It was time once again for our annual trip to the beach. The kids had a blast, of course.
And I wish we had more time to spend there but alas, our family schedule (along with our budget) only allowed this limited time in “paradise”. Anyway, here are some photos from our beach trip. enjoy.
had a fabulous 4th with the wife and kids out at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary. Yes, it was hot and crowded but that’s pretty much a given at any independence day celebration.
we arrived there at 3:30pm (30 minutes after the gates opened) and surprise, surprise, the entire lawn area was already full. we took a spot under the pine trees next to the lake in order to get some shade which ended up being an OK spot. Still had a good view of the stage and was in a good position to hear the symphony over the noise of the crowd. and man did it get crowded. our area didn’t really get that bad until around 7pm when the symphony took the stage. every inch of space got used. it’s amazing how many people could fit into one spot. there literally wasn’t any space left for people to walk through. folks needing to go to the concession stand or the bathroom had to simply walk over people to get there. at one point when I took the boys to the bathroom, I could not, for the life of me, find my way back to our spot through the sea of people. Luckily the boys had a better sense of direction and led us back to our chairs but I personally would have ended up searching in the wrong section of the venue. 
the fireworks display wasn’t the best I’ve seen in my lifetime but it served its purpose. I’d rate it better than the ones at the NC State fairgrounds though. all in all, we had fun. I could have done without the huge crowd but what are ya gonna do? The NC symphony was nice to hear and we packed enough food and drink to keep the boys satisfied.
Next time though, I’m bringing a large umbrella to shade ourselves from the hot sun. They don’t allow any “staking” or tents and such but holding or propping up a big umbrella for shade seems to be OK with the venue. The other thing I’d do next time is to arrive even earlier – maybe 2:30pm to try to get a spot on the lawn. but then again, sitting around the entire day for some run of the mill fireworks doesn’t really sound all that enticing, does it?
anyway, the boys thoroughly enjoyed themselves and that’s what it’s all about really – creating memories with your family, right?
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aawww. my 6 year old knows me so well. Especially the part about me laying down on the sofa after working hard in the yard.
here’s the story he wrote in his kindergarten class (with the spelling errors corrected):
Suddenly, lightning hit the old tree in the front yard! It took apart half of the tree. When the lightning stopped, my dad used the saw to cut the tree to ten pieces. He took the wood into the woods. When my dad got back he lied down on the couch.
It’s tough scheduling family outings when you have kids on different school calendars like we do. Two of our boys are in year-round schools and our oldest is under the standard traditional calendar. So whenever their vacation schedules eventually do overlap, we make an effort to do something worthwhile together.
This time around we went up to D.C. to visit with family. While there, we took advantage of the splendid weather and went museum hopping at the Smithsonian. Coincidentally it was time for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival so as you can imagine, it was pretty darn crowded in and around D.C. over the weekend.
random tidbits from the visit…
- can it be any MORE expensive to eat at Mickey D’s than at the Air and Space Museum? yikes. for a group of nine, it took a large bite out of the wallet!
- the kids loved riding the Metro even though it was slam packed. our six year old loved standing up while riding. in fact, he insisted on it even with a seat available.
- speaking of the Metro, from what I heard on the news, I think ridership on thurs/fri broke records. something like 900,000 trips were taken on both days. You may remember that the highest recorded riders was over 1 million trips on President Obama’s inauguration.
- with the huge crowds, we just did our best to see what we could at the Air/Space and Natural History museums. we barely scratched the surface since there’s SO MUCH to see there but enjoyed what all we saw nevertheless.
- barely got a glimpse of the hope diamond.. simply too many people congregated in that section of the exhibit. but the diamond/gem exhibit was probably the favorite part of the museum for the wife and her sister. heh.
- Roxy Paine’s Graft, a huge steel sculpture of a tree at the Sculpture garden was neat to see. it’s the first contemporary sculpture installed in the garden in the 10 years since it opened.
- definitely have to come back to see more of the Smithsonian. hopefully when it’s LESS crowded.
- before we left for home we made sure to visit our favorite korean noodle shop for some jja jang myun. for $4, you can’t beat the price PLUS it’s better than any I’ve tasted in the VA/NC area. definitely check out Choong Hwa Won if you’re any where near Annandale.
- another favorite eatery in the area is Spartan’s Family Restaurant (located in Burke, VA). Fantastic gyros, souvlakis and salads. it’s not much to look at but the food is always great.
my kids’ career goals…
the 12-year old: “I want to be a paleontologist so that I can go on far off excursions to discover rare fossils.”
the 8-year old: “I want to own my own company so that I can hire and fire people.”
and finally the 6-year old: “I want a lemonade stand.”
the wife just about had it with kids this past week. So in order to give her some much needed alone time, I took the kids out to the park. Actually, it was pretty much a no-brainer since it was sunny and temps reached into the 60s this past weekend. Definitely a nice change of pace after the long stretch of winter weather here in the area.
Since the kids were bored with the usual play areas in our vicinity we decided to make a trek across town. We hit one in Morrisville on saturday and did a different park in Cary on sunday (yes, the wife needed sunday afternooon to herself as well).
the kids and I recently visited the Dinosaur Trail at the local life and science museum. The kids loved seeing the life-sized representations of these long-gone creatures.
The boys’ favorite spot turned out to be the fossil dig area. I suppose that’s no surprise since boys and big piles of dirt have a long history together
meh. It’s too bad none of the dinosaurs were animatronic.
ugh, I was up late last night cleaning out my dad’s laptop. He recently mentioned to me that he had some problems with intrusive pop-up ads and such so I took the laptop home with me yesterday to see what was up. And just as I suspected, my dad’s computer had accumulated a nasty array of viruses and spyware. I’m not completely sure how it happened, but the internet security suite I bought for him last year was no where to be found on his hard drive. Since my father isn’t that computer savvy, he’s not certain if he deleted the program or if some malware had a hand in uninstalling it.
In any case, I had to scan the harddrive multiple times to get all the junk off his computer. After the cleanup, the computer kept on giving out error messages for missing .dll files related to some of the viruses. thankfully going through MSCONFIG and deactivating the related files in the registry did the trick for those errors.
I can’t believe his laptop was infected like that. What are my parents doing on the computer to end up with such malware?? must have something to do with all the korean videos that they watch so incessantly. They’re retired so as you can imagine, their daily routine involves going on the web to read up on the latest korean headlines and watch korean soaps. So it was imperative that I fix their laptop overnight so that I could get it back to them in the morning. It wouldn’t be right of me to deny the ol’ folks from their daily routine, now would it?
yeah, I screwed up. with all the kids involved in some sort of sporting activity on saturdays, it’s getting a bit tough keeping their schedules straight. for some reason I thought my middle child had his soccer game at the same time as my youngest. but I was wrong. the middle child totally missed his game b/c of me. sorry son!! but at least I got my other two kids to their respective games on time. as MeatLoaf sang all those years ago – “but don’t be sad because two out of three ain’t bad“.
The nice thing about having an 8AM soccer game is that there’s no problem finding a parking spot near the field. Plus after the game, you still have the rest of the morning to do other errands.
Unfortunately, my child ran out of gas pretty early on during the game due to lack of a proper breakfast. Getting the kid to the field by 7:45AM is tough as it is without having to worry about preparing eggs, pancakes and bacon. For the early games, it’s cold cereal, period. no questions asked. sorry kid.
Thankfully, the team still won this one, 3 to 1. I guess some of the other kids have parents that can get up early enough to make a decent meal before the game.
anyway, good job team!
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