Cordero Family - And baby makes three!!

Horray to Jose and Maida!! And welcome to the world "Luis." We can't wait to meet you.

He was born last Thursday (6 weeks early) to our friends Maida and Jose Cordero (you might recognize Jose from our wedding where he was Brian's groomsman) and we hear he and Mom are doing well. The second picture is of: Gwen ("Luis"'s aunt), Jose, Maida, and baby Jose Luis Cordero IV.

Memorial Preparations

Mom and I went to Skilling's greenhouse and picked out flowers for some family stones. Then we headed to Bath and planted them for the Memorial Day weekend. The cemetary looked nice with all the american flags at so many stones - made you appreciate the purpose of this long weekend holiday. We were lucky that the weather this weekend has turned out so nice - so lots of people will be able to get out and enjoy the holiday.

Bowling Bonanza

Thursday night we bowled our first games on the summer candlepin bowling league we joined at Brunswick's alley "The Bowling Bowl." Brian's Grammy and Grampy bowl pretty regularly, but Grampy decided he wanted to take the summer off, and another fellow on their team dropped out, which left two spots needing to be filled.... so we joined! Brian and I both had a great night, we beat our averages, and now have a weekly date to hang out with Brian's grandparents!!

(Grampy is our official scorekeeper.) The average age of the bowlers on this league (before we joined) was probably 65+, but that's fine, we're having a blast all the same. Sorry no photos, I'll try to add one later. It's just too beautiful out today (70's at 10:30am) to spend all day on the computer.

Baxter State Park

Brian and I spent the weekend in Northern Maine in a town called "T6R8" for a friend's wedding. This town - yes, it's so sparsely populated that it doesn't even have a name -borders Baxter State Park so we spent the day after the wedding hiking "Horse Mountain" in the northern part of the park. Unfortunately, it had been raining ALL week and although it miraculously stopped raining for the outdoor ceremony and reception Saturday, it started raining again Sunday morning for our planned hike in the park. We had a good time hiking the 3 mile trail, but will have to visit Baxter again sometime when it's sunny and dry. By the time we made it to the summit of Horse mtn the rain had picked up, and we were pretty well soaked. But maybe we shouldn't complain about being soaked - there was snow on the ground at the summit (you can see a little patch in the photo of Brian with the trail sign) - so we could have been snowed on!

And the trail... well, you could call it a babbling brook too. As you can see from the pictures the trail itself was transformed into a small stream for much of the trail. Needless to say, we were so thrilled to have a dry set of clothes to change into at the car.

Boston Museum of Science

We drove to NH Saturday night to spend time with Scott and his girlfriend Whitney. We went out to dinner and saw Spiderman 3, then crashed on the floor at Scott's house. Sunday morning we drove into Boston to visit the Museum of Science - for Free! Bank of America members can go to a bunch of New England museums for free this month - and we LOVE free! We had a great time there! We saw the lighting show where they teach you how energy and lightning work and then created it indoors. It was neat, but we all agreed - not nearly as impressive as we remembered from our childhood visits there! We learned about animation and camera tricks and had fun creating group videos with "stop animation" (essentially the digital version of a flip book) and 3-D photos where it takes a still shot with about 10 cameras (it gives you that movie effect where a ninja jumps and freezes midair as the camera spins around him). We played music on the musical/piano staircase that plays a note with each step you take. We learned about geology, dinosaurs, technology, the animal kingdom, and mathmatical phenomena. We spotted the queen bee in a live bee colony, and best of all - had fun with a little mirror Mel found....

Backyard peacocks

The wild turkeys frequent by our house on an almost daily basis. It might be because of all the cracked corn "squirrel food" Dad throws out on the lawn :) We have anywhere from 1 or 2, to 13 at a time come for the occational buffet. But a few weeks ago we got a lovely show of peacock preportions - one of the males was strutting his stuff and displaying his tail feathers. It was really pretty to watch - but also sad, as most of the females didn't bother to even look his way! In addition to displaying his tail feathers, his head would turn bright blue, and his neck bright red. (This 2nd photo is the turkey from behind). The way they walk/run reminds me of the velociraptors (no idea about the spelling on that one) from the Jurrasic Park movies. - except slightly less intimidating.

Prickly Pals

About 2 weeks ago Brian and I drove home after dark.

I said "Oh look! A porcupine!"

Brian said "What? That? That's a cat!"

Me: "No way, it's a porcupine. Look - it waddles when it walks"

Brian: "No, it's a fat cat. Fat cats waddle"

Me: "I guarantee that's a porcupine"

So Brian parks the car, grabs a flashlight, and chases after it..... it was a porcupine.

Why do I share that story? Because our prickly pal returned later that week! This time in the daylight, so I grabbed a picture - definitely not a cat :)

Mel the Mechanic

A couple weekends ago I taught Melissa how to change a tire. I didn't want her to get stranded on the side of the road somewhere and not know how to change a flat.

She had no problems at all, and I think she even enjoyed herself!

That's the cutest mechanic I've ever had working on my car!

Pinguino

Today I introduced my family's cat Bootsie to my newest knit creation: Pinguino (that's spanish for penguin)! Since the wintery days for knitting scarves are over, I found this new project. It was a bit of a challenge for my level of knitting, but how else do you learn something new, right? Bootsie was civil, but not a fan of her new, flightless friend- maybe it was their striking resemblence to one another that made her uneasy, or the fact that Pinguino followed her everywhere :) Next project? Maybe a sweater, but that's ambitious and again, out of season. But I assure you, no one's complaining about the season!

First Attempt at this BLOG thing...

Because of a special request, we've decided to give this Blog thing a try...

We moved back to Maine from California about a year ago, and we're so glad we did. We're still trying to find a house...which has been more of a process than we thought, but we still have hope that the perfect house is out there waiting for us to find it.