Roses are red, violets are bluish, if it weren't for Christmas, we'd all be jewish...

Tonight we ventured out of our neighborhood down to Old Town Alexandria. Originally we were going to participate in a candlelit holiday tour of Old Town, but as I am still pretty set on exploring Mount Vernon with Martha Washington next week, we decided to just make the tour ourselves. 

On the way home we pass the George Washington memorial before going back into Arlington. Old Town definitely had an old-time feel and we passed a lot of really cool brick houses that would be cool to live in once we are kajillionaires and can afford it.

We had dinner at The Light Horse which basically touted a menu of gourmet comfort foods. I had the most delicious beef loaf and taters, with a tomato gravy. It was glorious. Seriously. Most people would normally shy away from a beef loaf on a menu, and I don't blame them, but I am glad I went for it. Definitely keeping that restaurant on the backburner for future forays into Old Town. 

Just your average evening walk to the local Harris Teeter!

The street ner our apartment is all lit up for Christmas, and it's Snowing! We walked down to the Harris Teeter (local brand new grocery store) to get the fixin's for some enchiladas and give Penny some excercise. Very cold!

Camping indoors with a 42 inch flatscreen and an x-box.

It turns out that even in my unemployment, lack of furniture, lack of funds, lack of hobbies I still can't find time to a) update the blog I just created or b) fix the two posts I DID manage to create that contain grammatical errors (thanks for pointing them out, Mother) and wonky photos. I will try to be better, but I can't promise anything.

We arrived in Virginia! Wooo! The rest of the road trip was fun, we spent about 4 days with Kyle in Nicole in Kentucky and did all sorts of fun things like eating taters and going to Dino World and the Maker's Mark Distillery. But now too much time has passed and I don't feel like going into all the fun details.

I will, however, update you on live in the VA. Basically life in our nice luxury apartment consists of 2 camping chairs (with footrests, nothing but the best!), our 42 inch tv sitting on an overturned plastic storage bin, an air mattress (that actually isn't that bad, I was concerned that when Ryan got out of bed, I would sink to the floor or that during the night he would weigh his side down so much that I would slide over and be stuck in the middle of the bed. Not the case with this air bed). Our stuff is still pretty much strewn all over as we don't have the appropriate receptacles for our items.

The job hunt is on, but as yet has been unsuccessful. Ryan got a pretty promising response from a phone interview he had, so we are thinking good thoughts about that but trying not to get our hopes too up.

In the meantime Ryan and Penny have entered into a power struggle. Immediately outside of our "Veranda" aka "Porch" is some dirt and we would really enjoy for Penny to make that her designated potty area to avoid having to walk all the way out of the complex in the cold only to have her poo on the floor of the parking structure (in front of a person no less, naughty puppy!). She has been resisting. Ryan refuses to give up on her, so on day one of the power struggle he took her out to the spot, which she can access by jumping through the bars on our patio, repeatedly with no success. She pretty much is just holding everything in and had been pretty good about not having accidents on the floor. She finally went #2 out there, and he got so excited that he let her come back in and started playing with her. Unfortunately this caused a tidal wave of urine to come out that she couldn't even control when he tried to pick her up to carry her out.

The struggle continued on to today. She last had used the facilities when we took her to the dog park at approximately 5:30 last night. She continued to defy Ryan all day long, when she finally peed on the dirt as FAR as her leash would possibly go away from the porch at 4:30 PM. Success after nearly 24 hours of probable discomfort!

Stay tuned as the saga continues...

"...And that's why Kevin Bacon was so Successful. Everyone loves Bacon. If it had been Kevin Ham...or Ground Beef..."

Last we left off I was climbing on the Ball of Twine in lovely Cawker City, and I would like to take this time to ponder the reason that in most of these towns housing such amazing and precious attractions, I felt like I may or may not get knifed before snapping my pics and heading on my way. At the BoT there were 2 hoodlums racing around the block housing the BoT playing loud music and being hoodlummy. They clearly hate all things BoT including intrepid pilots who make a quick stop to check it out. I doubt they participated in the Twine-a-Thon the third weekend of August every year.

Moving on. Day 4 was a big day, though did not have many attractions planned, so we were relying on the POI we found along the way. One thing I do love to do is go into old houses and snoop around. So, I was pretty excited when I found a sign for the Harry S. Truman house and olden times jail. I thought yes! A chance to redeem myself from the tragedy that was the closed frontier prison, and I would be able to poked around the homestead of the ??th president. Wrong. We drove deep into the heart of Independence, MO only to find that the Harry S. Truman house was not open and there was a huge fence around it so I couldn't even go peek in the windows. The olden times jail was also closed.




I was determined to make lemonade out of these lemons, so I demanded we go instead to the Pioneer Museum nearby. $10 and 10 minutes of browsing later, we didn't even get to poke real artifacts. The museum focused mostly on the Lewis and Clark trail which unfortunately I already learned about in great length in elementary school. The lady at the front desk touted the real diary excerpts housed in the museum because they had some awesome artifact library. "Real diary excerpts" = "typed up papers printed out not even on old timey looking paper." Total bust.




So now we have wasted 1 hour in Independence, MO, and I do not feel at all like I was "where it all began." as the signage promised me. The day was not a total loss, however. After Independence we went through St. Louis and got to see those cool arch things. (We saw them while driving by, no time for stopping as Independence received our allotted attraction viewing time.)



We were able to squeeze in some time to view the World's Largest Catsub Bottle in nearby Collinsville, IL. Unfortunately, it is not filled with ketchup, but awesome nonetheless.












We rounded out day 4 by crossing into Kentucky and arriving at Kyle and Nicole's house in Fort Knox where we will spend the next 4 days before finishing our trip to DC!