I like to think we might be wishing on the same bright star!

Military separations are hard.

We had it a lot easier than some, to be sure, but it's still pretty lame having to live hundreds of miles away from your spouse for months at a time. I do not envy the spouses who face deployments to areas of conflict, with spotty internet or phone connections, and for way longer than Blake and I have been apart, but we may have to face such a separation at some point.

Blake reported to Naval Justice School (essentially military law school) in Rhode Island at the beginning of August. He stayed in the Navy Gateway Inns & Suites, a hotel on base, in his own suite with a kitchenette, so his accommodations could have been a lot worse.

I stayed home in Virginia. Lots of families do actually move to Rhode Island together, but since we knew it was only for ten weeks, I had a life in DC (hobbies, projects, friends, etc.), and my own apartment with a dog instead of a hotel with none of these things (except maybe the dog), we decided it was best if we lived apart for awhile.

Ultimately, it was right decision. There was still plenty to do to get ready for Japan, and we still got to talk everyday. We even had little dates where we'd would play a game online or cue up the same thing on Netflix and watch together, then call and talk about it.

I spent my time sorting through things at home, running around getting my medical records in order so I could be approved to go to Japan (a hassle I will probably not write about, as there were tears and frustrations and fears I wouldn't be able to get it done in time, but it all worked out), playing with Malcolm, and watching way too much West Wing.

We went to a few end of season doggy day swims at local pools and water parks.

Malcolm loves his sunny spots, even if it means sleeping on the coffee table.

20+ years of playbills and programs from theatrical productions I've seen or participated in, organized chronologically.

I also took a long day trip to visit the Philadelphia temple open house. It was beautiful!

I did spend some good time with friends. For example, Jill, a friend from BYU who I reconnected with in DC - after we both became librarians and before we married our wonderful husbands who also get along swimmingly, and I attended the BYU-West Virginia game at FedEx Field in DC. I'd known about that game for a few years, so I was thrilled to not have moved away before it happened. Malcolm and I made a little day trip of it, and he loved running around their backyard with their kids while Jill and I were gone.

I also had some houseguests. Nicole and Lauren came to visit for a quick weekend from New  York - Nicole and I met while we both lived in DC and Lauren had never been before. The Heisses also spent several days with me, becoming my bookend houseguests, as they were the first we hosted (before Blake lived there) and the last (while Blake was gone). They've met Blake, but, under the circumstances, it's possible they could believe I was just making him up. You can read about their/our adventures here, and I also just realized I have my own hashtag on their blog!

Zoe was unsure about Malcolm for awhile, but they ultimately got along just fine.

Of course I took them to Sugar Shack.

One of my favorite weekends was the one where I drove up to Rhode Island to spend time with Blake. We had hoped to do that more than we did, but time and circumstances didn't work out that way. It was still nice to have a few days to explore Newport and chill with my best friend.

Being impressed into the British Navy during a reenactment happening around Newport

I'd had a Blue Apron trial, so I brought up one of my meals and we got to cook together again.

Toured the inside of The Breakers this time

Wouldn't mind this view at all.

Next week, I'll talk about the two biggest projects of my last few months in DC and I'll finally start talking about Japan! Thank you for your patience!

We escort their men out of Yorktown

One of the many things Blake and I love about Virginia is how much history has happened there. Historical markers are everywhere and it was normal to pass them almost everyday. During our time there, we visited many historical places, both popular (Mount Vernon, monuments, the Library of Congress) and not (President Lincoln's summer cottage, George Mason's home - Gunston Hall).

One important place we had not yet visited was the Historic Triangle in Virginia - Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown, so we made sure to rectify that before we left. I had been to Williamsburg for a library conference last year, but I didn't do much touring around.

In May, I went on a field trip with the fifth grade girls to Colonial Williamsburg. At first, I hesitated, because Blake and I had wanted to go together, but it ultimately became useful as a scouting and planning trip before the family trip. Plus, it's a different experience to go as solo adults than as an chaperone to a passel of ten-year-olds.

In the end, we actually went down twice. For my birthday, we had been given a VIP experience to The Mystery Dinner of Williamsburg. Basic ticket includes dinner and the show, the VIP comes with a mug and extra bribe money when you're trying to interview the actors and solve the crime. It was kind of cheesy, but in a really good way. Blake even got to participate in the show! We got a pet-friendly hotel for the night, so Malcolm came down with us (though not to the dinner). We also found a nice little hike around the area to take him on.

Later in the summer, we made a three day trip of it. We went back to the same pet-friendly hotel, stayed off the interwebs, and enjoyed our last American vacation. We especially enjoyed that everything was, to some degree, dog-friendly, so Malcolm came with us! Sometimes we would have to trade off going into a museum, but it was worth it. Now, I don't recommend road trips in Virginia in late July without air conditioning the car, but at least all our trips to Sonic for beverages were well-justified.

 The first day, we started with Historic Jamestowne. There's a nearby Jamestown Settlement that is a recreation of the original, but Historic Jamestowne is the actual location. We walked around and checked out original foundations of homes and churches and other buildings, as well as the general layout of the place. There was a little museum, which included an exhibit about the recently confirmed cannibalism at Jamestown. Yikes!

Up the road a little was Yorktown Battlefield.  Of course we cued up The Battle of Yorktown from Hamilton to listen to while we did an abbreviated driving tour. We could have spent longer there, but as I mentioned earlier - no A/C.

Lafayette's cannon!

Our second day we spent at the beach. Last year, we discovered First Landing State Park - a quiet, dog-friendly beach, which we like quite a bit. This time, we thought it really cool that an aircraft carrier sailed by on its way to Norfolk. Malcolm really got into swimming (he got increasingly confident every time we've been to that beach) and digging in the sand. We also appreciated the one hour drive back to our hotel, instead of the three hour drive all the way back home.

This photo, taken by Blake in 2015, won Malcolm a free pass to a dog day swim at our local water park in September.

On our final day, we walked around Colonial Williamsburg, which we got into free as a military family! That saved us about $100! They have lots of interesting shops, exhibits, presentations, homes, and more to check out. We traded off with Malcolm going inside the places that interested us most, and managed to see most of it in the one day we had.

Hamilton was here! Or at least this is what it would have looked like.

I feel like Heidi would love working in a place like this. 

It was a lovely little trip. Blake reported for duty about a week later, so it was the perfect way to cap our time in Virginia together.

Summer lovin', had me a blast!

With my last day at work being in June and Blake having liberty from training until August, we enjoyed seven amazing weeks off together this summer. We spent a lot of time at home relaxing, sorting through our stuff, and just hanging out, but we also worked on our DC bucket list - everything we wanted to do before we left, possibly for good. Even though I'd been in DC for ten years and Blake for five, there was still a pretty good list of things remaining, or that we wanted to do again.

At the National Bureau of Printing & Engraving, how tall are you in dollars?

National Bureau of Printing & Engraving. We also went to the National Postal Museum that day apparently did not take any pictures.

Uncle Slam! I didn't know he was doing a #1 sign.  Oops!

For the third year running, I sang the National Anthem for a Potomac Nationals game, the local minor league team. This year, without even auditioning, they offered me Memorial Day, my birthday, or two other dates of less consequence. I chose Memorial Day. That afternoon, they also emailed me and asked if I'd sing "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch. Of course! And then as I was on deck for that, they asked if I was going to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" too. Sure! The links are to my videos from that night.

We only had time for one camping trip this year, to Lake Anna State Park, but we made it worth it, including foil dinner pizzas (Blake's idea).

This is a peppermint Joe-Joe s'more. 

We also tried this with Peeps. It was a lot of sugar.

Malcolm warmed up our bed.

And once the bugs started bugging us, we took our games inside.

The Twilight Tattoo at Fort Myer-Henderson was not what we expected, but in a good way!

I directed the ward roadshow, and Blake happily played our villain.

We ran our sixth mud run, our second Ice Cream Race!

Friends visiting from Pennsylvania were a good excuse to work on our dining bucket list. This time was Good Stuff Eatery. 

We looked at the Sun in the middle of the day.

Found a new dog park for Malcolm

Watched our last DC 4th of July fireworks - The ducks that were swimming by when they started were none too pleased and it was highly amusing to watch them sharply turn, as a big group, and swim toward our shore. "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope."

Refinished a hutch we bought while we were engaged.

Flower Library! We took a morning walk around the monuments to facilitate picking up tickets for going to the top of the Washington Monument at sunset later that night. The evening was beautiful too, but we're not sure where our photos went, so I'll just have to keep those in my heart.

Vintage Game Night at Woodrow Wilson's house! A friend from college, in the floral on the left, and I got to see each other a few times again this summer, and this is one of those times. 

NRA Firearms Museum

I dyed my hair blue! I'd wanted to for a long time, and being semi-retired was the perfect time!

And blue hair is a great excuse for dressing up as Tonks at a Harry Potter and the Cursed Child release party, where I won third place in the costume contest.

And of course we visited the newest panda baby, Bei-Bei, who was enjoying snuggles with his mom.

We managed to hit a lot of new and old favorites. I miss DC a lot, but we did a great job of bidding it farewell.

A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound

Blake and I frequently get comments about how much fun stuff we do. And you know what? They're right. We really do. We live in a really interesting region with more things to do then we'll likely ever accomplish, but that doesn't mean we can't try! We realize we may not live in this area forever, and we don't want to miss it.

We also don't want to run out of money, so we have found ways to do things as inexpensively as possible. Fortunately, many of the attractions in the DC region are free - all the Smithsonian museums (including the zoo), monuments, various historical parks, a number of events and concerts. That covers quite a few of our adventures and dates. Many other things are fairly low cost, like national parks with a $5 per car entry fee.

We are also big fans of coupons and deals. We almost never go out to eat if we don't have some sort of coupon. I even keep some apps on my phone just because certain deals will pop up sometimes. Just this morning, as we were getting ready to go clean the church when I got a notification that McDonald's was offering a free Egg McMuffin because the Capitals (our local professional hockey team) had lead in the first period last night. Sorry oatmeal, but you're just going to have to wait, because McDonald's is on the way to the church. I had to run into the store while Blake went through the drive through so that we could each use the coupon on our apps, but free breakfast is free breakfast! We also use Restaurant.com somewhat regularly, which offers discount gift cards to a variety of restaurants. We even got a Living Social deal for the website to really cut back on that price. I also sign up for emails from our favorite restaurants to get their coupons. I have it filtered to a different folder automatically, so it doesn't clutter up my main inbox.

Because we live in such a touristy area, Groupon and Living Social often feature paid local attractions, like the historical ships we visited a few weeks ago. Because of these, we've seen more off the beaten path places like Lincoln's Cottage and Gunston Hall. We probably wouldn't recommend them to people who have only a week or less in DC, but they've certainly enriched our experience here.

As often as we can, we usher at Ford's Theater, yes the one where Lincoln was assassinated, because you get to watch the show for free if you put in an hour of work before curtain. Done and done. A lot of theaters do that actually, we just happen to have a neat, historical one to work at.

Last year, the local second run movie theater was doing a Kickstarter to help them buy new seats. At a certain reward level, you got three free movie passes as a thank you, so we each backed them for that amount and paid for three dates in advance, in new seats to boot! I actually went up a reward level, so I got the three passes as well as a Date Package - two movie tickets, two drinks, and popcorn to share. Movies are kind of expensive dates, so we don't go to the theater that often. To have four dates already paid for has been great! In fact, we still have two passes each. We did go see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II in theaters this week, because seeing the very first one was our very first date and we've seen the rest of them together in the first run theater, but we went to a matinee and paid less than full price.

We have Amazon Prime (especially to supplement our entertainment since we cut cable last year) and if whatever we are ordering doesn't need to be here in two days, we take advantage of a $1 credit to digital content. Doing that two or three times pays for an at home movie rental date.

To help us remember what dates we've already paid for or are inexpensive and we definitely want to do them, we keep a list on a chalkboard in our kitchen. The list on the right is of walks we want to go on (or have, because they were on this list and we haven't erased them yet). Zoo and slurpees (there is a 7-11 right by the entrance) is probably going to be zoo and hot chocolate (also 7-11) in January after the new cub makes its public debut.

We do pay full price sometimes. Sometimes it's worth it, because of tradition (like Five Guys on General Conference weekend) or the activity is that good (such as Maryland Renaissance Festival - but we chose not to go this year due to time and budget reasons). However, because we've really been great about making and keeping a budget this year and we do wheel and deal our way through so many other things, we know when we can afford it.

We've decided that adventuring is something that is one of our priorities in our marriage, so with a little bit of effort, we make it work with our current budgets of time and money. We do still appreciate a good, lowkey time too, as evidenced by the weekend we are currently having. We did go on a mid-day walk today though, with a stop at Noodles & Co. for lunch with a BOGO coupon we got in the mail. The weather was extremely mild for late November, so we enjoyed sitting on the patio outside with Malcolm before coming home to an afternoon of relaxing or doing homework or other projects. 

So I creep yeah, I just keep it on the down low

I was invited by the fifth grade girls to chaperone their field trip yesterday to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Since the best thing to do after being out of the office/library for two days is to leave again, I was happy to go. Even if I have to keep an eye on five ten-year-olds as they run around a busy museum, it beats catching up on shelving and paperwork.

Now, I don't know if any of the students went home to their families and gushed about cool things they learned, but I sure did. Even though I've been to this museum threes and fours of times, I still found some new things.

In the insect room, a museum employee had three insects he was taking out of jars to let people touch or hold, depending on the insect. At the insistence of my students I held a feinting beetle. It's defense mechanism is to play dead when a predator is nearby, so it played dead on my hand for a couple seconds before it trusted me enough to start crawling.

I wanted nothing to do with the Madagascar hissing cockroach.

Based on how much I gushed about it to Blake, my favorite thing of the day was the last insect, the Australian walking stick. It is so cool! The museum employee had a female, apparent because of her large abdomen and tiny wings. These bugs are amazing at camouflage and mimicry! When they are first born, their mom shoots out the eggs. If there is no male around, it's okay - the female will just clone herself! Ants then carry off the eggs into their nests, where it is cooler and wetter than above ground. When the walking sticks first hatch, they look like ants, so the ants raise them as such! It wasn't really covered what happens when the ants and the walking sticks realize they are not the same, but I'm sure at some point the walking sticks get too big and move out on their own.

Out on the branches of trees and bushes, Australian walking sticks generally hang so that their abdomen just looks like a dead leaf blowing in the breeze, but if they're crawling around right side up, they look like a scorpion!

Not a scorpion!

Their life span is only about 9 months, but I think it's a pretty impressive 9 months.

I also learned, from our IMAX movie - Mysteries of the Unseen World, that dragonflies can move all four of their wings independently of one another, which is different from any other flying creature out there. This also allows them to hover and fly forwards and backwards.

Another other cool thing I got to do was touch a piece of Mars, a rock collected on Mars by a robot (I don't remember which one) and returned to Earth. The moon rock you can touch in the Air and Space Museum is pretty dang neat, but the Mars rock (in a similar display) is just off to the side in the minerals and gems room and you could easily miss it if  you're not looking for it. In fact, I must have missed it the other times I've been there. I definitely rectified that situation yesterday.

I'm bummed the new dinosaur exhibit won't be open until 2019, but I did think it was neat that there is a fossil lab with windows on three sides right in the middle of the temporary exhibit. The workers I observed were making storage boxes and taking photos, but that's still cool. There was a sign on the glass not to tap it, since it might disturb the mammals inside.

Overall, it was a fun way to get out and do something different for the work day and hang out with some students. I should have added a juice box to my lunch though. Anytime we had a field trip where we had to pack a lunch, Mom spoiled us by getting us a more fun than usual lunch to make the day even more of a treat, usually a Lunchable and a juice box. I did at least pack myself one last snickerdoodle and some Hershey's Hugs.

I did have to make up for it today by doing paperwork and lesson planning. I decided to put off shelving until tomorrow, but I'll make sure my podcasts are up to date in the morning so that I don't get terribly bored. 

To the ship, to the ship

Today, Blake and I went on a date to Baltimore to check out four historic ships anchored in the harbor there.

We started with the USCGC Taney, a Coast Guard cutter that is the last ship afloat to have survived the attach on Pearl Harbor in 1941. She was also present at the battle in Okinawa when the war came to an end. She then served the Coast Guard until the 1980s.

Next up was the Lightship Chesapeake, which served in place of lighthouse where such a building couldn't be built. The light on the mast could be seen for 14 miles with 13,000 candlepower!

The third vessel was the USS Torsk, a submarine built in the 1940s. Those were some tight quarters! We know a couple people who have served or currently serve on subs, and we have a deeper respect for them now.

Our final stop was the USS Constellation, a sloop of war from the mid-1800s. We got to see a demonstration of the parrott rifle on the deck!

The decks were rather spacious, especially after the sub, but they were probably more cramped when filled with crew and supplies. I tried out a hammock, and it was pretty cramped, even for short little me.

We found out that most of these ships provide an overnight experience for classes, scout troops, etc. You get to sleep like the crew, have two historic meals, and enjoy other appropriate activities. That sounds way fun to me!

We followed up this outing with a Thanksgiving lunch provided by our apartment complex (free and catered by Boston Market - yum!) and grocery shopping (because sometimes that's what you gotta do). Since then, we've napped, taken Malcolm to the dog park, made pizza for dinner, and now we're watching the BYU football game. We also turned on the heater for the first time this season - we were outside so much today that we just couldn't quite warm up with our apartment only being 60 degrees.

It's been a great Saturday!

Malcolm's status at the time of this post