Summer

Finally it is summertime for me. It's almost over for the kids, but I just took my final for the course I was taking over the summer and I feel like I can breathe at last. What a relief. I'm still awaiting my final grade, so more on that later. I am sad that Scrap Addict is gone, but with it goes a lot of the things I did to pass the time, like administrative work and design team things. I suddenly find myself with a lot more time, so maybe I will get some scrap things done. I have two albums I'm working on right now, both Shona things, but as soon as I get my summer vacation photos back, I'll have that to do as well. Speaking of summer vacation, it was a whopping two and a half days. Still, that almost seemed long enough by the time it was over!

Day One:
We started off with a trip to Fantastic Caverns in Springfield. Katy got us all in free because she is an area McDonald's worker. John still has the cave photos on his phone, and I'm nagging him to get those off. I loaned my camera batteries to Shona to use with her miner's hat. She'd been to the cave a few weeks earlier on a school field trip, and she'd been begging for a hat since. The only problem was she kept shining it in people's faces and finally had to confiscate the hat. In the gift shop, the girls begged for a bat hat, of all things. Oh, the silly stuff we buy our kids.

Next up was the Titanic exhibit in Branson. It was OK, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more without Shona. The highlight of her high spiritedness was when she tried to climb the sloped portion of deck on display and tumbled off, almost cracking her skull. Ten seconds out of my sight. Oy. I will give kudos to the attendant there. He was witty and said "Thank you for demonstrating the dangers of this display!" Kids. The interesting thing about the exhibit is that they give you a card as you go in with the name of a real passenger. For the remainder of your journey, you are that passenger and you can find "yourself in the photos and artifacts. Then at the end you find out if you lived or died. I was a Countess who lived. John and Shona survived. Poor Katy and her nine children perished. We didn't stop teasing her about that the entire time. There were also dresses and things from the movie and because of that, no photography was allowed.

On the way to our hotel, we stopped at the dam. Not much exciting to see there, so we snapped a photo and moved on to shopping. Didn't buy a lot, but with outlet malls, you gotta go.

Day Two: Silver Dollar City. I hadn't been in years and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. It wasn't as big as I remembered and there wasn't as much to do. Last I went, it was geared a lot more toward the displays of craftsmanship. You can still watch a blacksmith creating things, there was a glassblower creating works of art (Katy goaded him into making the first bunny of his life, and we wound up buying that as a souvenir), and a few others, but mostly it was just another theme park with cheesy shows and roller coasters. Well, OK, so the roller coasters I like. No, love. I live for them. That's us waiting in line for yet another ride. We opted not to stay for a second day because we had gone on all the rides we wanted and did everything we wanted. Instead, we headed home early and stopped for a bit of retail therapy on the way home. School clothes shopping galore.

Only one more month until I start classes. Tick tock, tick tock...