Look, Honey - We Have New Neighbors!

I'm ba-ack!!!  Finally!  So sorry I haven't posted in forever - we have been crazy, crazy, crazy busy the last couple of days.  The only times my mom posts is late at night when I'm in bed listening to her computer keys clicking (or sleeping - me sleeping, I mean, not the computer keys), or in the early in the morning, while I am definitely sleeping.  Those are the only available times, anyway.  For the last few days, as you already know, we've been in Washington.  Before that, we had our 'might as well' day.  Check my mom's post from couple of days ago - you'll know what I mean.  And I posted the day before that.  Anyway, we've been busy. :)

But today - no, siree, we are not busy!!  Well, at least not going into D.C.  Actually, Dad and Noah are at the Spy Museum (or they might be driving home now), but the rest of us wanted a break.  Oh, but we are going to visit some of our friends tonight.  I can't wait!!  He and she (I'm not saying names unless I get their permission) got married about 3 years ago, I think, and now they have a 4-week-old baby girl!!  I can't wait to see all three of them; I've met both the adults, but this will be the first time I'll see the baby girl.  (BTW, Dad and Noah just drove up.)  Anyway, what I was going to say in the first place (sometimes I get kind of off track, if you haven't noticed), was that we got to sleep in late this morning - until about 10:30!!  Well, we didn't actually sleep that long, but we didn't have breakfast until than.  Speaking of breakfast, we had pancakes and sausage this morning, thanks to the campground host.  We ate outside, near where the chef was cooking.  Yum!

Sooo.... I got a digital camera!!!!  It's amazing.  It has a pretty good sized screen on the front of the camera, as well as the back.  You turn that front screen on, turn the camera around and take a photo of yourself without cutting your head off (which is what I would normally do).  It's amazing!  It has tons of different features, and fairly user-friendly, too.  I'm so glad I got it.  I bought it the day before we trekked into D.C., and I'm so thankful I went ahead did it.  I got some cool pictures, too.  Here's a few pictures that I like:

This is a pic of the Freedom Statue inside the Capitol.  While we were at the Library of Congress, our tour guide told us that all - or at least most - of the statues sculpted in the 17th and 18th centuries that symbolize a concept - freedom, for example - are female.  The statues of real people were primarily men.  Cool, huh?

This is a pic of "The Apotheosis of Washington", George Washington, that is.  When I took this picture, I was in the Rotunda in the Capitol, looking up into the rounded ceiling.  This picture makes it look like a flat ceiling, but it was dome-like, not flat.  Anyway, the artist of this painting was depicting George Washington rising up into the heavens, in the middle.  Circling that are thirteen young women, symbolizing (what else?) the original thirteen states.  Around the edges of this work of art are six different scenes representing six things - War, Science, Marine, Commerce, Mechanics, and Agriculture.  BTW, it was painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865.  That's your history lesson for the day.

This is where we ate lunch a few days ago.  We met one of our friends there, a person my parents had met in Switzerland, though they live here in the USA.  We had actually first met the couple a few days before that, but the guy (again, not using names without permission) works in that area, at the Capitol, I think, or something like that.  He's really funny.  You see those stickers Mom and Noah have on?  Those let us into the Capitol and into the House of Representatives.  But they weren't in session, so we just sat there for a few minutes, looking around, taking a break, and then we left. :)  Oh, you see the flowers behind them?  I took a close up of one (below) - to me, it looks like a screen saver!!!  The flowers were really pretty.

OK, I need a vote - should I sell Nathan and have $1,491,200 (that measure thing is wrong - it was too high up on the wall - Nathan's only about 5 feet, 4 inches), or should keep him and have a pain in the neck?  Just kidding!!  He's not always a pain in the neck.  Just sometimes, like when he yells at the screen of his iPod Touch when he's playing a game, while I'm trying to blog. :)  (BTW, sorry the picture is sideways - I couldn't turn it.)

Right now we have almost completed seven loads of laundry.  Well, it was seven loads of laundry.  Now it's eight, because several things didn't dry all the way in the dryers, so now they are drying.  And we're in the process of folding and putting everything else away.  Oh, and a deck of cards was left in one of the boys shorts, and most got torn to little pieces and spread over almost everything.  That was fun.  Totaled, it all cost around $25, and a huge chunk of our time today.  Whoopee. :)

One more thing: yesterday morning us kids were sitting down to breakfast, while Mom was sitting in the back of the RV on her laptop or something.  Dad opened up the window and promptly called back to her, "Look, honey - we have new neighbors!"  Living on the road has certainly been a bit, ah, different, shall we say. :)  But I am absolutely loving it!!  God bless y'all with a great weekend and a great day of rest!!

P.S. Wow - I didn't know I have a storm named after me, Mr. Robert!!  Cool.  I looked it up, and I had two hurricanes named after me, too - one was before I was even born!  God must have told them to name if after me. :)  Hmmm...now that I think about, maybe two hurricanes and a storm named after me isn't exactly a good thing. :) But it's still kind of cool - and all three were spelled correctly: N-I-C-O-L-E, without an 'H'.