Saturday, June 14, 2014

Five on Friday, or Saturday!


1)  We hit the Columbia Zoo last Friday!  I missed posting about it last week, but it is worth sharing.  It is a very nice zoo and has a Botanical Gardens attached to it too.  Ginny and I got to feed giraffes.  I looks like the giraffe is kissing Ginny in the pictures above, but he's just hungry!  We also got to see a baby flamingo (the little white  blob by the mom's foot).  And the elephants were really active.  One of them put some straw on his head and then started flapping his ears!  Another one was chewing on a chunk of log like it was a toothpick!  Animals are really neat to watch.


There are some pictures from the Garden.  You have to walk across a bridge over the Saluda River, then take a short tram ride to get from the zoo to the garden.  The garden is really nice, even when your kids are already exhausted from the zoo!


2) I worked on some crafts this week.  (Homeschool is finished so we have had some free time!  Hurray!)  Ginny picked out a pattern and some material for this owl shirt.  I knitted my first shawl.  It's a present for my sister (shhhh...don't tell!)  And I made a storage thingy for my double pointed knitting needles.  Just used one of those fabric crayon holder tutorials but sewed the slots in different widths.  It works pretty well!



3)  This morning we took our bikes out to the Canal Trail.  We've been trying to bike or hike the entire trail.  I don't think the whole trail is more than 10 miles long, but that's still a bit too far for us in one day!  We've biked a couple sections, from park to park, and we've walked part of the downtown section and done the visitor's center.  We only have a tiny section left which we will hopefully complete soon!  After that, we'll head over to the SC side and check out their trails.  On today's ride, a train passed by right next to us and we got to see some lovely old factories!


4)  In book news, we finished book 5 of Harry Potter!  There's a pic of me in my pjs getting ready to start reading one of the last chapters.  It was great!  We are now trying to finish up "The Battle for WondLa", the last book of the WondLa series.  It is a lovely sci-fi adventure from Toni DiTerlizzi.  Jack has read "Space Rocks" by Tom O'Donnell and "Mouseheart" by Lisa Fielder.  Ginny read "Abduction" by Peg Kehret.  I'm reading a short story collection called "The End is Nigh" edited by Hugh Howey.  All good stuff!


5)  I picked up two new puzzle mags this week. The yellow one is "Puzzles & Pleasantries" from The Old Farmer's Almanac.  The puzzles are adapted from old editions of the almanac.  It's filled with riddles and other word games.  It has very different puzzles than you find in most puzzle magazines.  Like this "What is that which is so easily broken that the mere mention of it breaks it?"  The other magazine is one I'd heard was coming out this year from Will Shortz.  I'd been looking for it, but apparently I missed the first issue as this is the second one!  It's filled with your standard type puzzles, but they seem to be just a little bit more challenging.

Well, that's all I've got for this week!  Have a great weekend.  (And the answer, if you want to know, is "silence".)

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