Thursdays are Yellow

Further Explorations of Elm St and Downtown

2012-02-17T00:52:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We went to the Pizzaria and Pub, then we went to the UPS store to run an errand for mom. We used the key--turned the key--to open the box for 215 to get the mail.
We went to Queen City Cupcake and bought the last two cupcakes. Now we will go exploring.
The cupcake was messy, but yummy.
Then we went to walk on Elm Street, but it was raining. We went to the Manchester Public Library. We looked at a lot of books. I looked at the audiobooks. Then I helped Miaka check out some books. Then we waited for Mom to pick us up.
Next week is gonna be funky. So we're gonna be in Nashua?

Miaka's take:
Today was a 'lunch date' again, partly because there hasn't been a tour open at the Van Otis chocolate factory. We're still waiting on a chance to go there, it sounds like a lot of fun. (Not to mention yummy!)
We started the afternoon by slightly confusing Patch, who vehemently doesn't know Manchester. (Apparently 'down near the hotel' doesn't tell him much about Elm Street, which is odd because there's only one hotel I could possibly mean and he knows full well that it's next to Granite Street.) He seemed a bit miffed at my inability to give him a more exact description of where Portland Pie Co. is, and the fact that I wasn't paying attention to the surroundings the moment we got to Elm Street, while we were still north of Bridge St. I paid attention once we got closer, though, around the time we were passing Ben & Jerry's I started looking at the shops. The one we were headed to is on the corner of Elm and Merrimack, but I hadn't caught the name of the side-street until Patch dropped us off today. Giving directions doesn't come easily to me, and I tend to work best off landmarks, rather than street-names. This generally works out well, as Archi also tends to operate more on landmarks than street names. Patch, however, prefers street names.
At any rate, we got safely to Portland Pie Co. (Pizzaria and Pub). It's a very nice place, with a distict 'pub' feel to it. Thick wooden tables and sturdy chairs that aren't too heavy or anything. There's one area with 'normal-height' tables, and an area with a bar and high tables. King requested seats at one of the lower tables. An ad-stand (what are those things called?) on the table suggested 'Captain Eli's Root Beer'; I flipped through the rest of the little ad-cards while King was looking at the menu, but I don't remember the other cards, only that the root beer sounded good. King decided to go with Sierra Mist, and I asked for Captain Eli's Root Beer, already thinking to myself that I must bring Archi here sometime. The root beer was 'on draft', the waitress explained when she brought it. King got a regular cup with ice and soda and a straw, while mine was in a chilled glass (no straw) and she brought a cup of ice for me. I ended up not needing the ice, though, as the root beer was at the perfect temperature.
King and I both decided on steak-and-cheese sandwitches, though he got a wrap and no onions, and I got a baguette (light onions) and some soup instead of chips. Everything was VERY good. King seemed to enjoy his a lot, though he doesn't talk as much about what's yummy as I do. The soup was eggplant and zucchini, and very tasty.
After lunch, we decided to run the errand Mom asked us to do for her before getting dessert. The UPS store was a short walk down the street, maybe as much as a block or so, with no cross-streets in the way. I pulled out the key Mom had sent along, and asked King to find box 215. It took him a bit, but he found it. I gave him the key to try and fit in, but it wasn't going in the way he was trying to put it in. To save a little time, I stuck the key in the lock for him (he'd been holding upside-down) but I made him turn it. This turned out to be a little funny. He kept grabbing and turning the key ring, rather than the key itself. Turning the key ring, of course, didn't affect the lock at all. "It's like a knob," I explained. "You grab the key part here," I tapped the metal circle sticking out of the lock mechanism, "and you turn it like a knob or a dial." A few tries later, he managed to grab the right part of it and twist enough for the little door to pop open, allowing him to grab the mail from inside. Once we got the door closed again (another slight trick, as the lock mechanism had to be turned correctly to close the door, and again to lock it and pull the key out), we went to the counter in order to renew the box. This being more of a me-errand than a King-errand, he chatted with the gentleman behind the counter while I fished around in my purse for the card I needed. Errands discharged (get mail and renew mailbox for one year), we headed back the way we'd come, to the little shop next door to the pizzaria and pub.
Queen City Cupcake is a very cute little shop, done in pretty pastels, with cupcake prints and cupcake-pans on the walls. It's a lovely blend of cozy and modern, and a fairly new addition to Elm St. The sign on the door states that the close "when we run out of cupcakes". King and I were lucky, we got the last two cupcakes of the day. I don't remember what the flavor was called, but they were chocolate cake with almond frosting and slivered almonds sprinkled atop the frosting, the whole then drizzled lightly with more chocolate. The cupcakes were devine. King enjoyed his messily, chucking quietly as I enjoyed my cupcake. The frosting tasted like ammaretto minus the alchohol--sweet and almond and delicious. The chocolate cake was perfectly soft and springy and tasted just as devine as the frosting. Well worth the $3.50ea price tag, and large enough that they could be split. (Not with a hungry growing boy, though. Possibly with Archi, but King was more than able to demolish one on his own.) I decided that I simply must share this with Archi, as there was about half of mine left when King finished eating.
Sweet cravings appeased, we headed back out to explore more of Elm Street, only to discover that it was raining, or at least thinking about it. The drizzle got a little stronger as we went, though it was certainly not pouring or anything at any point during the trip. We stopped in the 'Brady Sullivan Plaza' (which used to be the 'Hampshire Plaza Mall' but they seem to have changed the name) to try looking around there. However, we discovered that it's a half-empty mall-ish place with no public bathrooms. (How odd, no public bathrooms.) There's a Post Office location there, but nothing that really seemed to be of interest to us, so we headed back out to the street. Glancing about, I realzied we weren't far from the library, so I suggested trekking over there. King agreed that the library sounded like a great idea.
The Manchester Public Library isn't on Elm Street, it's on Pine Street, but that's only a couple blocks east. A couple blocks isn't far, and the library is a place I'm familiar with anyhow, so getting there wasn't a problem. I called Mom to let her know of the minor change in plans--from 'explore Elm St' to 'visit library'--and she said 'OK, that sounds good... text me the library's address'. This confused me for a moment--I had no idea what the library's address was, I've never mailed them anything. I wasn't sure how the address would help her, either; it isn't like she has a GPS, or operates off street-names like Patch.
The trip up the couple blocks to the library involved 4 street crossings, since we were on the wrong side of Elm, and then the wrong side of Concord St. I think the rain and his hood were making it hard for King to see, because it took a while for him to recognize the library after I started pointing out to him. I didn't think he was seeing it when I first pointed it out, so I asked him what colour the doors were. He started guessing. "Red?" "Green?" "White?" Once we were on the way up the path through the park that let out right at the crosswalk which lead to the bottom of the library's granite steps, he could finally see where we were headed, and at last correctly identified that the library doors were "Brown." The doors are a natural-wood brown and quite heavy, probably soild oak. The building itself is a lovely old structure, constructed of white stone, which I think is marble. It's a magestic building, in a quiet sort of way, very well suited to a library. Brass handrails line the granite steps, one on each side and another in the middle. The tops of the rails are smooth, polished by hundreds of hands. Of course, the rain and the gloom of late afternoon in winter stole away a good part of their shine. We hurried up the stairs to get out of the rain and away from the ciggarette smoke. Fortunately, someone else was at the doors at about the same time we were, and helped push them open--they're quite heavy and harder to pull than to push, which oddly enough makes getting into the library more difficult than getting out, at least as far as the doors are concerned.
We went up to the desk and asked for the address of the library, which I quickly texted to mom, then went to go look at books. Well, King was acctually more interested in the audiobooks, but he seemed pleased enough to look through those while I looked through the nearby stacks for a while. We spent most of our time in the YA section, though I brought King over to look at the rest of the audiobooks as well. He opted not to get anything, apparently deciding that he had enough books and audiobooks at home. He sounded more interested in the DVDs available, but as they have only a 7-day loan, I suggested that he get DVDs from his town library, which is closer to him. I did find a few books to check out myself, so once we knew mom was on her way we headed over to check them out, then sat near the lobby and worked on this 'journal' for a bit, until mom called and said she'd gotten confused. King double-checked that his coat was all zipped up while I talked mom through where the library was and picked up my things, then we headed out the door as she passed the park across the street, and met her at the bottom of the stairs.
All in all, today was quite a fun adventure! Yes, as King pointed out, next week will be a trick. We'll be in Nashua instead of Manchester, working around other schedualed events for the day.

Elm Street Explorations

2012-02-09T22:00:00.000-05:00

King's take:
Mom dropped us off to go to Greg's Place. I got a cheeseburger, you got a turkey sub. I had some ginger ale, you had some water.
After Greg's Place, we went to Ben & Jerry's. I had a Brownie Special, you had a hot float. The Brownie Special was good; it was kinda messy too.
"I've heard of Bill of Rights, but Bill of Ice Cream Rights?"
"Sorry about the chocolate beard."
We're going to explore the music shop.
(King wasn't all that interested in 'talking to the journal' today.)

Miaka's take:
Today's plan was to do a little bit of exploring in downtown, since it's a touch warmer than it has been--at least according to Mom. This is not to say it wasn't still chilly, but it wasn't as bitingly cold as it usually tends to be at this time of year. (We've had an oddly mild winter, actually.)
It was very quiet in Greg's Place, being between rushes. We had our pick of any seat in the place. The food there is quite good, and not terribly expensive. It's primarily a bar, though.
Once we'd finished lunch, we headed out for the walk up Elm St (quite a ways, actually) to Ben & Jerry's for ice cream. It was still a bit too cold for ice cream in my opinion, but at least there's an inside to the shop, where you can sit down. They also have something called a 'hot float', which involves dropping a scoop of ice cream into a traditional winter hot drink. I opted for hot chocolate with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream, topped off with whipped cream. King went for the brownie sundae, a big brownie topped with a scoop of Chocolate Therapy ice cream, with whipped cream and hot fudge to top it all off. We both very much enjoyed our treats, though King had more of a mess. (Mine being contained in a cup, it was a touch easier to keep neat.) We both laughed over his 'chocolate beard' (spilled chocolate dribbling down his chin until it almost looked as though he'd grown a dark brown beard). Cleanup didn't take too long, though.
Ice creams finished, we decided to go check out the nearby music shop for a little while, to explore some and kill a little extra time.
We mostly looked at songbooks in the music shop. Pick one up, open it, and try to sing whatever songs were in it, when we'd grabbed one that actually had a vocal part (there were at least a few that contained the scores to games or movies that don't have sung music, or not much). King can't really read the music, so he was silly if I didn't set the tune for him first. Once he had my voice to follow, though, we sang a pretty decent two-level melody. Except, of course, when my unprepared voice didn't make quite the right sounds. I would've sung better if I'd thought to warm up first, before trying to launch right into, say, music from Phantom of the Opera.
King eventually opted to go ahead and get the first thing he'd spotted upon walking in--a Harry Potter songbook and recorder set. Dad met us on the street between the ice cream place and the music shop, and we headed home.
Perhaps next week will bring more exploring, perhaps something entirely different. The weather will have a hand in which gets chosen.

February 2nd: Another day at the mall

2012-02-09T21:10:00.000-05:00

King's Take:
Today was good.
We took the Manchester bus to get to the Mall of New Hampshire, then went to Best Buy to get a music CD. We got a Beatles CD of all their greatest hits.
We went to look for something for Mom, but I don't know. Miaka what were we looking for again? I'm not sure what it was.
Then we went to American Greetings to get a Valentine's card. Then we went to Bertucci's and got a Ultimate Bertucci pizza.
We looked for hats at Olympic Sports. But the hats were 20 or 30 or 10 dollars, which were too expensive for us, so we decided to do it later.
We're going to get a five-layer chocolate cake for dessert and then go home.
I'm sorry that we can't go to your apartment this time. Maybe next week.
We will box up leftovers and share a five-layer chocolate cake for dessert.

Miaka's take:
Woah, I totally forgot to write this up on Thursday when I was supposed to. *wince* I got distracted, sorry.
Mom dropped us off at the place where the buses all come, just before one of the buses that stops by the mall (three routes include a stop at the mall) was due to take off. We hurried a little, though it turned out we didn't really need to, we were in plenty of time for the bus (I think we were looking at a faster clock). The bus fare is $1.50 each direction, and is of course per-person. With a little encouragement, and using my hand as a table, King pulled out 3 one-dollar bills, enough for two fares. Of course, these had to go into the fare box.
The fare box 'eats' dollars the same way your average soda machine does, but of course this part is pointed at the side where the door is, making it harder to reach if you're not standing on that side of it. Not a problem, generally, but this bus was designed to carry more wheelchairs than a normal bus can (not that I have any idea how a wheelchair-bound person is supposed to stick a dollar in the machine that's up next to the driver). The particular setup of this bus, with the location of the fare box, a couple half-wall partition-thingies (no idea what those are called, sorry) made it very difficult to access the dollar feed part of the fare box. If King had all quarters, we would've had no problem, as the coin-drop part was easier to reach. We had to deal with what we had, though, so dollars it was. Now, he has no trouble at all dealing with a soda machine, so it wasn't the feeder itself that was the issue. (He also had no trouble with the same feeder on a different bus later on.) It was all the angle. It's a lot harder to feed a dollar into the machine when you're standing on the side of it, than it is when you're standing directly in front of the feeder. Attempting to get him to step into the 'in front of it' position wasn't working, and the partition kept me from getting to an angle where I could show him what I wanted him to do (he didn't seem to understand my directions to 'step up in front of it... no, that way, around the side'). I ended up reaching around him to get the bills started into the feeder, once he got them in close to the right spot. (Those dollar-feeder things are finicky at the best of times.)
Once we dealt with the fare box, finding a seat was actually pretty easy, and we spent the roughly half-hour ride looking out the window and talking. Every so often I would ask him what he saw out the window--he doesn't interpret the world the same way Archi or I do, so he tends to notice different things. It was almost a game, asking what he saw and then looking to find what he was reading off. (King reads signs and always has. These days he says something about the sign right away, while there's still a chance for someone else to read the same sign; quite the improvement over a time when he was little, when Mom remembers spending weeks trying to figure out what sign said 'No Trucks' after he asked about it.)
Once the bus dropped us at the mall, we headed straight for Best Buy to look at the CDs. King and I have (I think) very different tastes in music, so I don't think I was really much help. He ended up choosing a Beatles CD, as he mentioned. I did glance at the CDs myself, but I already knew I was unlikely to find anything to my taste.
CD in hand, we went over to the cell phone kiosk section of the store to do a little research for Mom. There were a number of blue-shirted employees there, so we got the attention of one of them and asked about a Bluetooth headset that didn't go in the ear. He was able to show us one immediately, and I took a picture of it with my phone (King does not have a cell phone of his own yet) and sent it off to Mom with the info. We thanked the employee for his help and headed out to the cash register to buy the CD.
Our next stop was a greeting-card store about halfway across the mall or so. I had mentioned to King that Valentines is coming up, and he decided that, yes, it would be a good idea to get a card for a close female friend of his. (She isn't his girlfriend, just a girl who is a friend.) We looked at perhaps 10 cards or so, and he chose an appropriate (and very cute!) card. I made sure he had the right envelope to put the card in, and we checked out.
Next stop: sport shop. King has taken up snowshoeing, and Mom wanted us to look for a hat and a 'turtle fur'. We found both hats and 'turtle furs' (though not the Turtle Fur brand), but we ended up not getting any. The good hats were around $30 and they didn't have any bright-yellow turtle furs. Turtle fur looks like good practice for someone (me) starting out with sewing, so I figure if I go buy some nice bright-yellow polar-fleece, I cane make one for him, and it'll be all the more warm and special for being handmade.
At that point we decided that both of us were getting hungry, so lunchtime was in order. Bertucci's wasn't busy at all, since it was between the average lunch and dinner hours, though late enough that we were restricted to the dinner menu. I think King's comments cover that part pretty well.
Once we finished eating and paid the bill, we realized that it was after 5pm, getting close on the last run of buses back to downtown. We hurried back to the food court, near where the buses drop off and pick up. It didn't take as long as I'd thought to get there, so we grabbed a table and I pulled out my bus schedule to check it again, wanting to make sure we didn't miss the last bus. I've had the unfortunate luck of getting stuck at that mall before due to missing the last bus of the day. Checking revealed that we still had a good bit of time before the very last bus of the day would come by, so, at King's request, we went to look in the Disney Store.
'Looking' at the Disney store turned out to consist of walking past the first two or three displays to stand in roughly the middle of the front section of the store, gazing around at the things on the walls and shelves for a few minutes. I tugged King over to one wall for a moment to get a closer look at a display of dolls; from halfway across the room it was hard to tell if a particular doll was Rapunzel or Aurora (upon closer inspection it was Aurora). Then we went to look at a display of Cars things, though it was all stuff for a boy of about five to ten years. I told King, "I think it's a little small for you." After that, he was thanking me for letting him look and suggesting we go catch the bus.
We made it onto the 5:30 bus, the first of the last round of buses. Paying the bus fare was a lot easier this time, partly because we were lined up correctly for the dollar feeder from the start, and partly because we dropped $2 in quarters into the change-eating part, which went a lot faster. The change collector is rather more forgiving, being somewhat funnel-like. Once again, there were plenty of seats, and we spent the ride watching out the window and chatting about all manner of things. When the bus let us off at Veteran's park, we made our way across the street to wait in front of the Raddisson for Dad to pick us up, only we forgot to tell him exactly where we'd be. We waited out near the street, and he thought we'd gone into the lobby (where we would have been out of the cold). We were, however, able to connect readily enough, and thus ended the adventure comfortably.

Mall trip 1/26/12

2012-01-31T02:22:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We found some shirts and pants that would fit me. It was fun. We tried to find some striped socks but they were too expensive. All the yellow shirts were really big.
Then we tried Best Buy to find a CD or DVD. They didn't have much anime. We looked at the games. We were going to get Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy, but the lady at the counter said it was $30, so we decided to try GameStop.
The game I got at GameStop was Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. I spent my $20 on it.
Then we went to Ruby Tuesday to order our lunch and drinks. Patch is going to pick us up after we finish our lunch. I'm very excited about getting endless french fries. I'm sorry they don't have honey for you. Miaka asked for honey but they didn't have any. I asked for a bacon cheeseburger.

Miaka's take:
Sorry this has taken so long to get up, I had a very bad cold that I'm just getting over.
Our plan for today was to hit the mall, as King needs some new clothes. Mom said his pants weren't fitting all that well anymore, so she asked me to help him find at least one new outfit. My cold had us getting a bit of a later start than originally planned, and not taking the bus--I was pretty miserable.
We went to Sears first, to look for pants and a shirt for King. It took us a bit to find the right spot to look for the kind of pants that would work for him, but once we found it, it didn't take long to locate a few pairs that looked quite serviceable and happened to be on sale. Once we'd picked up a good pair of on-sale pants in his approximate size, we went to look for shirts. Bright yellow, because it's his favorite colour. Unfortunately most of the bright yellow shirts we could find were size large, x-large, or xx-large. King wears about size medium. We did find one bright yellow shirt in size medium (it had a silly face on it), but it was rather expensive, so we decided to go with a plain bright-yellow shirt that was only $8 but was a size large. I figured that if it didn't fit, Mom could return it and get a different size.
Once we had pants and a shirt, we went to look at socks, but they were all about $12 or more per pack, so we decided not to get any. Off to the checkout, and then across the entire length of the mall to Best Buy, so that King could get a CD or DVD or something. He was talking about possibly picking up a One Piece DVD. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the DVD section in Best Buy, we discovered that the anime section has been reduced to part of one case-thingy. Very sad, there is almost no anime at all. And of course there was no One Piece in what little anime was present on the single section devoted to it. So King went to look at the games. He picked up a two-game box set, of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, which the shelf-tag seemed to say was $20, and therefore within his price range for the day. Get up to the counter with it, and we find out it's apparently been put away in the wrong place and is actually $30. King doesn't have $30 for today, only $20, and the cashier was not willing to fix the pricing for us, even after I brought her the price-card it had been sitting in front of, which apparently was actually for a different game. King sort of shook his head and decided to go elsewhere.
So we walked all the way back across the mall to GameStop, and King found a pre-owned Wii game to get, paid for it, and we headed to Ruby Tuesday for lunch. On the way there, I called Patch for a ride back home, since we needed to give him time to get back to Manchester.
Lunch at Ruby Tuesday was good. King enjoyed his bacon cheeseburger, and I had some very yummy chicken soup, which did have me feeling a bit better. We talked about a variety of things, including what series to start watching after we finish all of the second season of Rayearth. Patch called just as we were getting ready to pay the bill, to let us know that he'd arrived at the mall.
Because of my cold, Patch dropped me at my place and took King home, rather than having King hang out and watch more Rayearth. Next week we'll probably finish off the last disc.

Movie Day: Beauty and the Beast 3D

2012-01-21T01:25:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We're doing this on paper because the computer is not working. I can't believe this. I don't get it.
We saw Beauty and the Beast in 3D.
We went into the theater and got some 3D glasses. I used the gift card for tickets. We got a small popcorn to share, and then we headed into theater 14. We watched previews. There was the Arietty preview, that Miaka wants to see. There was the Disney Pixar Brave movie. I think that would be a nice movie to see.
It took a while for the lights to go out. Miaka said the lights reflected off the 3D glasses and made it hard to see.
First there was a piece called Tangled Ever After.
Then they started the actual movie. Belle went to get a new book. Her father was trying to make his invention work and then headed off to the fair. Until the horse, Phillipe, went the wrong way, and he wasn't at the fair, he was at the Beast's castle. The Beast was not happy and locked him up in the tower until Belle came to rescue him.
Gaston wanted to marry Belle, but she refused.
Gaston did not give up.
Belle went to the castle to rescue her father. Then she met the Beast. She said "What have you done to my father?" and she offered to take her father's place.
The Beast gave her a room. He wanted Belle to come to dinner, but she said "I'm not hungry." She wouldn't come out and the Beast lost his temper.
Then there was the Be Our Guest song. I think that was a great song.
Then Belle went to the west wing on purpose, even though the Beast had told her not to. She lifted up the glass case for the red rose and the Beast got angry and told her to leave. She ran away and then she was going to be eaten by wolves, until the Beast saved her life.
Then Belle was trying to treat the Beast's wound, but he said "Ow!" and wouldn't stay still. Belle said "this may sting a little."
Belle's father Maurice wanted to rescue Belle, but no one would help him. So he set off on his own.
Gaston's plan didn't work.
Best part: When the Beast and Belle got married and all the servants in the castle were human again.
It was a great movie. Except for when the Beast got stabbed in the back by Gaston. Gaston fell off the tower and the mountain.

(We got the computer to cooperate again about then, so we did a video interview.)
Video link: (will be added when I can get YouTube to cooperate and let me upload the video.)

Miaka's take:
I'd been looking forward to seeing this movie since I noticed that it was being re-released, this time in 3D. I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast the first time it was in the theater, some 20 years ago or so, and I thought it would be a good way to see what a 3D movie might be like. Considering the 3DS tends to give me a headache pretty fast, I was a touch iffy on the whole concept, so trying it with a movie I already knew I liked was important.
Fortunately for me, the whole experience was quite smooth. Well, except for a minor hiccup with the tickets. I'd forgotten that 3D movies cost more to see in the theater. (I presume the extra cost is there to cover the glasses and equipment.) King had a gift card to be used for the purchase of the tickets, but it was $6 short of the cost of 2 tickets for a 3D movie. Fortunately, he was able to pull out 6 $1 bills, with a little coaching. Once we had the tickets, he headed over to the concessions counter and asked for a large popcorn. I assured him that a small popcorn would be more than enough for the two of us. "A large is for the whole family to share. There's only two of us, so a small is plenty."
He was loosing stray kernels of popcorn, like a flower-girl scattering petals, the whole way to our seats in the theater. We were the first to arrive for the showing, so we had our pick of seats. King chose a row in approximately the middle of the theater, a little to the forward side. The theater we go to has stadium-style seating, and King's selected seats were perhaps five or six steps up from the entry floor level. I poked at him to go sit in the very center of the row. My reasoning for this is twofold: it provides optimal viewing position, and it leaves plenty of end space in both directions for others to grab seats in the same row, if needed. This showing, it wasn't needed. I think about 3 or 4 other people came, though I suppose that's fairly expected for a noontime showing on a Thursday that's not during vacation week. It is a kids movie, after all.
King pretty well covered the events leading up to the movie--yes, I fussed a bit about the lights still being on, because they reflected on the glasses (which I kept trying on) and made it hard to see things through the glasses. Also they played the trailer for the latest Ghibli film, which I am already making plans to see with friends when it comes out next month, as we did with Ponyo.
The movie started off with a short about Tangled. Personally, I thought it was rather silly and was looking forward to it being over. Then again, I really only enjoyed Tangled because Flynn reminded me (and my friends watching with me) of one of Archi's characters.
Once the movie actually started, it was awesome! The 3D worked quite well, actually, even with the stained-glass set that starts off the story with the tale of how the Beast came to be. I have, of course, had bits of the songs stuck in my head all day. Also I could not quite resist singing along a little in the theater. The movie was just as excellent as I remembered it, and the 3D had been very carefully applied with a subtle hand. Backgrounds came to life even more, and it was like looking into a diorama (the edges of the screen seem quite sharp as they interrupt the picture). I was very pleased to see that they hadn't really changed anything to make the 3D more apparent, simply added it where it fit, seamlessly. I don't really know enough about the details of how animation or 3D effects work to go on about it much more. Well, that and I wasn't really paying attention to the 3D as much as to the movie itself.
After the movie, Archi picked us up and we headed back to my place. In the car, King and I discussed doing the video review and what to have for lunch. He decided he'd rather have a ham and cheese sandwich than wait around an hour for pizza to arrive. Upon our arrival at my place, King enjoyed his ham and cheese sandwich, and a chocolate cupcake for desert (I made cupcakes Wednesday night because the house was cold). Lunch eaten, we went to the living room to try and create the video review. That was when I discovered that my computer didn't want to work with me today. We did a written review for a bit, and then suddenly the computer started cooperating again and we were able to craft a video review. Once that was completed, we put in the Rayearth dvd to watch until it was time for King to head home.
For some reason it takes forever to upload one of the video reviews to YouTube...

Movie Day: The Adventures of Tintin

2012-01-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We saw The Adventures of Tintin!
I think it was good.
The captain, Captain Haddock, was trying to get his ship back.
The cat came in the window and the dog chased it. They broke a lot of things, and they knocked over the ship. That made Tintin very angry at Snowy.
Favorite part: My favorite part is when Tintin found the scroll for the ship and the two policemen arrested the bad guy.
Funniest part: Well, when the dog hung onto the falcon, and the captain had to fight for his ship.
"Miaka, you liked it when they were sword-fighting?"
"I adore sword-fights!"
Only a true Haddock can solve the riddle!
The secret weapon, the Milanese Nightingale! The singer gave the captain a headache and he had to cover his ears. Her voice shattered the glass! Then the falcon stole the ship. I hate that falcon.
Tintin got it back, but if he didn't let it go the captain and Snowy would go overboard and die.
(At this point, lunch arrived and King lost interest in having me write down his thoughts.)

Miaka's take:
Right across the top of the movie posters, it says that both Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson worked on it. I may not know much about movies, but I know those names, so I knew this would be impressive. The Adventures of Tintin definitely met my expectations! A wonderful, rollicking and hilarious comedy adventure.
We made good time on the trip from my place to the movie theater, in spite of the snow still coming down, the roads we took that hadn't been plowed yet, and Patch's phone GPS attempting to confuse us--it didn't like my route that skips several traffic lights. Patch liked the route, though the roads were often not plowed as they're not considered important enough to bother with, apparently. We'd left my place at noon on the dot, and still arrived at the theater in time to buy our tickets for the 12:15 showing and head in to grab seats just as the last of the previews was playing. Patch was kind enough to volunteer for a snack run, so King had popcorn and a drink--water, because his throat is still bothering him.
The movie itself was truly excellent; my only regret is that my husband didn't get to see it too. The bumbling police officers are a silly little treat, and there is all manner of adventure! Sword-fights, gunfights, grand chase scenes, things that explode; pretty much all anyone could want from a story of adventure. Including a 'sword-fight' between giant cranes!
Bits and pieces of Tintin's character reminded me of Kudou Shinichi from Meitantei Conan (Detective Conan/Case Closed), one of my very favorite characters. As mentioned above, I adore watching sword-fights on screen, not that I can really explain why. Chase scenes are also wonderfully exciting, somehow even more so when they include the occasional random bit, such as the tank caught inside a building, which ends up chasing Tintin all the way to the docks, with a part of it looking almost reminiscent of the City Escape level in Sonic, where the hero is running from a big ol' truck. This will get overly wordy rather quickly if I keep going on about bits I particularly liked. It's a good movie, go see it.
By the time the movie let out, the snow had stopped falling, though the plows still had a good bit of work to do. It being about two or so in the afternoon, we were all getting a bit hungry, so off we went to Blake's for a late lunch. (Patch tagged along today as he had the day off work and was also interested in seeing the movie. He provided transportation.) The way plans worked out, there wasn't any real chance to record King's take on the movie with anything other than words on paper, so I set about writing it down (my handwriting being rather swifter and more legible than his) while we waited for our lunches.
Lunch was tasty, and lively with discussion of various topics. King capped it off with a sundae (Archi gave me a coupon yesterday because it had been sitting in his wallet). Moose Tracks and Caramel Caribou ice cream, topped off with hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry (which King let me have, as he doesn't care for cherries).
Mom had granted permission for King to be out and about most of the afternoon, and asked only that the boys head for home by about 5pm, so King requested a stop at my place to catch another disc of Rayearth. Even skipping both openings and endings, we didn't manage to make it through the whole disc before they had to go. Ah well, we'll finish it next week. I've also noticed that honey water really seems to help his throat; he doesn't cough nearly as much after drinking some.

Mall of New Hampshire

2012-01-05T22:59:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We went to Ruby Tuesday.
We got a microphone from Best Buy.
We went to Ritz Camera.
I didn't want to go to the Disney Store. It was OK but going there would... I don't know.
I remember we're going to Starbucks at three. Or whenever Archi gets here.
The mall is tiring. I am getting tired.
We got a microphone at Best Buy. We tried looking for Christmas CD's, but they were sold out. Maybe next year.
We are wandering the mall, but I didn't see anything I wanted to look at.
We will go to Starbucks when Archi gets here. Then we will go to Miaka's place to watch Rayearth season 2. That is our list for today.
We are going to wander all around the mall and see if we find anything we want to look at.
(Later, while letting the ending and opening play between episodes of Rayearth)
We went to Ruby Tuesday. I got a burger and you {Miaka} got salad and we both got Sprites.
We went to Starbucks and I got a double chocolate brownie. It was yummy.
We went to Miaka's place to watch Rayearth season 2.
We went to Ritz camera and looked at the cameras.

Miaka's take:
Wow, King is good with product-placement for stuff he's interested in or excited about. Er, sorry, that's a bit off topic.
Today we went to the mall. Originally, the plan was to take the bus from the middle of town, but King seems to have a low-level cold (sneezing and coughs) so Mom wasn't sure she wanted him to ride the bus. Instead, she dropped us off at Ruby Tuesday. The place was pretty empty, the lunch rush over since it was nearly one in the afternoon, so we were seated right away and got our lunch quickly. While we ate, we talked over the things we needed and wanted to do in the mall today. Item number one on the agenda was to go to Best Buy and pick up a microphone that could be connected to my computer, so that the next time we do a movie review we don't have the issue with the sound being too quiet. Last week's review was that way because the microphone built into my laptop was too far from our mouths and didn't pick up our voices very well.
Lunch was good, and after we paid--I showed King a trick for figuring out the tip, but made him do the actual calculation--we headed out to the other end of the mall to run our errands.
Picking up the microphone was a snap, because Archi and I wandered around the mall a bit on Tuesday and I came in to see if they had anything that would work, and how much it would cost me, so I knew exactly where it was. We went right to the aisle and found that there was one left waiting for us. King had a bit of trouble getting off the hook, though. "It's stuck..." Looked to me like it had gotten caught on the price tag, and I jiggled it a little to get it off--King was not quite at the right angle. He decided that he wanted me to carry it, so I stuck it on top of the coats I was carrying and we headed off to run the next errand.
Mom had mentioned seeing Christmas music CD's for $5 at Best Buy, so we went over to the music department to look. When a quick check failed to reveal any Christmas CD's, we found a store employee and King asked. "Try the front of the store," we were told, so off we went to the front of the store. No Christmas music here. Slowly, we worked our way through the whole music department, checking each aisle. No dice. Or Christmas music, for that matter.
"I guess they must be sold out," I told King.
"They don't have any?"
"It doesn't look like it. Maybe next year."
King agreed that Mom might be disappointed, but there wasn't really anything we could do about it. If they were sold out, they were sold out, and we were out of luck. (Mom had seen the display at a different Best Buy.)
The next item on our list was to 'wander the mall'. I had to remind King that we needed to pay for the microphone first. I think the fact that there wasn't a line at the cash register confused him, as he stood in the walkway for a moment until I told him to look at the lit-up number sign some 10 feet in front of us and a little to our right. "Oh," he said, immediately walking over to the counter. "Um, we'd like to buy this," he told the cashier, whom he hadn't been able to see a moment before due to the positioning of a shelf. I set the microphone on the counter and went digging in my purse to find the rewards card, and then the gift-card I knew I had. We split the cost of the microphone, as it's going to be useful for both of us. There was a bit of a delay with locating the right denomination of bill, and then with trying to get the change back in his wallet. Sometime when we're not in the middle of trying to make a purchase, I will show him the trick of sorting money to make things easier to find.
Archi to change the time he planned on picking us up.
We wandered back out of the camera shop about the same time as I finished talking to Archi, and decided to meander on down the same hallway and see if anything else caught our eye. King decided that the soft chairs clustered into a sort of 'rest station' looked good, so we sat down for a few minutes. I pulled out the journal and we went over the events of the day and what else we had planned. Then we decided to go check out Game Stop, a little farther down the hall, just to see what games they had. Mom had told us she'd rather King not buy any more new games until he'd at least played all of the ones he got for Christmas.
We were looking at pre-owned Wii games when Archi called to ask which door he needed to meet us at. Arranging for him to pick us up at the same door we'd originally entered by, I set stuff down for a moment to help King into his coat and to put my own on. It's been getting cold lately, though it really ought to have gotten this cold at least a couple weeks ago.
Meeting up with Archi was no problem, and once in the car we headed for the nearby Starbucks, to get a snack for King and a drink for Archi and I. Because King wanted a snack, we decided we'd better go inside. Considering the long line at the drive-thru, this was probably the faster choice anyhow. King selected a brownie, Archi a hot chocolate, and I decided on a chai. I had to remind King to talk to the cashier, not the display case, but everything went smoothly. Archi and I were rather impressed with the ability to scan a card from the Starbucks app, instead of having to present the card. Snack and drinks in hand, we headed home.
As soon as we were in the door, King made a beeline for the chair in front of the TV (my living room isn't big enough for a couch) and dug into his brownie almost as soon as he was seated. He was mostly patient while I got the DVD in for him, and then located the TV remote so I could tell the TV to listen to the DVD player instead of a gaming console.
We had enough time to watch all of one disc and part of the first episode on the next disc before Dad came to pick King up. This series is not likely to last more than another week or two, at this rate. I rather wish I could figure out what's so special about watching stuff at my place that he could just as easily watch at his own house. His cough started bothering him partway through the first disc, so I made him some honey-water, which seemed to settle the cough pretty well.

Movie Day: Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked

2011-12-30T09:10:00.000-05:00

King's take:
We saw Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked.
I think it was good except for the volcano part. The volcano was about to erupt.
No one was helping. Only Brittany and Alvin were trying to build a shelter.
Simon got bit by a spider which made him think he was a French guy Simòn.
Zoe was obsessed with the treasure and caught Jeanette by a rope and wanted to get more treasures.
My favorite scene was when the Chipmunks and the Chipettes helped build a raft. Simon and Jeanette were missing and not on the raft.
(The rest of the review is video-recorded, though the sound is actually very soft, as my computer's basic mic was simply too far away to catch as much sound as I would have liked.)
Video Review

Miaka's take:
Today we went to see a movie King chose, Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked, which is the latest movie in that series. I must honestly admit that I was not really looking forward to this movie. The difference in ages between King and myself means that I'm old enough to remember the Saturday-morning cartoon Alvin and the Chipmunks, while he is not. I don't really care for the whole live-action and CG thing, and I tend to appreciate Alvin & co better in small doses. King wanted to see it though, so we went. It was actually better than I expected, though I must admit I wasn't expecting much.
We arrived at the theater in plenty of time for the show, planning to go to the 12:10pm showing. Upon reaching the front of the ticket line, however, we were told that there were only 3 tickets left for that show, and the cashier recommended we attended the 12:20 showing instead. King decided he was fine with that and bought the tickets, after which we headed over to the concessions counter to pick up popcorn and drinks. Once we had our goodies, I decided to go sit at a table for a moment while I sorted myself out again and gave my husband at heads-up that we were attending a later show. Of course, I then decided while waiting for him to pick up the phone that we really ought to be in line... so we went up to enter the theater proper while I was on the phone and juggling snacks, drinks, and purse. Fortunately, nothing got spilled and everyone was willing to be patient with us for a moment while we found our tickets and then our way.
Once in the actual theater, it took a bit to find seats, and we ended up in the second row, the seats just behind the wheelchair-parking section (meaning there wasn't anyone in front of us). We settled in and took off our jackets, careful not to take up more space than we needed, as the show was nearly if not entirely sold-out. I don't think I've been in a theater that full for quite some time, but I suppose that's to be expected with a kids' movie matinee during school vacation.
The movie, as I mentioned before, was better than I had thought it would be. I found it rather amusing to watch Simon and Alvin effectively swap personalities. However, I still think I liked them better as cartoons.
After the movie, Archi picked us up and we headed back to my place, chattering the whole way. I think we may have confused Archi a bit, since he hadn't seen any of the movies, and like me, was familiar only with the cartoon from when we were little, back in the 1980s.
At home, we ordered pizza and then wrote up part of the review, then recorded most of it to put on YouTube. King was initially having trouble deciding if he wanted to do a video review or just write it all down, so we ended up with a little of both. With the review done and lunch eaten, I set him up in front of the TV so he could watch another disc of Magic Knight Rayearth season 2, as he's been clamoring for each week. I made sure everything was working well with the DVD player, then went to another part of the room to work on a sewing project for a bit. He got to watch one full disc before it was time for Dad to pick him up and take him home. I think he had fun. He certainly seemed to enjoy the movie. Let's see what next week brings!

Christmas Cookies!

2011-12-23T16:06:00.000-05:00

First off, let me apologize for the delay. Yes, this ought to have gone up yesterday, I know, but I didn't get home at all until late, and then I fell into bed almost as soon as I'd returned home. This morning I was distracted by life in general, but here at last is the record of adventures for yesterday, December the twenty-second.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

King's take:
We made cookies today.
We made cookies and we made cake.
We got all the ingredients first. Then we got the mixer to mix up the cookie dough. We mixed the cookie dough, it was brown. The cookie dough was gingerbread cookie dough. It needed to chill for one hour.
While the cookie dough was chilling, we baked a cake for Baby Jesus. Vanilla cake, in a Bundt pan.
We put the cake in the oven and then we made some chocolate chip cookies for Patch.
We mixed up the dough for chocolate chip cookies and then we added the chocolate chips. We added the whole bag! We stirred it up to mix in the chips. They didn't mix in very well. We had added too many chips! We said "oh well, extra chocolate".
We scooped dough onto a baking sheet. We put 12 on each sheet. Then we put them in the oven.
They cookied 8-10 minutes.
That was about the point I got tired of cooking.
I'm sorry I was tired of cooking.
I'm going to play Bakugan on the Wii for a break.

My take:
Today, the plan is to bake cookies for Christmas! Mom also asked if we could bake the birthday cake for Baby Jesus (a tradition in my family, since everyone else gets a birthday cake).
I had e-mailed Mom a recipie for gingerbread cookies, which I planned on making with King today, and she had all the ingredients (except butter and eggs) out on the island in the kitchen. We got started pretty much right away. I asked King to read off the directions and how much of each ingredient we needed as I did the measuring. Once I had a measured portion, I'd give him the spoon or cup and it would be his job to dump it into the bowl. Putting the cookies together didn't take all that much effort by itself, at least for the first few steps. Of course, we got everything measured out for the second step and then I realized I'd put things in the wrong bowl, as it needed to be mixed with an electric mixer, and Mom only has a stand mixer. (I am the opposite, I have only a hand mixer, and thus don't really have a clear idea how to use a stand mixer.) Well, I dumped everything into the correct bowl for the stand mixer and set it going, King reading directions to me from his seat at the island while I worked. I am not exactly sure why the stand mixer confused me, but it did.
We managed to get the cookies put together, though a lot of the work was actually just me standing in front of the mixer while talking to King, or singing along with the Christmas music on the CD we'd put in. Once the dough was mixed up, it needed to chill. I asked Patch to come in and help with the cling wrap, because it's tricky and my hands were sticky with dough. Once the dough was in the fridge to chill for an hour (or so), we debated what to do while we waited.
Mom had asked that we also bake the cake, and had the cake mix and Bundt pan all set out and ready to go. Patch asked us to make chocolate chip cookies (apparently he doesn't care for gingerbread?). I told Patch we'd make his cookies if he found the recipie and got everything together for us, then we set to work getting the cake ready, since that had been a previous request, would take longer to cook, and stuff had already been set out for it.
Cake, of course, needed to be made in the stand mixer bowl, so I washed up the dishes from the first batch of cookie dough by hand. Then we set to work putting the cake together. Considering it was a box-mix, this part was simple, and the cake was in the oven in practically no time.
I asked Patch to wash the mixer bowl again, since we'd need it for the chocolate chip cookies as well, and King read through the recipie while Patch cleaned. Apparently, though, I wasn't quite paying attention to all of the bits of recipie information and quantities of items that we had.
We did this batch of cookies much the same way as the last--I'd measure things and King would pour them in, then I'd operate the stand mixer. Then it was time to add the chocolate chips! I sliced the bag open with scissors, then instructed King to dump it in, not paying attention to how big a bag I had, as opposed to how big a bag the recipie actually called for. Upon dumping the bag of chips into the mix, a couple chips got caught in the cut-off part of the top of the bag, and I told King to eat them to make sure the chcolate chips tasted good...only he didn't see where they were! He tried to eat the plastic for a moment, and I giggled and dumped the chips out of their hidng place to hand them to him. He took it all in stride and assured me that the chips were good.
Excellent. Now to mix them into the dough... and the bowl kept trying to get away from me! King held it steady while I stirred and stirred, wondering why on earth the chips weren't mixing in all that well. I shrugged it off, though, and set about getting things ready to bake the cookies, slightly distracted by the cake for a moment when it came out of the oven, looking very tasty.
With the cake set to cool and cookie sheets done up with parchment paper, I pulled out two spoons to start plopping cookies out on the pans. King counted for me, to make sure we had the same number of cookies on each pan--an even dozen. We laughed over the fact that the cookies weren't holding together all that well, and there were a LOT of chocolate chips. Once they went into the oven, we pulled the gingerbread dough out of the fridge.
I handed King the bag of cookie cutters while I made a mess with the flour preparing the island countertop to roll out cookie dough on. With the cookie dough rolled out flat, King would hand me a cookie cutter and I'd place it. Once I had several placed, King would push them all in. This worked well for a few rounds, and then King decided he was tired of cooking and wanted to go play Wii for a while. Not all that suprising, really, since we'd been at this for nearly 4 hours. So I washed my hands and got him set up with the game he wanted to play, asked him for his take on today's adventure, and then went back to the kitchen to finish up the cookies.
It wasn't untill all the cookies were finished baking and set out to cool that Patch really looked at the chocolate chip cookies and complained that they were more chip than cookie...this turned out to be my fault for not reading the package and the directions closely. We'd dumped a 12 ounce bag of chocolate chips into a recipe that called for 6 ounces of chips. No wonder they hadn't mixed in well! Nothing to be done about it, though, the cookies were already baked.

SEE Museum, Manchester NH

2011-12-15T22:49:00.000-05:00

December 15, 2011

Miaka's take:
Today, our plan was to visit the SEE Museum (SEE stands for Science Enrichment Encounters) in the Millyard. Getting there was a little interesting as the streets are a touch confusing. A one-way street and a missed turn had us looping around, after we'd already realized that you can't get to the upper parking lot from within the lower parking lot. (The Millyard being built on a hill, there are entrances on both the first and second floor of some of the buildings, especially those on that side of the street. Commercial St is at one level and Bedford Rd, the next street up, is about a story above it. Yes, it's a bit of a steep hill. Most if not all of the buildings in the area date back to at least the 1800s.) We got there eventually, though. Proceeding into the building, we took the elevator up to the 4th floor (yes, I know, you're supposed to use the stairs 'cause it's good exercise and all, but I threw out my back earlier this year and it was acting up).
Once we were in, coats off and admission ($8 a person, so $16 for the two of us) paid, the fun began!
There are two floors to the SEE museum. We started out on the upper floor, where the front door was. I think we sort of breezed through most of the upper floor over the course of about half an hour or so, though we spent more time in the 'Seasons of Change' exhibit. Lots of cool and interesting stuff about how our actions now will affect the environment, and the changes we could see by 2075. There were a few notes also about changes we can already see happening, like the rising temperature of the ocean waters off the coasts of New England, which threaten the lobster population, and the decline of ground-freezing in the winter, which affects the flow of sap in the sugar maples, reducing the amount of maple syrup New England can produce.
Most of the other things on the top floor didn't really seem to catch King's eye, so we headed down the stairs to check out the lower floor. Here, we found a few more things to play with, though one large section of the floor was taken up with a non-interactive exhibit: a full historical model of the Millyard built entirely of Legos. 3 million Legos. That must've taken forever to build, but it was really cool! There was water to represent the canals and the river, there were train tracks everywhere, and horses pulling carts and carriages, people working or playing, a parade going down Elm St... VERY elaborate. There were also a few more buildings that exist in different parts of the city lined up against a different wall. I found it very cool to see that one of the buildings modeled was the administration building for the first college I went to (Notre Dame College, which closed in 2002).
King, however, wasn't particularly interested in the Legos, since he couldn't interact with them. We played with a couple musical displays, then wandered along, finding some displays about electricity. These didn't hold our attention for all that long, though, and we wandered away, finding a robotic arm to play with (and gaining a whole new level of respect for the kids that operate the FIRST robots! Attempting to get the arm to pick something up was tough!). After that we passed through a set of hanging blue-and-clear plastic into a mock-up of a submarine...where I quickly discovered that I would not be able to get a good look through the periscope, because I was too tall. Exiting the submarine, we turned a corner through another set of hanging plastic 'water' and found ourselves in a section focused on optical illusions! King was temporarily entranced by a computer which displayed several common optical illusions, while I went a little ways ahead to look in another room, which was labeled as containing more optical illusions. There was a label warning of strobe lights, though, so I decided we'd better skip that room--King doesn't handle strobe lights all that well, I remembered.
We played with a number of optical illusions as we wandered through the exhibit. One of them involved a neon light (a straight bar) that spun when turned on, and allowed you to control a number of variables--pulse frequency, spin speed, and voltage. We messed with that one for a couple minutes, then I managed to do something that made my head hurt, so I decided that was enough and we moved on to another exhibit.
We worked our way through a number of fun things, a fair amount of which spun in some fashion, including a display of gears held to a 'wall' by magnets, which didn't seem to entertain King as much as it did me. Of course, my attempts at lining up the gears to turn lots of them kept disconnecting. While I was attempting to get the gears going, King found a seat--chairs that were connected to a pulley system--the idea being that you pull yourself up! This looked like fun, so I took a seat in the other chair and gave the rope a tug--woah, it's harder than I thought! King couldn't get his chair to move on his own (you'd have to be able to lift 1/7th of your weight to pull up the chair he was sitting in, and 1/7th of and adult'sequivalent to about 6 bags of flour). King appeared to be impressed by this, and we swapped chairs. I pulled the new chair up to the top as well, watching him tug ineffectually on the rope and laugh. Then I let myself down and hopped up to try pulling his chair while he sat there. Again, rather easier said than done. I had to pull while walking away and use my foot to hold the rope down while I adjusted my grip. I took him about three-quarters of the way up, and then he decided that was too high (to be fair, the chairs did not have any kind of belt mechanism, so he was probably nervous about the possibility of falling out). Letting him down was almost as difficult as getting him up, since I really didn't want to just drop him. I managed, though, and we wandered off to explore the next exhibit and give my hands a rest.
Once we'd made our way through all the exhibits on the lower floor, including hitting the bathrooms, we headed back upstairs. Wandering back through the submarine mock-up, I caught sight of something I'd missed the first time through--a 'holograph' image of a shark in one of the portholes! I jumped, startled by all the teeth, and King got a good laugh out of it with me. We stopped at the bottom of the stairs to play with a small exhibit on air currents for a moment before clanking our way back up the metal staircase.
On the entry floor again, we wandered through more of the exhibits, ducked under a wooden wall into a giant kaleidoscope, and explored. There was a section with several brain-teaser type puzzles, though this was apparently more interesting to me than to King. We'd hit all the exhibits except those behind a fence which looked like they were specially geared for younger kids (say about 5 years old or younger), so we decided to take a quick walk through the gift shop, just to see if anything caught our eye. King wanted to get some Oreos, so I asked if he was hungry. His reply boiled down to "No, but I am thirsty," so we hit up a nearby vending machine for a Coke, which we ended up splitting. He got a straw and drank his fill, and then I finished the can since it was a can and we couldn't really carry it around.
After refreshing ourselves, we went back to the exhibit on weather ('Seasons of Change') and poked around for a while. King sat down to play with a computer running a display called 'Boston Underwater' about the changing levels of the water in Boston Harbour and around the city, especially during storms, and I went to the big table to fiddle with 'environmental effects' and see if I could make it tell a kinder story about 2075. I got frustrated a few minutes later when the table seemed to be having trouble accepting my inputs, so I went back to King and discovered that the computer he'd been playing with apparently had a problem. It was giving him an error message, which was frustrating because there was nothing at all which we could do about it with the buttons available.
"I'm sorry," I told him, "I guess it's busted. Shall we go look at something else?"
"Yeah. Why's it busted?"
"I dunno."
"It said I should reload the link." Except there was nothing we could click the link with to reload it, so we went to look at the rest of the exhibit.
After some more time spent exploring the 'Seasons of Change' area, we decided that we'd pretty much done everything we wanted to at the museum and dinner sounded like a good idea, even if it was a bit early. On that note, we called up my husband to ask him to drive us to Jillian's (mostly because I wasn't sure walking would be a good idea with my back acting up and the rain threatening).
While we waited for our ride, we started brainstorming ideas for what we could do next week, coming up with a decent list. Once we got dropped off at Jillian's, we crafted the part of this entry that his King's take on the day, then decided on our top three ideas for next week.
Dinner was delicious, and desert was even better--we got the 'Killer Chocolate Cake', which turned out to be a wonderfully chocolaty creation, two layers of melt-in-your-mouth fudge with a smaller layer of cake in between. It was so deliciously rich that even splitting the one piece we couldn't finish it, but it was so good!
After dinner, Dad picked us up and we went our separate ways home, looking forward to next week's adventure!

King's take:
King liked playing with the robotic arm and the pulleys, but the pulleys were too high.
We went to the SEE museum.
Today was great because we went to the SEE museum. We went to a computer that had flood warnings but it stopped working. It wanted us to reload the link.
We went up the elevator. We paid $20 for admission and we got change back.
We went downstairs. There were Legos downstairs. There were a LOT of Legos! They were built into a college and a lot of other things, like city hall.
We saw a computer that had changing illusions on it. I thought illusions were only mirages! The computer changed different illusions.
We saw some gears and pulleys, a robotic arm. We did see some turtle cages, but they weren't downstairs.
We went back upstairs.
We went to the gift shop and I looked at some Oreos.
I went to the vending machine to get $1 for a Coke. I put a dollar into the vending machine to get a Coke. We asked for a straw because I couldn't drink the Coke without a straw.
We watched something about lobsters and about maple syrup and something about Boston underwater. The Boston underwater computer had a problem. We decided to do something else.
We called Archi to take us to Jillian's.
The car had a mess. You should clean it up sometime. (Miaka note: I have been telling my husband all summer that the car needs to get cleaned out, but it hasn't happened, and at this point probably won't until it starts to get warm again.)
We talked about what we should do next week.
Miaka got startled by a picture of a shark.
We got pizza and Philly Cheesesteak at Jillian's.
We're going to have Killer Chocolate Cake after our dinner is done.
I am going to box up my pizza and save it for lunch tomorrow.
We had a good time today.