adventures


31
Dec 17

We’re back

Apple juice, the official drink of my airline flights, for some reason.

Good to be back. And since we’ve been gone for a while, that meant dinner was Chinese. And that means fortune cookies, which means:

Guess who is sitting next to me?!?

(Update: She got the same fortune.)

More on Instagram and, of course, on Twitter.


29
Dec 17

I made a friend

This is the time of year when it is cold enough to order hot chocolate:

And it is, therefore, also the time of year when you remember the problem with hot chocolate: there are no cups capable of holding the large amounts of hot chocolate required or desired.

We went to see our friends Paige and Kevin today. Paige was our wedding photographer, and the current joke is that since we took engagement photos in a 17-degree Nor’Easter and our wedding photos in something like 126-degrees heat index, then we really, really have to do something meteorologically fancy for our 10th anniversary. Fortunately, we have some time to figure that out.

Their daughter is a real cutie:

And she gave me a sticker. I’m told I am lucky because she doesn’t give her stickers away to just anyone.

Mickey and I go way back, of course, so it was a great gift.

More on Instagram and, of course, on Twitter.


24
Dec 17

Christmas Eve

schlaf in himmlischer Ruh, schlaf in himmlischer Ruh.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

More on Instagram and, of course, on Twitter.


27
Nov 17

Back at it today

We made it back home yesterday. No one was more pleased than her:

She’s such a great traveler. We don’t let her in the driver’s seat, but she splits her time napping in the back and cuddling whoever the passenger is at the time. She’ll look out the windows, the big trucks either intrigue her or freak her out, but she’s very calm about the whole thing. When we slow down, she perks up a bit. Maybe we’re there. But if you think about a long drive, there’s a lot of disappointment in that as the defining characteristic.

We hang the left and then the right into the neighborhood, though, we hit a roundabout and you start doing that crawling neighborhood speed and she knows something is up. She’s up in the windows checking everything out. You’d think she thinks she recognizes it, but she only knows these views by the way of the windshield. She’s an inside cat.

But then you hit the garage door, turn into the drive and then she knows and this patient passenger turns into a dashboard diva.

It sorta works against her. She wants out of the car — through the windshield if need be — but climbing up there hampers her exit from the Magic Moving Box.

We ran a turkey trot this weekend:

The Yankee won her age group. I won my age group.

This was the course, which I ran in the wrong shoes, because I realized about two hours into the drive, that I’d forgotten my running sneakers. So I ran it in my walking sneakers.

They are walking sneakers for a reason: they were lousy running sneakers.

On our drive back we found some cotton fields that hadn’t been harvested yet. We, of course, had to stop for pictures:

I wonder why it was still in the fields. People that passed by probably wondered the same about us, though.


20
Nov 17

And now, another installment of Storytime

The Yankee was out of town visiting with friends and family this weekend. It goes like this: her godparents have known her parents, individually for years. Her godfather and father grew up together. Her godmother and mother met in nursing school.

Now the two of them met at their friends’ wedding. They got married. Along came The Yankee and they became her godparents. The godparents had two daughters and The Yankee’s parents are their godparents. Now those young ladies are of course grown and have beautiful families of their own. They all got together this weekend.

The oldest of those kids was up for a story. So I found myself digging through, and passing along, photos last night.

Here are two now.

This first one is from the Cayman Islands. It was a graduation trip. We were off diving for a week and the locals helped us find a dolphin. He’d just turned up one day, they said, and was very social. They figured he might have been a part of a Central American dolphin venue, where customers likely interacted with him, but a hurricane had damaged where he lived and so he was back in the wild. But he enjoyed people. He didn’t like SCUBA divers, but he’d swim with you. And if you tried to out-swim him, he’d let you know who was boss.

But to swim with a dolphin, to pet and play with a dolphin in the wild, that was a terrific experience, just one small part of a great trip.

And here’s one of The Yankee and me:

It was one of our first family trips. My bunch went to Belize, where we did a lot of diving and horseback riding and exploring Mayan ruins. We didn’t see any dolphins this time, but I did get to catch a bunch of reef sharks by hand while SCUBA diving. (I’ll have to find those pictures.) That was another great trip. Even the snorkeling selfies were great.