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!