I am still working on my list of 104 things to do in 1,004 days - 33 down, 71 to go…but I just crossed off #53: See at least 10 movies in the theater. (If you click on the link, you can see which ones I saw.)

Those who know me well know of my reputation for narcoleptic tendancies during movies. Whether they’re on TV or on DVD or in the theater, I can’t stay awake. That factored into choosing that as one of my items to do, as did the fact that I just wanted to share in that part of popular culture. I’d seen movies before but it was always one of those things where I’d wait til it came out on video, and then I would end up forgetting to rent it and I’d never see it.

I finally finished my 10th movie last week, and I think it’s accomplished what I hoped it would - making going to the movies not some event that happens once every 5 years, but rather, something that happens every time I see a movie that looks interesting or that I think the kids will like. Fortunately, the movie theater here is CHEAP! $3/adults, $1.50 for 6 and up, free for 5 and under. The only bad part is that the popcorn tastes like wet styrofoam.

Sit her in a seat with some popcorn and watch a movie about chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate.

Anyone who knows Anja is familiar with her boundless energy and incessant chitter-chatter. It only gets worse when the weather is bad, since she spends hours every day playing outside. It has rained the last three days in a row (IN THE NORTHWEST? NO ONE TOLD ME IT RAINS IN THE NORTHWEST.) That means our little Princess has not been able to play outside, which means she has had no outlet for her endless energy for THREE DAYS IN A ROW.

We needed to get out of the house.

So we went to McDonald’s where an unsupervised little boy decided to walk up to our table and put his drink with our stuff and refuse to leave us alone. We’re usually pretty laid back about little kids, especially since if we can deal with ours, we can deal with any, but unsupervised kids who interrupt someone else’s meal is really irritating to both of us. We followed our meal with a trip to Best Buy hoping to purchase a replacement monitor for our living room, but we didn’t have too much luck. This was followed by a brief but productive quick trip to Famous Footwear where I got a nice, new pair of running shoes and painfully tore myself away from all the other really really cute shoes that I really really wanted but really really couldn’t afford right now. (Mom? Dad? You reading this? Think: zappos.com gift certificate…it doesn’t take up any room in our luggage and they ship for free!)

On our way home, we decided on a whim to stop and see what movies were playing. It turned out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was starting in less than 1/2 hour - perfect! Isak had already seen it with a friend but wanted to see it again, so we decided to go.

As soon as the movie got to the part where they were in the factory, Anja went from her usual wiggle-worm self to being perfectly still, captivated by the concept of a completely edible factory. And she stayed that way until the very end. I was so impressed! It made for a very enjoyable theater experience, one we might actually do again someday.

On our way home, Anja asked if we could please go to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Sorry, sweetie, I already ate it.

Right, so I posted a while back that I was entering a digital photography exhibition at the Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival.

The pictures I ended up entering were these:

and

There were probably 40 photographs entered altogether and there were cash prizes for the top three photographs, with 3 honorable mentions given as well. While my efforts did not earn me a cash prize, I was ecstatic to see that I had been awarded an honorable mention!

The exhibit was juried by only one judge, which I don’t think gives much of a “juried” result, but in a way it made it even more an honor to receive any acknowledgement at all. Because there was only one person’s opinion, the final result is based on that one person’s opinion of what is and is not appealing. I didn’t particularly care for the top finisher, nor the 2nd place, but that was OK with me. Art is subjective.

Aside from that, I was disappointed with the running of the contest: The prospectus clearly said that all photographs MUST be matted with a plain white mat, framed with a thin metal or wooden black frame, and that each artist could submit no more than three pieces. So why was it that the winning piece was matted with a black mat? and that there was one person who submitted no less than a dozen pieces?

At any rate, it was a very exciting experience for me, and was one more item to cross off my list of 101 things to do in 1,001 days (#7: Have a photography exhibit somewhere).

Number 7 on my list of 101 things to do in 1,001 days (which has evolved to be 104 in 1,004 is to have a photography exhibit somewhere.

I hesitated to put that on there because it was one of those things that was so far-fetched that I wasn’t sure I’d really be able to do it.

An opportunity came up waaaay back in May. There was a call in the local paper for digital photographers for an exhibition in September. Score! I emailed the point of contact and received a reply (this all happened in May) that said the prospectus was going out that week and would email be acceptable? I replied that it would, and last week I realized it is awfully close to September now. I emailed the POC again and got a quick reply with the prospectus that said that entries were due by Sunday, August 28th. Yeah, I got the prospectus on Sunday, August 28th. I called and was told that I could submit my entry late - yay! So the scrambling began.

Sunday I went through all of my pictures. That is a LOT of stuff. I narrowed it down to 9, then to 7 by eliminating the two pictures of the kids that I wasn’t comfortable with potentially selling (all pictures submitted must be priced with the intent to sell). I posted a couple of polls on some messageboards I was on to gauge other people’s feelings toward the pictures and got a very positive response. Between the feedback I received as well as my own feelings and opinions about the pictures, I decided on three pictures to submit (you could submit a maximum of 3).

Next was getting them printed: I rushed home from work a half hour early so I could get them done that last night. Now, I have two computers and literally thousands of images. Looking for some of those pictures was going to be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, one of the pictures I had only taken 2 days earlier so I had it readily available. Another was taken at a memorable time: last Thanksgiving while I was in port in Hawaii. The third I was a bit overwhelmed with finding, but lucky me! I was smart enough to copy it to my laptop in case I ever wanted to print it out. Yippee! I edited all three pictures and uploaded them to my website, called Niki to find out if they made it up ok and if she was able to see anything on them that I didn’t (I was working on my uncalibrated LAPTOP, not so good for imaging!). As soon as I got the go-ahead from her, I left to drive to the Costco in Tukwila, about 45 minutes away.

Fortunately I packed Anja with me, because I was driving right smack in the middle of rush hour. Hello, HOV lane! I saved probably a half an hour driving in the HOV lane and probably would have been even faster had it not been for the guy towing a giant boat going 40 - definitely better than the apparent 5 miles an hour everyone else was averaging, but he could’ve gone the speed limit. Once I passed him, it was smooth sailing and I got to Tukwila in a record breaking 35 minutes.

Let me just say that Costco is THE place for quick prints. I would have preferred to print them out at my online lab, but I didn’t have the time, and they did a fabulous job in a pinch. Unfortunately, one of my pictures was an odd size (I had it sized for 10″x10″) and it didn’t print out the first time, so we had to wait more time for it to get printed. When it finally did get printed, it was an 8″x8″.

That brings me to framing. I rushed to Michaels before they closed and got there at 8:00pm. I went right to the framing section where they have the mats and frames and everything.

They had no mats for a size 12×18 picture. OK, one of them I could frame as an 11×14 and be OK with that. But the other one I could NOT crop at all. It would have destroyed the entire picture to cut any of it off. So I asked them if they do same-day custom mats (yeah, at 8pm when they close at 10). They said no, it takes 7-10 days. Gulp. I’ve got like 7-10 HOURS. However, a saint of an employee said, “I’ll do it for you.” WOW! So she did it for me, beautifully. A nice, plain, white mat. I found a frame that it’d fit in. I found a mat and a frame for an 11×14. Things are working.

However, there was NOTHING for an 8×8. After forking over $38 - THIRTY EIGHT DOLLARS! for a PLAIN WHITE MAT butwhatever - I got a mat for an 11×14 and then a 16×20 frame and a 20×28 frame.

I got back to Niki’s house and we spent a good couple of hours getting the pictures done. What a total PITA. We finally got them done and I left her house at about 11:40pm…ugh. But thank god for Niki - I don’t know what I would’ve done without her encouragement, because I really wanted to just give up and quit. I did give up on the square picture, as there were NO frames that worked and I just did not have the time to get anything custom made.

I submitted the pictures today - more stress as I was running late because of work and then got caught in traffic at the ferry and had one last-ditch effort to get a frame for a third picture but then realized I didn’t have the wire to hang it.

But it’s now DONE, and I should hear by Friday whether or not they were accepted for the exhibit; prizes will be posted September 8th and then official opening reception is on Sunday, Sep. 11th and the exhibit will continue through September. The first prize is $100, then $75, then $50, then 2-3 honorable mentions.

I am so excited that it is done, and that (hopefully) I will have my photographs exhibited!!

I finally got my day in Seattle and managed to cross off 3 items from my list of things to do. These were all from the same day Niki and I went to Teatro ZinZanni. I got lots of pictures! Here are a bunch…I’m not going to bother captioning any of them, just gonna post them all as they are. Hope you enjoy them!

I can cross yet another item off my list.

For the last several months I’d been wanting to do something very special for B for father’s day. He has always wanted to go to Alaska, and we’ve never really had the time or the money to send him (he’s a stay-at-home dad so we don’t have childcare for when I’m at work). Well, after I won the car, we had a bit of “fun” money to spend. We were going to get a new camera, but if we did, we wouldn’t have any money for anything else.

So I decided to take the plunge and arrange a special trip for B to get away, all by himself, to the Kenai River in Alaska. He’s going to spend 5 days, 4 nights at a lodge, spending 8 hours a day fishing on a boat, with one day being flown out to a remote location with a guide to go fishing there as well.

All by himself.

He’s spent the last 3 years home with the kids, who can be very challenging and frustrating, and has only spent maybe a day away from them here and there….and in the last year or so, he hasn’t even gotten to have that one day here and there.

I’m so excited to be sending him, it’s a well deserved break with memories to last a lifetime.

I went to D.C. yesterday for a day of sightseeing. I hopped on the Metro and took it to the Smithsonian -stop. It was H-O-T!!

First, I walked to the Holocaust Museum. The first thing you do after you get a ticket is to pick up a passport of someone who was involved in the Holocaust. Mine was from a woman named Agnes Mandl, born in Budapest, Hungary (I am part Hungarian so I thought that was very interesting). It reads:

When Agnes was a teenager, she attended Budapest’s prestigious Baar Madas private school, run by the Hungarian Reformed Church. Although she was the only Jewish student there, Agnes’ parents believed that the superior education at the school was important for their daughter. Agnes’ father, a textile importer, encouraged his daughter to think for herself.

1933-39: In 1936 I studied educational techniques with Signora Maria Montessori in Italy and earned a diploma so I could teach. Hoping to improve my French, I traveled to Switzerland in 1939. On September 9, while swimming with friends at Lake Geneva, I met some Polish Jews attending a Zionist Congress. Suddenly, news blared that Germany had overrun Poland. Frightened and still in swimsuits, the Poles ran to try to call their families.

1940-44: In Budapest in 1944 I worked for Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat working to save Jews. That December, the fascists ordered Jews executed at the banks of the Danube River. The Jews were tied in groups of three, and the person in the center was shot so all three fell in and drowned. Wallenberg asked his staff, “Who can swim?” I said that I could. We rushed to the water’s edge, and when a group fell in we’d plunge into the icy river. We rescued 50 people. Later, I got sick and fell into a coma for a day and a half.

After the war, Agnes went to Sweden and Australia, and moved to America in 1951. Later, she dedicated herself to writing and teaching about Wallengerg and his actions.

I believe the street that the museum is on is actually Raoul Wallengerg street.

First, you go up an elevator that was designed to look like the elevators they used to shuttle people to their executions. They play a short film during the ride up, and then you come to the first area where they give the history of the Nazi party. In the end of the first section, there is a walkway across to another part of the museum. There, we were stopped and waited, and waited, and waited. I thought it was part of the tour for a while, but after about 15 minutes of waiting and the entire room being backed up, I decided it probably wasn’t. And then the security guard came out and said, “Um, everyone, we have a Situation. Please stay where you are.” Okaaaaay. Waiting, waiting, waiting, after about 5-10 minutes, he came back again and said, “At this time, we would ask that you all evacuate immediately.” Ugh.

So allllll the people made for the emergency exit and we all calmly made our way to the first floor where we exited and were directed across the street and into the field. I called my friend who I am staying with and told her and she suggested that I start walking to wherever I was going next because there was a chance they’d keep us where we were and block us from leaving. 6 fire trucks came and lined the road in front of the museum. I never did figure out what happened, and I never did get to finish the museum.

I walked from there to the Vietnam War Memorial - quite a hike!! - and stopped off first at the World War II memorial. It was a beautiful memorial.

(click on the picture for a larger one - it is three pictures stitched together so it ended up being very small in order to fit on my blog)

I finally made it to the Vietnam Memorial and was awed by the wall of names. It was so sad to see how many people lost their lives during the war. There were veterans there, there were surviving family members there. Old, young, middle aged, people left notes, flowers, bracelets, pictures.

Click on this picture to see the writing on the note:

I came across a man in a wheelchair just staring up at the wall, tears running down his face. It was so profoundly sad. One of the monument volunteers walked up to him and put her arm around him, and he just lay his head on her shoulder and cried. When she left, I walked up to him and thanked him for his service to our country. He told me that it was his friend that died, his co-pilot. They were both from Ohio and became fast friends. I just can’t imagine. He sat there for a long time, right at the middle of the wall where it towers over you, thousands and thousands of names stretching out to either side.

After the wall, I walked on to the Lincoln monument.

By this point I was starting to feel a little bit sick from a combination of the heat and being hungry. I didn’t spend long there (though there’s not a lot to see anyway), and then walked all over looking for somewhere to eat. By the time I found something, I was having some problems and got the earmuffs and my vision started closing in on me - not good! I got a hot dog and a bottle of water (my 3rd for the day already!) and laid down in the shade until I felt a bit better. Once I got walking around again, I felt a lot better.

I walked, and walked, and walked, all the way to the mall where the Smithsonian museums are. I went first to the Museum of American History - I was running out of time so I had to figure out what I wanted to see and see only that. I wanted to see Dorothy’s ruby slippers…

…and the original Kermit the Frog…

(Oscar the Grouch was right next to Kermie so I got a picture of him, too:

…and on my way out I saw the preservation project for the Star Spangled Banner. I never knew that there actually was one flag called the Star Spangled Banner! I thought it was just a nickname for our flag. The project involved several people on platforms laying above the flag; I couldn’t tell what they were doing but they were simultaneously showing a video from the History Channel that described the work being done up to a few years ago. It was incredible. The flag is so delicate and large parts of it are missing. They wouldn’t allow any photography, flash or not, in the room.

There is just so much to see in each museum that it was hard to walk away before seeing it all, but like I said, I was running out of time and had to see only what I had planned on seeing beforehand. My next museum was the Museum of Natural History, I wanted to see the Hope Diamond. I saw the Hope once before but it is so incredible that I had to see it again….

…and some of the pearls on display. The pearls were amazing as well - some beautiful settings for gigantic pearls.

I went from there to stop in the tectonic plates area where I saw the display about Iceland and then another display that showed all the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions over the last…20 years? I don’t know, it was a lot of years’ worth. Each event has an audio blip, so it was almost musical. I then went on to the Art Galleries, stopping in the middle at the Sculpture garden.

The whole reason I wanted to stop at the art galleries was because of the book on Van Gogh that I’d just finished.

I learned about Impressionism in it and wanted to see more, especially Van Gogh’s (the Chrysler museum had some really wonderful Impressionist paintings on display, but none of Van Gogh.) There were 6 Van Gogh’s, one of which was the self portrait that was pictured on the book I was reading! It was so incredible to be able to see his paintings, knowing how tortured he was, especially at the end of his life when most of the paintings on display were done.

Other impressionist paintings:

After the impressionists, I walked on to the East wing of the art gallery and saw a small display of “Small French Paintings”, but by the time I got there I only had about 10 minutes left.

I call this one “Self Portrait in a Really Cool Drinking Fountain by the Elevator”:

Then I walked around trying to find the Metro, and ended up walking all the way down almost to the Washington monument…

then across, then back up halfway before I found it. By the time I got there, I was exhausted! It was nice to be out of the sun finally for good.

I got back to my friend’s house and took a shower that I needed so badly after sweating all day, and then we went out for dinner for Ethiopian food (I had sushi the night before - my first time eating “real” sushi, not just california rolls. I was surprised how good it was!). We had a huge platter of shrimp, chicken, collard greens, and carrots and beans. You eat everything with this flat bread, thicker than a crepe but thiner than a pancake and with a very different texture of either. The bread serves as the plate, the fork, the knife, and the napkin. The food was delicious. We sat on the roof of the restaurant; the sun had gone behind the clouds, it dropped a few degrees and a nice breeze picked up, making it the perfect weather for eating outside and a great end to the day.

Well, that’s all for now…I’m hoping to make it back to D.C. again today to see a couple more things, but I’m not sure that I’ll get to do much. I might just go for lunch and a few souveniers and then head back so I can drive back to Norfolk before dark.

Oh - last thing - as I was driving into D.C., I got a little bit lost and had pulled over to call my friend’s house and get some directions. I turned around to get back on the road and was at a stop sign, waiting for the car in front of me to turn. She decided she didn’t want to turn right, but she was already in position to turn so she had to back up. I was a good distance behind her and didn’t think anything of it, til she kept backing up and backing up and backing up! I started honking, but she didn’t hear me and she went right into my front end, knocking off my license plate, putting a big gash in the bumper, and denting in the grill on the front end. OY. Karyn’s adventures in the big city.