Weekly Review August 28 '15

Last week I ended by saying that Frank and I were going on a date that I was excited about. It was actually more than a date...it was a little overnight get away. Since Frank didn't get to go on vacation with us this summer, I told him we should do some sort of weekend thing. We talked about it back and forth and when I finally convinced him that he should get to choose what we do because it was his vacation, he said what he really wanted to do was do something with just he and I together. And of course I was fine with that!!

So what Frank decided he wanted to do was to go to a place in Baltimore called Medieval Times. We've been hearing about it for years but never gone there. I thought it was one of those places that they have all over the country, but when we went online to learn more about it, I discovered that there are only 9 "castles" total, and one of them is in Canada. So there are only 8 in the United States, and we just happen to be lucky enough to have one near us. (The others are located in New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California, as well as Toronto. As often happens, they ignored that there is a whole big section of the country located in between Illinois and California {Texas is the only exception}.) So if you have never heard of it, it's a dinner and tournament. You eat dinner while watching the tournament. The package we booked included a photo of us together, although to wear medieval clothes you had to pay a few dollars per person. But who wouldn't want to dress up in Medieval clothes? So here we are: 

Frank totally looks like a king! I just look like I'm drowning in my clothes, because I was. One size fits all doesn't work for me. But it was fun anyway. This picture was taken on Frank's phone. The official picture we got makes it look like we are standing on a balcony in a castle. I'll have to scan it or something.

After the picture, we went back to our regular clothes and the paper crowns we received upon arrival. Then we wandered around this big area full of suits of armour:
  

And thrones:

And flags:

While waiting to go in here:

Here's Frank in his crown:

Sorry none of these pictures are very good. We brought our nice camera but of course we forgot and left it in the car so I had to make do with my phone. While we were wandering around we also avoided spending lots of money buying light up swords and jester hats and t-shirts that said "Wench" on them and stuff like that.

Finally it was time to go in to the tournament. We were seated according to the color of our crowns. Our crowns were black and white striped:

There were six different crown colors and each one corresponded to a knight. So everyone rooted for the knight in their section and "booed" all the other knights. Frank and I were sitting on the front row of our section so we got to see all the horses and knights up close, which was cool. The tournament started with bringing out the horses (beautiful!) and then there was a falconer and after that several "games" where the knights were competing for who showed the most skill. Our knight was one of the winners for a lot of those, and he would get to go get carnations from the princess and throw them into our section of the crowd. After all of that, they had a jousting tournament and hand to hand fighting (after they got knocked off their horses) and, sadly, our knight got "killed" in that part. But it was still really fun. While we watched the show we had a dinner of bread, soup, half a chicken, potatoes, corn on the cob, and apple tart. We had to eat all of that with our hands (we drank the soup!). The food was pretty yummy too.

After the show, we went back to the hotel in downtown Baltimore. It was an actual Marriott (not a Fairfield Inn or a Towne Place Suites) with a really fancy lobby:

They even offered us champagne when we checked in! (Which we declined, of course). For all of that, though, once you get past the fancy lobby, the room is pretty much the same as you get at a Fairfield Inn (nothing wrong with that, though). We were on the 10th floor and had a nice view of the city from our window. 

In the morning we checked out and drove to Chantilly, Virginia to the Air & Space Museum (not the one on the Mall...there are two museums now). It's basically these two huge hangars--one full of planes and helicopters and the other full of satellites, space capsules, and this:

The space shuttle Discovery! It's pretty awe inspiring. I took a ton of pictures of it because it's just so big and amazing! Which of course I already knew because I've been up close and personal with a space shuttle in the past. But even so, I was impressed. It's pretty cool to think that this space shuttle was actually up in space many times. Looking at it that close, it looked a little beat up. Here's a close up of some of the tiles:

The back end looked particularly huge to me.

There's writing on this side that says "cut here for emergency escape".

Here's some of the interesting planes, like this Blackbird SR-71:

And the big silver plane in this picture is the Enola Gay:

And there's a Concorde:

Frank liked the military helicopters:

We actually would have liked to spend more time here, but we had to get back home. Jared was working a shift at the party place at 4:30 so we had to be back by then. It was a fun little getaway, though!

When we got home, Jared did the shift and then he went to a dance. The shift must have gone well because they called him on Monday and offered him a job. He decided to take that job instead of the YMCA one. He picked up a shift next week and then they will start putting him on the schedule the week after that.

Monday was the first day of school for our boys. Here they are on their way out the door:
 

(Jared didn't have Seminary the first day, so he got to leave later than usual)

After I got the boys to school, I went to a "Moms' Back to School Breakfast" that a friend and I had organized. We invited all the moms in the ward who have all their kids in school. We had kind of a small group (a lot of people had conflicts) but it was still a lot of fun. I had a pretty busy week. On Tuesday I had book chat, on Wednesday I had a presidency meeting and my monthly meeting with the bishop, and of course there was school and seminary carpools again. I also read a lot, and did some RS stuff, and all the usual housework, and started doing some baseball uniform sewing projects. (I do adjustments like hemming pants and sewing on patches for a guy who used to be in our ward. He asked me to do some sewing for him a couple of years ago and it has somehow turned into a yearly gig. It is kind of fun to earn a little bit of cash, though!) Partway into the week I found out that the stake president wants us to get visiting teaching done before stake conference (Sept 19th & 20th) so I decided that I'd better do visiting teaching changes for September this week (instead of next week as I originally planned) so I could hand out new assignments this Sunday. So that took some time too. Snickers went to the groomer and I had to pick up some medicine for him too. So all of that kept me going this week!

I also got another eye infection this week...in my right eye again. I'm not sure why that keeps happening; I guess I need to get it looked at.

Jared had a pretty busy week too. Besides getting a job and starting school, he also had his first rehearsals for Legally Blonde. He worked on his Eagle Project a little bit and on Friday he went to a special fireside given by some inspirational speakers that go all over the country doing firesides. He said it was really good. ( I would have liked to go too, but I was feeling kind of swamped.)

Frank got home really late on Tuesday because after work he went to a client in southern Maryland to do some work for them. On Wednesday he went to physical therapy and the doctor signed him off...he doesn't need to go back. He does need to keep doing the exercises every day. He still has a decent amount of pain but hopefully if he does the exercises he will get back to normal (or close to normal) someday. He really hasn't been doing them consistently yet so I'm hopeful that he will see more changes when he gets more in the habit of doing them.

That's about it for this week. It's been really dry here, overall. All the lawns are yellow. We've had some hot days but it hasn't been uncomfortably humid most of this week. That is about to change though...supposed to get hotter and more humid this week. It can't last forever, though. Fall is just around the corner. I'll finish with some nice sunset pictures from one day this week:
    

There is actually a very faint rainbow in this picture. On the left side of the picture, below the clouds, close to the trees. It's really hard to see, but it's there.