Short Vacation

Dolphin watch photo

My 50th birthday is in September, and my brothers & sister and our respective spouses always try to get together for a mini-reunion to celebrate a 50th. I have one brother & his wife who will turn 50 in a couple of years, then we will have to make another excuse to meet for the occasional mini-vacations. This year I chose Rockport, Tx., which is a small town outside of Corpus Christi, Tx. We had a good time seeing everyone and getting to play tourist. Dh and I lived close to Rockport early in our marriage, and it was fun to get to go back. We toured the Corpus Christi Aquarium, went on a Dolphin watch boat tour, rode the ferry over to Mustang Island and had a big day at the beach. Some of us went to see the Lexington, a ship that is now a museum, some went to Fulton Mansion, (another museum), some went to visit Goose Island State Park and some got to fish. We also had time to visit in the evenings, and see folks we hadn't seen in a while. We tried several restaurants and now have a couple of favorites for the next time we visit. I really enjoyed it!! :) I even got to crochet a couple of small things during the trip there and back. It appears I am still having problems getting pictures to download to blogger, so I will be ng on adding a couple of vacation/crochet photos.

Movie Marathon

Oldest GS and I had a Movie Marathon last night after he had a big day playing on the lake with friends and family. We watched "The Witches", "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken", and "Never-ending Story". I had to go to bed at about 12:30 this morning in the middle of "Never-Ending Story", I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore!

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I am having problems with blogger not wanting to upload my photos for the last couple of days and all I can seem to get on here are thumbnail photos. Sorry! The topflappen (small photo just above this paragraph) was finally finished this morning.

Gehaekelte Topflappen

!!!Happy Dance!!!! I finally broke my crochet drought! It actually started as a puzzle..... I found this pattern on Ravelry, written only in GERMAN! It appeared that NO English translation was available.....so I did what any detective would do, and set to work trying to solve the problem. First I cut and pasted the text into a free translation website, then copied the very oddly resulting translation to a word document. Then I modified it with this translation of German crochet terms. After that, I found some information on various people's projects that filled in the rest of the gaps. Once I had a semblence of a pattern, I rewrote it for my own ease of "understanding". As a backup, I have a friend at work who's Mother is from Germany, so if my translation failed, I asked if she might mind translating for me. Happily, it appears that I did fairly well on my own! I plan to finish the final "flower outline" row tomorrow. After this I plan to try to "tweek" my pattern to resemble this lovely version of the topflappen. Unfortunately this person lives in Estonia and HER blog appears to be written in..........RUSSIAN! :)

Ideas for 50th birthday

In September, I will be turning the big five oh! My brothers and sister started a tradition when my oldest brother turned 50, in that we would all meet somewhere for a mini vacation to celebrate. Of course we went to a couple and then my husband pooped out on his 50th birthday last year and didn't want to do anything. This year mine is in September, but we will probably try to go during the summer months instead, since I don't know if our oldest gs will still be living with us or not, and I might be having to deal with helping him go to school. I can't really decide where I would like to go, although I have been really thinking about going to the Corpus Christi area, as I would like to take my gs fishing at Rockport, see the Aquarium, take the Battleship tour, and go to Port Aransas on the Ferry. However, I don't know if all siblings could make that trip. I don't want to do anything that would break the bank, either, since we all have various ranges in income. Hmmm. I need to put on my thinking cap!