Cute Kid Pix February 2023

More pictures that did not make their own post...

My youngest had his first school concert. He plays the bass and was in the very back of the orchestra, so hard to photograph.

The orchestra

Close up of him

At the cub scout pack, Pinewood Derby was fun. We built a Minecraft car. Poor Steve had to lose an arm so that the car's weight would not be too much!

Arms and the man

About to race

Goofy victory pose (sorry I didn't get a good shot of the serious one)

Victory ice cream later

I went to one of my older son's debates and volunteered as a judge. The judges waited between duties in the high school's library, which had this awesome chair.

Check it out...not literally, though

The flowers that bloom in the spring have nothing to do with the case...in this photo.

Our G&S front yard

More Random Bits of Batimore

Here's some more random spots in Baltimore...

A sign commemorates an 1877 railroad strike near the Orioles Ball Park. The strike broke out on July 16, 1877, because wages were being slashed by ten percent. The strike turned violent by the 20th. President Hayes deployed Federal troops to restore order. By the 22nd, peace was reestablished in the city, though the striking workers and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company did not come to a settlement. Read more detail here.

Strike memorial

Nearby is an art display of a giant folding fan. The pattern on the fan is a reflection of the building on the right, it's not just some weird color scheme!

Mirrored fan

We discovered a crosswalk with a hopscotch overlay! And yes, I did cross in the boxes.

Who can resist?

A closer look

Just outside Oriole Park in Camden Yards is a statue dedicated to Brooks Robinson.

What's he looking at?

Oh, the ball park!

At the Union Collective, a friend and I tried out a sampling of ryes and aperitifs. The Baltimore Spirits Company happened to have an uncasking that day and had already sold 300 of their 305 bottles of rye just released for sale. I tried the special new rye and was impressed. I'm not a rye drinker, so I didn't get one of the last five bottles. I did enjoy their apple brandy and their amaro, an after dinner digestif. My favorite was the coffee, with hints of toffee and cocoa nibs.

Samples on offer

The distillery part of the distillery

We also visited Second Chance, a used furniture and furnishings warehouse full of materials reclaimed from buildings and homes that would otherwise have been demolished. They sell the material at very reasonable prices to fund their initiative to train people from the Baltimore area for employment.

Cool statues

Purposeful porpoises 

Trying out a chair

Fun, if scary, wall hangings

Unpacking Update

Our household goods finally arrived last Monday (five days ago as I write). We've spent a busy week trying to unpack boxes, reorganize rooms, and return disassembled furniture to its original state. It's been fun but exhausting work, leaving no time for blogging.

The good news is everything on the packing list made it. No boxes were lost or smashed to bits or confiscated by customs (I was worried about my copy of Portal 2!). Not quite everything made it. We have an Ikea loft bed that the American movers took partially apart. They did not do a good job of keeping all the fiddly little bits with it. We made a trip to Ikea today to get some additional furniture and the missing screws, dowels, and bolts required to finish the bed. The bed is now complete. Jacob even tested out the ladder and the mattress and all works well.

I was happy to see this listed as number 42 on the packing list:

The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is...

A bookcase! Full of linens? I guess that makes as much sense as "42" does.

Books are pretty important in my opinion. If they don't have the ultimate answer, they can definitely help in discovering it. This poor bookshelf will be stocked with books once we get some shelves for our linen closet. Ikea was surprisingly unhelpful in that regard.

Worse than Ikea not solving all our problems, we did have one casualty in the move. Jacob's cheap plastic fireman's hat got crunched up in the move. The hat was in the bottom of a box, so I think it just suffered under the burden of supporting other items. My wife said we should write to the moving company to demand $80 for a fireman's hat (as long was we left out the words "plastic" and "child's" in its decription); I said we should demand £80!

I'm not sure it's the authentic style and color (colour?) of locally used hats

Things are slowly coming together. The study/guest room/man room can finally be properly organized now that the loft bed is not scattered in pieces all over the floor. We opened up the boxes of pictures to hang and need to decide where they should go. That's fun work, though not as fun as going through the books and re-alphabetizing them. That takes a while because of all the sampling I do as I go. Soon there will be time for reading again! Truly a happy time for us.