Thanksgiving in Maine

We headed to Maine for Thanksgiving to visit Gail's family. We stayed at the Hampton Inn, in Freeport, which is only about 10 minutes from Gail's sister Laurie (better known as La-La). It was a great hotel, with a sweet pool that apparently only we knew about...



Here's a group picture taken using my world famous "swim-around" technique...the hotel even gave us rubbing alcohol for Ben's ears after each swim to help prevent ear-infections...


Given that it's an underwater camera, I feel as though I have to take pictures underwater, so here is a great picture of Ben's legs...


and my imitation of a torpedo (think Sean Connery from Thunderball)...


Ben and La-La had a great time in the pool, and we went swimming everyday that we stayed there...


We also watched a couple of fun pay-per-view movies after each day's activities, as a way to chill out and snuggle-up before bedtime...


Mo, famed world-traveller and adventure-seeking rat was in rare form, and explored the hotel room relentlessly (honestly...she was completely without relent) during our stay...


We visited Friendly's for breakfast one morning (this was before discovering the awesome breakfast that our hotel layed out each morning), and had a great time with the coloring and the tasty foodstuffs...Ben had pancakes with M&Ms in them...


You cannot visit Freeport without stopping in at L.L. Bean, so after breakfast, we made our way over, and explored the store for awhile...the biggest (and best) change was bringing the hunting and fishing stuff back into the main building, after years of exile in an outbuilding...


They added a cool aquarium with all sorts of trout and some salmon in it that had a bubble dome in it that allowed Ben to be one with the fish...


Later in our visit, we went for a visit with Gran, dropped off some belated birthday presents (including Ben's first-ever school photos), and Ben showed off his newly missing teeth...


Thanksgiving day we all went over to La-La and Uncle Steve's house to help get things ready...Ben was very spiffily dressed, and helped to set the table while we engaged in some general carousing and rationalized pre-noon beverages ("the pilgrims probably had a beer while getting ready for the feast")...


The food and prep and comings and goings and noise all made dear, sweet, Lucie a little stressed-out...Lucie came to live with La-La and Uncle Steve 9 years ago (during a Thanksgiving visit), and has been doing admirable guard-duty since then (she can turn on the scary-dog like nobody's business)...she was originally billed as a german-shorthaired-pointer mix, although she is obviously a Saranac Lake pit-bull mix...


Gail was allowed to help in some food-prep before the festivities began...


La-La was, of course, the mastermind of the Thanksgiving feast...


After helping to set the table, Ben settled down to watch a bit of the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV...he was excited, as always, by the balloons...especially the Shrek balloon seen here...


Gail's brother Bim arrived, and we had some time to chat before Dinner was served...


After the Dinner was served/eaten/cleared/cleaned, Ben's cousin Max (and his little brother Lucas) made an appearance, with their parents and Kathy and Auntie Helen, which was a fun bonus...Ben had a great visit with Max, and made plans for a possible overnight this summer during our visit to Maine...

We ended up our visit at Mommy's favorite restaurant in Maine, Margaritas...Gran hung out with Ben for the afternoon while Gail and I went to see "The Mist" (a pretty great movie, except for the changed and quitter-supportive ending)...afterwards, we met La-La and Uncle Steve there for drinks and appetizers until the wee hours of the morning and closed the place (actually, we left at 6pm, just as the evening rush was coming on)...

We had a really nice visit to Maine, and are very thankful for family, fun times, and hotel swimming-pools...

Sunday morning ninja-zombie-football practice

In our ongoing efforts to be participants in Ben's education, we started off the morning with some work on the fundamentals...

Being Sunday, and seeing as Ben has a new found love for football, we got out a football to toss around...but...given that we like variety, we turned the challenge-o-meter up to 11 for this exercise...Ben and I played some ninja-zombie-football, incorporating all of the best things in life (except for pizza, which would have been messy) into our game...


Here you can see Ben in his "Tropical Mango" colored room (with unseen sky-blue ceiling) playing our new game...you can see the zombie component of the game trying to blend in with some of Ben's stuffed animals on the bed behind him (the pic is clickable to enlarge it)...


There is a long and rich history involving the Backyardigans and Ugli-Monsters and zombies...we had a great time playing this morning's ninja-zombie-football...my current plan for when CPS comes to take Ben away due to my multiple "corruption of a minor by exposure to zombies" offenses is to lock the door and yell out that we're not home...if anyone asks, we did not watch "Resident Evil" when he was 4 months old, or "Pirates of the Caribbean" when he was 2-3 years old...

I love my job...

I work with 6th graders, and in our school the 6th graders cannot participate in the athletic programs...to combat this shortcoming, we take turns offering other activities...today I spent some time getting ready for a couple of weeks worth of GPS fun and games...


I spent most of the day in important (I keep telling myself) SPED meetings, and then snuck out at 2pm to try and beat the darkness...I had my hugest backpack loaded with 26 containers that I would spread out in 5 course of 5 containers (plus 1 pseudo-geocache with trade items and a logbook)...


I drove over to North Country School (also known as Camp Treetops), a private school during the school year and summer camp in summer...I spent 4 great summers here as a kid, and it was neat to come back for a visit...our 6th graders will be joining some North Country School students for the fun and games...


The containers for this activity are screw top tupperware jars with explanatory notes and crayons that they kids will use with check-sheets to show that they found the right containers in the right order...you can also see the demo-cache...


It was a gorgeous day to wander around their huge campus, light cover of snow, chilly air, clear sky, no wind...perfect...


My looping hike took me down to the waterfront center, where we would swim and boat (even on that July 4th almost 30 years ago when it snowed...yes...they still made us go swimming)...I spent too much time looking around at everything, remembering everything as having been bigger...


It was a great way to spend an afternoon, but it was getting colder by the minute...so I kept moving along and hiding jars here and there in the woods and in one case next to a huge glacial erratic (I've got a thing for erratics, and the Adirondacks is chock full of them)...


On the way out I noticed the cute sign over by the barn...I had a moment, remembering the horses...I hated (and was horrible at) riding, which we had to endure once each week...


Luckily, there were tons of sheep and a llama to cheer me up and make enough funny noises to help me forget my childhood trauma...looking past the fun beasties, I was reminded of working the honey-wagon inside, and the compost pile adjacent to, the big barn in the background...which was more fun than it might sound like...


The sheep and llama kept making funny noises at me, so I took another picture of them...


On the way back towards Lake Placid and home, I drove by the closing of the day's nice light over the High Peaks...


I passed the ski jumps a minute later, snapping this picture on the fly...I only swerved a little, and the policeman waiting right there for speeding tourists must have been sleeping, because he didn't snag me...


The school that I work at, Lake Placid Middle/High School, is situated on the Sheffield Speed Skating Oval (no relation), where Eric Heiden won his 5 gold medals in 1980, and across the street from the hockey arena where the "Miracle on Ice" took place...my room is the center window (and the one to the left of that one) on the 3rd floor...pretty sweet digs huh?


On top of the awesomeness of my day, I got paid for my time playing in the woods this afternoon...feeling flush with my easily-gotten gains, I treated myself to a venti vanilla latte...I love having a Starbucks in the town where I work...


On the way home, I filled up my Element with pricey gas and got some nice beverages (both can be improved/dressed-up with bourbon) for the special 2-hour CSI...


To put a yummy-fatty ribbon around the whole afternoon/evening, I stopped by the best Chinese restaurant in Saranac Lake (the other one is known, by us, as "the shitty Chinese restaurant", and it's not just a clever name)...

I'm heading upstairs now to make us some cocktails, tomorrow signals the beginning of a long weekend, we're heading down to CT to see my folks and sister, and I had a fun day at work...

Chilly Saturday Fun

It was chilly this morning, and there was a nice hard frost on everything, including our big and little Adirondack Chairs...


Ben has been invited to the birthday party of a kindergarten-friend of his, so we headed out to Lake Placid to do some shopping and playing...


We poked around some of the stores in town and were generally uninspired until we found a cool animal-morphing toy/game that allows you to mix and match different parts to make neat combination animals...Ben made a cool parrot/snake/dinosaur/flamingo/fish thing...


We played with the stuff on the floor of the toystore for about 1/2 an hour, having a great time putting together lots of different scary (and silly) beasts...



This was my best creation...a horned insect/bird/dragon that Ben quickly field-stripped in his beastie-making "chop shop"...needless to say, Cullen will be getting an animal-morphing set...his is made up of the mixed parts of 6 of our favorite dinosaurs...


After we paid for the present, we went for a celebratory visit to my favorite Starbucks in the Adirondacks (yes...it's the only Starbucks in the Adirondacks)...here you can see Ben in a "Happy Coma" brought on by the rainbow cookie and fancy orange soda...

I was spartan by contrast, eschewing my regular Venti Vanilla Latte for a plain old cup of coffee...I chose poorly...I make a better cup of coffee at home and I missed the tricky goodness of my usual Starbucks extravagance...lesson learned...


Next, we headed over to the playground at the Lake Placid Elementary School, an old favorite of ours and had a great time...afterwards we went to McDonald's for lunch and then home by way of the video store (we're watching Spiderman 3 as I'm typing this)...the weather is closing in, I'm about to start a fire and head upstairs to make some tea and cocoa...

A nearly perfect Saturday...