Showing posts with label Silver Dollar City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silver Dollar City. Show all posts

Friday, October 7, 2016

Yes, I Said BABOON

I'm having some sort of debacle with my computer, and I can't figure out what's wrong. When I go to any Blogger post, mine or anyone else's, and some Wordpress posts, and a few other sites, instead of a padlock icon (by the way, I always kind of thought that was a little pocketbook instead of a padlock) followed by "https" in the url, I get a little grey exclamation point inside a little circle, and I don't know why and I WANT IT TO STOP. 

 Someone help.

 That is definitely not on my list of Ten Things of Thankful for this week, but it will be NEXT week if someone will tell me how fix it. Here's my list for THIS week:

 1. I've got my tiny writing buddy helping me (i.e., lying so I have to hold my arms at a funny angle as I type and I'm getting a cramp in my right shoulder because of it but I'm willing to put up with it because my tiny writing buddy just fell asleep so deeply that her head clunked onto her arms and it didn't even wake her up. 
Nora Pearl in supervisory mode.

 2. A sleeping kitten means a quiet kitten, and all bodies living in this house, be they two- or four-legged, are grateful for a little peace and quiet when Nora is sleeping. 

 3. I thought the back of my hand was bleeding just a minute ago, but upon closer examination, I found that it was just the remnants of a mark from a Sharpie, so that was nice.

 4. I went to a Goodwill thrift store today when I had half an hour to kill and found two pairs of jeans, a long sleeved shirt, and a sweater for me, plus a Hawaiian shirt for the College Boy and spent less than $20. You know what the key to finding stuff in a thrift store is? Low to no expectations, which is precisely what I had when I walked in the place and look how well I did!

 5. I seem to have been a little overzealous last spring when I purged what appears to be most of my winter wardrobe (hence another reason #4 is on the list), because this morning, I was searching under my bed for warm clothes and only found winter pajamas stored there, but that's okay, because the real thankful here is that we have cool enough weather that I NEEDED something warm today! Yay for October weather!

 6. My husband decided to take today off, so I did the same, and he and I had a play day. 

 7. After a brief stop at his office in Springfield (and the reason I had a half hour to kill in #4), we went to Silver Dollar City, an 1880s theme park a little less than 2 hours away from us, with no whiny kids.
Suspension bridge

8. I visited for a few minutes with one of my mom's old friends from when she taught school before she got married. This woman and her family come to Silver Dollar City every fall during the Craft Festival and demonstrate sorghum making at the park. When I saw her last year, I told her my mom was not in good health, so she was not too surprised when I told her my sweet mama passed away this summer. Doris gave me a big compliment when she told her family how much I reminded her of my mom.

 9. My husband wanted to see the Wild West Show that was featured at this year's Craft Festival, so I humored him and agreed, and boy, am I glad, because one of the segments was SO WORTH IT. It was a trained dog act, and that part was rather ho hum, but they brought out a miniature stage coach with the little dogs in it pulled by a ginormous dog and DRIVEN BY A BABOON WEARING WESTERN CLOTHES. At one point, and I kid you not, the baboon pulled two six-shooters out of holsters and waved them around. Made. My. Day.'
Stagecoach + dogs + baboon = HILARIOUS

10. A baboon. In western clothes. With six-shooters.


The College Boy is home this weekend, and we're all going up to visit my dad while my husband volunteers at an Oktoberfest (for work, not because he wants to). We're going to take Nora Pearl with us, and tomorrow evening we (not Nora) are going out to dinner at one of my dad's favorite places, a restaurant in a little town of a few hundred people about 40 miles from where he lives. The food is homemade and delicious, and when they needed to add more seating, they turned an old grain bin into a dining room. Top that, city slickers!

 Link up your thankfuls at the best blog hop ever.

 A baboon, people. 



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Saturday, December 12, 2015

Oooh! Ahhh! Christmas Lights And More Thankfuls

Shhhh! My family is still asleep and I'd like to keep it that way for a little longer. Here are some thankfuls for the week:

 1. We drove to the lake house yesterday. No one has been here since my mom fell right before Halloween, but everything was fine.

 2. My parents have really great neighbors across the street. They keep an eye on the place and have a key, just in case (for example, just in case there's a tornado warning, as we have a basement and they don't). They turned on the heat and set the thermostat very low, so if the weather takes a dive, the pipes won't freeze.

 3. Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of unseasonable weather, but the 70 degree day yesterday made for a really nice visit to Silver Dollar City last night to enjoy their spectacular light display. We didn't have to wear coats and hats and gloves, which meant I didn't have to carry anyone else's coats and hats and gloves when they didn't want to wear them.










4.  While there are shows to be seen at Silver Dollar City, such as a production of "It's A Wonderful Life," our plan was just to walk through the park, enjoy the lights, and get the free pewter ornaments we earned by using our season passes the correct number of times (don't ask me what that number is, because I have no idea; I just know that we qualified). I asked the kids if there was anything else they really wanted to do while we were there, and they both said, in unison, "decorate cookies" (we've only been doing this since College Boy was about 3, and I'm sure somewhere I have pictures to prove it, but I'm not where the pictures are, so use your imagination about how cute he was as a little guy, frosting a cookie with green [always green] frosting and sprinkles and devouring it.)





5. Turkeys were on sale for 73 cents a pound, so I bought two for the freezer.

 6. The College Boy is finished with finals and home for a whole month.

 7. He brought his (REALLY BIG) tv home with him, carefully packing it in the original packaging for the trip, fretting over making sure it stayed upright, per warnings on the box, carried it inside the house, set it in the living room, next to a wing-back chair that contained one Ruby, and was in the process of carrying some things up to his room when there was a big WHOMP from the living room. He returned to find Ruby sitting on the arm of the chair and the tv jelly-side down on the floor next to her. Hysteria ensued, and he rushed the tv up to his room to make sure it still worked, vowing there would be one less cat in the house if it didn't. It did, and Ruby's place in the family is still secure.

 8. Emma and I are enjoying the perks of Area Appreciation pricing and going to see a music show tonight. (Branson is known for its music shows, among other things.) This is a big deal, because we don't go to shows; that's for tourists, as far as we're concerned; besides, tickets are pretty pricey. She and I are going to see The Haygoods, whom we love, and we will wish my Person and her daughters were with us, because we never would have gone to see them the first time if it weren't for them. Two thankfuls for the price of one!

 9. I don't have pneumonia. I do have bronchitis (its name is Dayn). 

 10. I didn't have to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis. We had our preschool Christmas program Thursday night, and Dayn the Cold, which started on Monday, had turned into Dayn the Horrid Cough and Dayn the Laryngitis. One of my preschool moms (yay for awesome preschool moms) is a nurse who is also studying to be a nurse practitioner. She brought her stethoscope to school the next morning and listened to my chest, pronounced that it was tight (it's been making a weird noise when I breathe), but it wasn't pneumonia. Whew!

 Work hard and find some thankfuls for the week. If I can do it, so can you!

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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Glorious Fall Days Full Of Thankfuls

October really is a lovely month. There are warm days, sometimes even hot ones, where you can cling onto your summer clothes and flip flops for just a little longer, and there are snappy days with a little bite in the breeze that make you remember how much you love wearing boots and sweaters, and there are glorious days in between, with bright, blue skies and just a pinch of briskness in the air, and we've had them all this week. If that's not a thankful right there, then here are Ten Things of Thankful for the rest of the week:

 1. I ran into Sam's Club (like Costco, for those of you who don't live in Walmart Country) the other day to pick up a few things, put my grocery cart away (where it was the only one in the little cart corral), went back to my car, pulled out of my parking space, and just as I put the car into drive, I spied with my little eye A GROCERY CART ROLLING RIGHT AT ME. I can't imagine where it came from, because I was the only one in the immediate area when I put my cart away, and I was preparing for the impact when it veered to my right. This was a thankful for me, but the cart's next intended target was the bottom end of a woman loading groceries into her trunk. I started honking my horn like a maniac to get her attention. She looked up at me and gave me a half smile, then noticed I was frantically pointing behind her. She turned around in time to catch the cart before it boffed her in the butt.  

 2. As I drove past the cart corral, I was happy to note that my cart was still firmly parked where I left it and was NOT the runaway cart, because that would have really sucked. 

 3. It's been a long, dry spell since I indulged in my little hobby of taking pictures of exposed butt cracks, but I was rewarded with a pretty decent shot in the checkout line at Walmart:
As if the butt crack weren't bad enough, we now know
he buys his underpants at American Eagle.
4. I really, really hate spiders, but in the fall, we always have a big 'un spin a web in our carport, between the posts along the driver's side. This year, there is a GINORMOUS spider setting up camp there. I keep forgetting it's there when I go to my car and when I pull in the carport and get out of the car, and he scares the bejeebers out of me every time, but as long as he stays in his web and doesn't try to attach himself to me in any way, then we can coexist. So far, so good.
Gargantuan spider. I couldn't hold anything up there for
reference, because I was too scared, but suffice it to say
that his body alone is bigger than a quarter.

 5. Volleyball is over, over, OVER for the season! The girls lost in their first game of District play, and this hellish season is DONE.
Isn't this awesome? One of Emma's friends found it in the
archives of the paper for fall sports. It didn't make the paper,
but it should have.

6. But the Kansas City Royals? Yeah, they made it to the World Series. 

 7. When we bought our house 18 years ago, the refrigerator came with the house. We had a practically new side-by-side that we brought with us from California and were going to put in the kitchen instead, until we found out it didn't fit in the refrigerator hole. It went down to our basement to live instead and has been useful to store extra flour and baking mixes and rice and other foods that can get bugs in them. The freezer side has always had some overflow stuff and odds and ends, but we also have a chest deep freeze big enough to hold at least one body (not that we've tried, but still). Wednesday, I went down to look in the freezer of the side-by-side to see if there were any frozen vegetables stashed in there and found there were only thawed ones. Let that wash over you a minute. The motor was still humming away, but the inside of the freezer was barely cool. I threw away half a trash bag full of food that had thawed (including some salmon fillets that should have been in the deep freeze in the first place), leaving only some gel ice packs on the shelves.  Then I opened the refrigerator side (it didn't have anything perishable in it), and, not having any clue what to do about the whole situation, turned off the switch, then turned it back on and sadly hauled the trash bag outside. Fast forward four days. I went into the basement for something and decided to go see if the side-by-side had fixed itself (ha ha ha). I opened the freezer door, and was met with a puff of cool air and gel ice packs that were almost frozen. WHAT. THE. HELL? I list this tentatively as a thankful, for obvious reasons.

 8. I bought a new pair of jeans. I hate to shop for jeans, but finding a pair I not only liked but that were also on sale was a pleasant surprise.

 9. We went to the lake house this weekend with the primary purpose of visiting nearby Silver Dollar City, an 1880s theme park. It's always seasonally decorated, but the fall decorations are my favorite. It was a gorgeous day, I got to sit and listen TWICE to a little bluegrass band that has been playing there for many years and that I adore, and THERE WAS NO FIGHTING, BITING OR OTHERWISE HATEFUL BEHAVIOR from any of my family.


10. Ruby made the journey with us to the lake house, but I guess when we left this morning to go to Silver Dollar City, she was not happy. My parents had gone out to get Sunday papers when we returned in the early afternoon, and we found this note from my mom on the refrigerator door:


My mom cracks me up!

 Be thankful, be thankful, be thankful!

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Monday, June 15, 2015

Random Reflections On My Weekend

I probably did Trisha Yearwood a disservice when I said we had the same neck in this weekend's Ten Things of Thankful post. Hers is actually better than mine, but I do have 5 years on her. Sorry, Trisha. My bad.
We're almost neck twins. Anyone remember
when Joey found his hand twin on Friends?

 There was a lot of talk about bladder control in that same post. It occurred to me that I never gave bladder control much thought until I found I no longer had 100% control over my bladder.

 If I didn't act like a three year old and put off going to the bathroom until my bladder is filled to bursting, I probably wouldn't have ANY bladder control issues. Hmmmm.

 When a tour guide tells me, right before I go down into a cave, that anyone who has problems with difficulty breathing when climbing stairs, a fear of heights, a fear of the dark, a fear of enclosed spaces, or a need to go to the bathroom often and might need to rethink the cave tour, I will immediately have every one of those symptoms shortly after the last chance to turn around and go back to the surface.

 The above is true even if it's a cave I've been in over a dozen times in my lifetime and I know I will live through it.
600 steps down that tower, then lots of steep ramps
to get to the Cathedral Room. 

Made it, unscathed, although the little kid who kept stepping on my heels as I climbed the (slippery, wet, steep, narrow) stairs out of the cave very nearly found himself kicked in the teeth if he had stepped on my flip flop back and tripped me ONE MORE TIME.

 Yes, I know, flip flops are not the best choice of footwear for a cave tour. When I got dressed to go to the theme park with the cave, I didn't know my kids were going to want to go on the cave tour.
Stalactites. Cool, huh?

I have seen more bats at preschool than I have ever seen in Marvel Cave, which allegedly has something like 80,000 bats in it. 

 The tour guide who tried to tell us in the event of a bat encounter that we should hold still has obviously never seen any of my previous bat encounters at preschool, where my m.o. is to run screaming into the nearest room with a door and slam it.

 Her other suggestion of ducking and letting the person behind us deal with the bat was much more practical and something I could work with.

 I would have fed that heel-stepping kid to a bat if I had had a chance.
Looking up.

I recorded these for Ivy while I was in the Homestead area of Silver Dollar City. I have no real reason to put them here, except that I CAN, so I did.






Silver Dollar City, by the way, is an 1880s theme park, located on top of Marvel Cave. 
Who doesn't like a good pun?

 When it starts to rain as you're waiting to get on a tram to return to your car, and by "rain" I mean raindrops the size of softballs, it doesn't motivate the tram driver and conductor to move any faster to get you out of the rain and onto the tram, because they are nice and dry where they are.

 The trams don't have sides on them. Any guesses on how wet we were by the time we made the (approximately) one mile trip to our car? Does this give you an idea?
The parking lot behind me was a lake.

I could tell you how, at one point on the two hour trip home that all three cats began meowing as a round, but without a recording, it isn't that impressive.

 I could also tell you how my husband brought in two Canada goose feathers and laid them on top of the piano, and how Ruby smelled them, finally sniffed out their location, carefully hopped onto the piano, stealthily stepped over to the feathers, then took her paw and WHACK WHACK WHACK killed those damn feathers, but OF COURSE I didn't think to get video of that, and, having killed them dead, Ruby was done and refused to do a re-enactment.

 Sigh.

 The end.
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Friday, June 6, 2014

An Eating, Talking, Laughing, Thankful Week

I don't mean to brag or anything, but I'm writing my Ten Things of Thankful post an entire day early. Okay, totally bragging.

Last Saturday afternoon, my daughter and I drove to Branson to meet my person and her kids at my parents' lake house. We hadn't seen each other since March, so we've been counting the days until this trip! Our drive was two hours; their drive was 8 hours. Guess who almost let her friends arrive at her house before she was there herself? It was a close one, and only the beginning of a week chock-full of thankfuls:

1. Terri used to live in Branson and performed in several different shows in town. This means she has CONNECTIONS and was not afraid to use them. End result was that we got to reap the benefits of her connections and attend a myriad of shows and events, either for free or at greatly reduced prices. 

2. While Branson is a huge tourist destination, our family uses it as a place to be complete sloths. Not this time. We hit the ground running from the time our friends arrived and didn't stop the entire time. Saturday night, we attended the Haygoods Show. Five brothers and one sister, all talented musicians, singers and dancers. I am always in awe of talent that runs through a family like that (think Osmonds, if you will). 
The girls with Matthew and Michael Haygood.
They are each scheming to marry Michael.

 3. Monday morning, armed with a pocketful of quarters for the food dispensers, I took the kids (all 15 and 16 years old) to the Shepherd of the Hills Fish Hatchery. I failed at getting a video of them, which saddens me a little, because I wanted to record their giggles as the fish lunged at the food pellets they dropped into the pools. 


4. Tuesday morning, I took three of the kids to the Ralph Foster Museum at College of the Ozarks. This place is a gem: admission is free for kids under 18 and only $6 for adults, and it's filled with local artifacts, from furniture and dolls to stuffed animals (the real kind, not the toys) and weapons and more. 

 The pièce de résistance of the Ralph Foster Museum is this:
Yes, kiddies, it's the REAL Clampett car from
The Beverly Hillbillies.

5. Terri's son was in seventh heaven at the sight of all the guns on display. I don't know nuthin' about guns, but I do know there were old pistols and rifles and such. At one point, after staring intently into a huge display case of weapons, he turned to me and said excitedly, "If this place ever gets attacked by zombies, THIS is where you go!" I think he was only partially kidding.

 6. Wednesday, we packed a picnic lunch and headed to Moonshine Beach on Table Rock Lake. In spite of the following, it was a fun time:

 I got bitten by a housefly on my ankle and the little bastard drew blood.
The sand was not that ultra-fine beach sand you might be used to, but rather hauled-in sand that was coarse and rough and made it feel as though you were scuffing your feet on coarse-grade sandpaper. Which you kind of were.
There were rocks in the sand. Sharp ones.
It was windy. And sand being sand, it blew onto you and stuck in your sunscreen.
The water was pretty cold. Which didn't matter to me, because I had no plans to get in it, but it mattered to at least two of the little angels who were with us.


7. The amazing Terri also scored us tickets to see Jonah, which is, you guessed it, the story of the guy who was swallowed by the whale, told as a musical. I know, I know, but it was really good! The scenery and special effects were spectacular. The cast was talented. I would not have believed I would enjoy the production, but I was wrong and stand corrected. She also arranged for us to go to the Dixie Stampede, another show that I wasn't too sure I was going to like, but I did. Plus, they feed you so much, you sometimes were so busy eating, you forgot to watch the show.


8. Thursday, we went to Silver Dollar City, an 1880s theme park, which is my happy place. After a morning of severe thunderstorms, a power outage that lasted about an hour and a half and caused four teenagers to huddle in the living room with us, because they were varying degrees of scared, we ended up with a delightfully cool, non-humid afternoon at the park. I made it my mission to eat my way through the park and did a pretty fair job of it. The kids rode rides and ate THEIR way through the park. I stopped to listen to the Homestead Pickers, people watched, rode the steam engine train, as Terri had never done it before, got cheese in my hair, and enjoyed sitting in a shady spot and talking and laughing with my person.

 9. We visited a lot of folks. Like Freddy (as in Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers), Billy Bob (as in Billy Bob's Dairyland), Danna (as in Danna's BBQ), Andy (that would be Andy's Frozen Custard). We had lunch with Terri's former boss, Buck Trent (that was a hoot). We sat up late and talked. And talked. And talked.

 10. Sadly, Friday morning arrived and they departed, but not without one last meal at Freddy's before they left. We spent a long time saying goodbye in the parking lot, and Terri, who is not good at such things, tried to take a selfie of us. 


Her daughter, either feeling sorry for her or disgusted by her failure to take a decent selfie (or some combination thereof), took command of her mom's phone. We were just posing for the picture when Terri made some rather unladylike sound (a burp, maybe, or possibly a throat growl), and we fell apart. Because that's what best friends do.



Sometimes, they nearly wet their pants. NEARLY.




Who wouldn't be thankful after a week like that? 

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