it just so happened that the coffee I drank was a pumpkin spice latte, and it also just so happened that I really, really liked it.

IT WAS PURE COFFEE YUMMYNESS AND PERFECTION.

If you have never drank a pumpkin spice latte before, go do it. Now.

And if you're one of those insane people that, for some reason, doesn't like pumpkin spice lattes... then I really feel bad for you. 'Cause you're missing out on a lot of deliciousness.

Wow, this post was really quick.

Bye!

 

Um

We just found 6 mini pinecones stuck inside our doorbell.

Floor Drama and Washington Adventures

Hi again, blog!
As you may know from the last post, we went to the Building Museum yesterday. The Building Museum is a random museum in Washington that showcases stuff about... well, buildings.
We rode the Metro down to Washington yesterday so we could go there. This is how it looks from the inside:

Yup. That's it.
Anyway, right in the middle of the Building Museum, there's a wooden maze that looks like this:

Well, Bug decided we should go through the maze, since that was what everyone else in the Museum was doing. So that's what we did.
It actually turned out to be a lot harder than it looks, though. We all kept going in circles again and again for like the first five minutes we were in the maze, until we finally realized that this one pathway which we thought was a dead end... actually WASN'T a dead end!
Also, we kept trying to look at this map of the maze to figure out which way to go, but then we realized that it actually wasn't even a map of the maze. It was just a maze.
Here are a couple Nora pictures. You can click them to enlarge.

Then we looked at a few exhibits about old buildings and statues and natural disasters, which I unfortunately don't have any pictures of because photography wasn't allowed in the exhibit-rooms. After that, we went to a gift shop where Nora wandered around for like 10 minutes, ranting to us about how she couldn't decide whether to get this one marble that looked like a peppermint or this one marble that didn't look like a peppermint. Eventually, she just decided to get them both. Sigh!

Then we went to lunch at this restaurant called 'Pret a Manger', which had a loooot of construction going on in front of it, as you can see:

Seriously, the construction was so loud that our eardrums were practically going to burst--even once we got inside the restaurant and chose a table near the very back of the room.
Anyway, about the restaurant--it seemed to be really obsessed with how they only serve their food when it's reeeeeeeeally fresh, and how their food is all sooo natural and wonderful and perfect in every way. This label was on the back of my juice:

I don't even know why I found that important enough to add to this post. But, whatever.
Moving on--
Apparently, the floor-varnish around the kitchen sink is starting to peel, so these floor-varnishing people have to come and re-varnish the kitchen floor. It wasn't supposed to take very long, but then they discovered that the floor situation was actually worse than we thought it was, so it's going to take 2 days for them to fix it. We can't use the kitchen sink or the stove for 2 days, because all of the floor-varnish-stuff is around the countertop, and, obviously, you aren't supposed to step on fresh floor-varnish stuff, so you can't step up to the sink to use the sink or step up to the stove to use the stove.
Here's a sloppy diagram I've made for you on MS Paint to help you comprehend this terribly complex situation:

Well, now I've just exposed my very unpresentable kitchen to the entire internet. Good for me.
Oh, and by the way, we can't use the kitchen table or the kitchen table benches either. That's because the floor-varnishing people want to be able to varnish that part of the floor without having to scoot under the table, which means that we have to totally deconstruct the table AND the benches for them. So now, with the table being deconstructed and all, the kitchen looks rather... scary.

See? Scary, isn't it?
Err, just kidding. It's not actually that scary. It's just... reeeally odd-looking.
And it also smells weird. You can't walk anywhere in the downstairs left half of the house without smelling the evil stench of VVVAAARRRNNNIIISSSHHHH!
Also, there are a bunch of table-pieces and bench-pieces and rolled-up rugs just sitting on towels in the middle of the hall, which is weird. Sooo, yeeeah.

EDIT: Well, the floor-varnishing people came again this morning, and now the entire floor is covered in varnish! So we can't go in the kitchen or use the fridge at all until tomorrow.

Boringness

Hello again, blog. I've been lagging behind on my posting quite a bit lately. Perhaps it's because I really have nothing interesting to post about. But, if anyone really wants to know, here's an update on the (kind of ) interesting stuff we've been doing for the last month!
I'll start with the story of Green Springs. Well, it's not really a story, but... you know what I mean.
Anyways, a few weeks ago, Bug, Nora and I went down to a nature-y, garden center-ish place called "Green Springs" on the way back from this other place where we dropped off a bunch of boxes. After we looked around the greenhouse, which had a bunch of fluffy cacti and looked like this:

we decided to walk down this random path into the woods that just happened to be there.
At the end of the path, there was a small creek that was teeming with these adorable tiny little fishies. (Nora thought they were tadpoles at first, but nope. They turned out to be fish.) I tried to take a few pictures of them from the surface, but they all ended up looking like zippy, grey blur-things since I don't have an underwater camera. An underwater camera would be cool, though.
The creek looked like this:

Yep. It's a creek. Cool, isn't it?

Soooo, as we were walking around and looking at the scenery of the creek, we spotted THIS weird little thing:

We first saw it moving from behind a bush, and we were like, "What is that? Is that a duck? Is that a seagull?"
Then it popped out from behind the shrubbery and started strutting around, giving us this suspicious birdy stare as if it was afraid we were going to try and pounce on it. I instantly grabbed my camera and started following the bird around, carefully documenting its every move. For some reason, it kept on skimming the surface of the water with its talons, like it was trying to catch a fish or something, but it never did, and eventually disappeared back into the plants without further ado.
Then we followed this path into a place with a pond with weird plants and a fountain, and we thought we were lost but then it turned out we weren't.
So, yeah. That was the Green Springs story. (By the way, if you're wondering, that bird turned out to be a juvenile green heron.)

About a week (or something) after that, our neighbor and her family went on a vacation to somewhere and they commissioned us to take care of their pool. It's a little backyard pool with a slide that's about... err, 8 meters long? I don't know exactly how long it is, but it's something around that. We swam in that pool for an hour almost every day for about 20 days straight, and I must say... we had quite a blast.

Speaking of people going on vacations, Bug's neighbors in the apartment across from hers also went on a vacation recently, so they left us in charge of taking care of their cat, Cowboy. Cowboy is an 8-year-old Blue Russian kitty, and he is EXTREMELY fluffy. Seriously. He's like a little walking rug, that Cowboy. Cowboy likes to be scratched right under his chin, which is convenient for you if you happen to like fluffiness, because his chin happens to have a supernatural abundance of fluff. Also, he purrs a lot, which is adorable.

So, about today.
Today I woke up at Bug's house, because last night we slept over at her apartment again, which we've been doing more than usual lately. I mean, we sleep over at her house a lot, but lately we've been doing it, like, a-lot-a-lot. This time we slept over because our parents had to go to some random party-thing that had to do with Dad's work, and it ran on like wayyyy past the time that any normal human would usually go to bed. So we were all like "whatever" and went to Bug's house. We ate spaghetti and then tried to watch a movie, but the movie was really bad so we just went straight to sleep.

I had a bunch of really disturbing dreams that night. Most of them I can't remember, but there was this one dream in which I had apparently "forgotten to wear my braces" (which makes no sense, because braces are already glued to your teeth, duh) and therefore my teeth were getting really deformed and falling out and sliding to the back of my mouth in weird formations...! So then I had to go to the orthodontist, which I was not particularly happy about. When I got there, the orthodontist just gave me this evil sneer and cackled, "Now we just have to figure out a way to make you DIE!" and prepared to launch these random orthodontics-tools at my face that would most likely "make me die". Yeah... well, I have no idea what that's supposed to say about me.

Then I had to go to Nora's cello lesson, where I took Nora's cello teacher's Pomeranian, Cookie, for a walk. Since I'm not a very experienced dog-walker and I wasn't at all familiar with the neighborhood, my plan was to just make two giant loops around the block for fear of getting lost. But at the same time, Cookie kept dragging me off into streets I'd never been before, and I felt bad not letting her go where she wanted to go, so I followed her. Eventually, Cookie and I found ourselves in a random street far from Nora's cello teacher's house where Cookie seemed content sniffing every single plant along the sidewalk. For a while I was almost certain she'd gotten me lost... which would have been embarrassing, but then I just kind of found my way back, somehow.

For lunch, we walked to Subway and got ourselves some sandwiches, which were yummy. On the way back, I found this weeeeird plastic toy of Pumbaa the warthog with Timon the meerkat sitting on his head, holding a leaf with a bug on it. It seemed to have what looked like a bunch of bite-marks all over it.
Yep... this thing actually exists.
Here it is:

Errrrrrrrrrrr... yeah.
Well, I better sign off now, because we need to go home and practice our instruments and then proceed with out lives. Tomorrow, apparently, we're going to go to a place called "The Building Museum", which I misheard as "The Villain Museum" somehow.
Bye!

North Carolina!

Hi, world! We went to Asheville, North Carolina earlier this week to visit my dad's friends, and it was epic. :)
It's hard to sum it all up entirely in one blogpost, but some cool stuff we did includes:

• Seeing a rainbow
• Seeing ANOTHER rainbow
• Going to a reeeeally yummy restaurant
• Going to a garden-place with pretty flowers and lots of bees
• Going to this place called "Biltmore Estate" that is apparently the largest private home in America and was built by some rich guy in the 1800s
• Going to a creek (yay!)
• Renting a pontoon boat and driving around at Lake Lure, where we jumped off the boat and swam around (yay!)
• Me getting stung by a bee for the first time (yay?)
• Climbing up a climbing wall
• Seeing these adorable fluffy little chickens in a friend's backyard which we randomly decided to call Oldy, Goldy, Moldy and Checkers

About the bee sting, if anyone wants to know:
I was in the gift shop of the Biltmore Estate, walking around and looking at random stuff. I set my hand down on a table that had a bunch of clocks on it, and suddenly I felt something weird and prickly on my fingers. I was like, "Is that a bug on my finger? Ha, nooo, that can't be a bug on my finger."
Then suddenly there was a "ZZZZZZZT" and my finger felt like it was going to explode. The end!
It was so weird, though--like, what is the probability of getting stung by the ONLY bee in an over-200-room house? (Well, technically I don't have any way of knowing whether it was the only bee or not. But, you know what I mean.)

Here's a picture of the first rainbow:

And, the second rainbow!

Here are the chickens we gave the weird names.

Here's Lake Lure!

More Lake Lure.

Even more Lake Lure.

Cute little inchywormy inching along.

Nora leaning over the wall and staring at the Biltmore. It looks like a castle.

Koi pond!

Cute little cardinal having a snack. :)

View from some cool fancy hotel-place that's partially built out of rocks.

Well, that's North Carolina. Cool, isn't it? I wish we could go there again.

This morning I tried to make a poached egg:

Well... it's a little deformed. But it actually tasted quite good, surprisingly.
Bye, blog!





Save the Bees!

(Sorry if this post sounds like a random advertisement and really has nothing to do with my life, but I am making a post about bees because I feel like I need to make a post about bees. Thank you.)



A bumblebee in the garden next door

Attention, people of the world! The bees need YOUR help.

Our fuzzy, buzzy, bumbly garden friends are currently in trouble. Their population is decreasing for a variety of reasons, including pesticides, parasites, malnutrition and other stuff that you can read about by clicking the link above.

But if you don't really have time to read an article, then you can skip straight to the rest of this post. And noooo, I am not the world's greatest expert on bees, but I know enough to make a post about it. So, read on:

 

WHY SHOULD PEOPLE HELP THE BEES?

Well, there are several reasons. They include:

• If there were no bees, then us humans would have practically no food at all. They pollinate a LOT of the stuff we eat, and that we feed to our livestock.
• Without bees, there would be no honey! :(
• And not many flowers.
• Bees are fluffy, adorable, innocent creatures that deserve to live!
• They are also really photogenic. :)
• Their population is seriously less than half of what it was back in the 40's, and if it keeps decreasing this rapidly our bees will not be doing well at all in the future.

 

WAYS YOU CAN HELP THE BEES:

• Don't buy foods that have been farmed with pesticides, because pesticides are bad and they hurt bees and if you support farms that use pesticides then they will keep using them and the bees will keep being hurt.
• PLANT FLOWERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Seriously, go do it. Buy a flower and plant it in your garden right now. Please.
• If you see swarms of bees in your yard, that is GOOD! It means that you are doing a great job of helping the bees by planting things they like! Do NOT try to knock down their hives or kill them off!

(Thank you to my grandma Pat, or greengreengreen on Blogger, for giving me this information.)

 

Also, don't be afraid of bees. Not all people, but quite a lot of people in my experience, think of bees as evil things that want to sting any human that comes within a foot of them. (Ahem, Nora.) But bees really aren't as interested in stinging as you might imagine. Seriously, I know that, because there have been times when I have chased bees around for 10 minutes straight shoving a camera into their faces (as you can tell from the picture above--I didn't use zoom) and they just carried on with their merry bee lives without even thinking once of stinging me. They really only sting you as a last resort, like if you're a crazy little child who is stepping on them or touching them or trying to eat them for some weird reason. Please, make sure your child does not run around trying to eat bees or I will seriously start to wonder about your parenting skills.

 

Here are some special flowers bees really like:

 

Alyssum

Anise hyssop

Annual poppies

Asters

Bee balm

Black-eyed Susans

Butterfly weed

Clover

Coneflower

Cranesbill

 

So, I guess that's about all I have to say on the topic of helping the bees. So please, do your best to help them, and share this information with people you know!

Byeeeee!

Thanks for tuning into this bee PSA. The bees appreciate it.

4th of July

Last night I got my hair stuck in a fan. Long story.

Anyway, today is the Fourth of July. YAAAAY AMERICA!!!!!!!!!

At about 11:00 a. m, we went to this random neighborhood fourth-of-July party at the park, where kids ran around screaming and devouring hot dogs, brownies, cookies, watermelons and chips. There were a lot of dogs in wearing interesting patriotic attire, like this one:

More pictures of random stuff other than the dog can be found here.

As part of the fourth-of-July party, the fireman-people (I guess?) brought their fire trucks to the park and let kids play around in them. Nora insisted that I come with her into one, so I did. Then I unintentionally took a picture of myself while trying to take a picture of some random reflective part of the truck.

 

We also walked past this row of fancy old cars that was there for some reason, and my dad was beaming at them like they were the most beautiful things he had ever set eyes upon.

Then Dad, Nora and I rode our bikes to Dad's friend Andy's house, where he and Andy and Andy's wife blabbered on about their lives. While they did that, Nora and I went outside to their backyard where we took turns pushing one another on a homemade swing that hangs from a tree. It started out as just a civilized session of swinging, but eventually turned into a wild rampage of hurling the swing into the air and jumping off it while screaming random names of plants into the air, like, "CACTUS GERANIUM CORN!!!!!!!".

We kept injuring ourselves, and soon it kind of turned into a contest of who could get the most injuries. Nora and I were about tied until she smashed into the tree and shaved the skin off of both of her kneecaps, turning them a bright crimson red. We decided that that made her the winner.

Halfway through the day, I heard my mom having a random conversation on the phone with someone that went something like: "Ahh, gross!" and "Where did you buy it?
Turns out my grandma bought a watermelon that was apparently rotten on the inside.

Then, later, we went to see the fireworks! Yaaaaaaaaaaay! I saw some that were shaped like smiley faces and some that were shaped like fireworks. They were very colorful and firework-ey, and they exploded. Yeah. And I ate a blueberry pie in the shape of the American Flag. It was yummy.