Vacationing far from home

 We did it! We left the Pacific Northwest!

Day One: Flying For A Very Long Time. Flight was fine, transit was a struggle, but we finally made it to the hotel in the evening, and sallied out into Midtown Manhattan. 

Day Two: A View, and a Lot of Walking. We ate Bagel #1, went to the Top of the Rock to see the view, and made a loop of St. Patrick's, Grand Central, and the public library. (The public library! And there was an awesome exhibit!) We rounded off the day with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the girls spend a weirdly long time looking at armor.

Day Three: Boats, Immigration, and George Washington. We did a classic tourist trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and then visited the Fraunces Tavern to think about George Washington. (Skipper, who had finished an 800-page biography of George Washington just in time, regaled us with oddball factoids.) We spent the evening in Jersey City with family, and Skipper resolved to start that author's biography of Alexander Hamilton. 

Day Four: The Future, Central Park, and Moving to Chelsea. Duchess and Cook went uptown to tour a college that Duchess is interested in, and Skipper and I went uptown to stand in a really long line to get a really good bagel. This bagel, Bagel #2, was the best of our trip and possibly my life. We met up at Central Park for some wandering, and it turns out that Central Park is very lovely. We went to Chelsea to check into our vacation rental, and spent the evening enjoying having separate rooms with doors. Three days in a single hotel room is a lot. We also bought the Alexander Hamilton biography. 

Day Five: East Village. We ate Bagel #3, visited Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, and a lot of things between, including the Strand Bookstore and a stop to try Bagel #4 (my second favorite of the trip). We ate some kind of delicious stuffed flatbread. 

Day Six: High Line and Then Culture. We spent the morning on the High Line, which is beautiful and incredibly good civic infrastructure. We visited Little Island, which is just fun, and then hustled back uptown to drop the girls off at Hadestown (birthday present for Duchess, who loves Broadway). Cook and I went to MOMA, where we discovered a mutual fondness for the kind of art that involves big blocks of color. We wrapped up the day with ramen.

Day Seven: Thanksgiving, I Guess, and Brooklyn, and a Long Trip Home. It made our plane tickets substantially cheaper to fly home on Thanksgiving day, so we spent one last day in New York before our 8pm flight home.  We ate Bagel #5 (it was okay), crossed the bridge, walked along the Heights and then across the Squibb Bridge to the waterfront, all of which was lovely. We went to a bakery and then made one last long walk back to the luggage storage place to soak up just a little more New York ambiance. And then we came home, to pick up our real life again!

It was a great trip, really dense with experiences and carbohydrates, and if I ever go back to New York City, I will know exactly where to go for my bagels. 

Heading into winter

Updates! We're still here.

This is Skipper's Halloween costume. (She was Shaggy, in a group Scooby-Doo costume with her weirdo friends.)

We did a pseudo-Day of the Dead ofrenda again, and that was lovely.

Dog #11 came back for a few days. Much cuddling ensued, and also a lot of very vigilant monitoring of the neighborhood. (We were thoroughly notified of every person or animal who passed within 200 feet of the front window.)

Skipper wrapped up her ultimate frisbee season. (She plays with some of her gang of weirdo friends.)

That's the news! 

MORE vacationing close to home

We went to Herron Island for the weekend - a weird private island deep in the crevices of Puget Sound. We did a lot of not very much. We read, we watched movies, we played dumb games on our phones (well, I did, at least), we walked around the island, we admired the probably problematically friendly deer, we messed around at the island's park where they have pickleball stuff (we do not actually know how to play pickleball) and a big field full of deer poop, and we paddled about on a flotilla of paddle-things. It was pretty great.

Dogs #10 and #11

 We're done with long-term fostering, but we're keeping the door slightly ajar for very occasional short-term back-up fostering. We have had two dogs pass through, recently. The first was a lovely older gentleman who adores people - but dislikes other dogs on and off the leash and has a mighty desire to kill small animals. He's been in foster/boarding for a looooooong time, and we were asked to give him a break from the boarding kennel. 

The second is a young dog who also adores people, wants to murder small animals, and is unpleasantly leash-reactive to other dogs. Her foster family had an emergency and had to leave town for a few days on a few hours' notice. This girl is the snuggliest dog we've ever hosted, desperate to crawl into everybody's lap and nibble on your ears. 

When I packed up her crate and food so she could be picked up by her foster family, she got really worried, and lay down and moped (not her normal state), clearly alarmed by the prospect of yet another abandonment. (She was super-happy to see her foster people and their dog, though, when they arrived.) 

One of the things I've learned from fostering is that while dogs are resilient - some more than others - they are damaged by abandonment and neglect and that damage doesn't go away. You can help them work around it, you can heal them up a bit, and it fades over time, but it never goes away. I think the kids have learned that, too, - I hope they will never make the mistake of getting a dog without committing to the whole dog and the whole dog's life.

It's fall.

 School has begun! The kids have had seven days of 7th and 11th grade so far. There have been multiple cases of covid in their schools already, but none so close to them that they're considered "exposed." (I did buy some at-home tests, so we're ready.) They were both very exhausted by the first few days of school - spending time with actual humans in person is extremely draining.