Going to Virginia Beach

Hello Blog readers (Dad is typing this because I’m really tired). Today I woke up in a hotel in New Jersey. As you may have guessed I’m on my way to Virginia Beach (VB-that’s the abbreviation I like to use).

It feels weird to be on vacation because I just got over a “vacation” with my cousins Nic, Devin, and Cole. Staying with the cousins was really cool. We went to Lupa zoo again (Cole liked that). We swam almost everyday, and slept at Grammie and Papa’s house for one day. We also raided Grammie and Papa’s attic for my Dad’s old comic book collection which he had put there for safe keeping (little did he know it wasn’t safe enough.) Hee-hee-hee. My Dad easily has over 1000 comic books that are over 20 years old. We foolishly tried to sort them all alphabetically. We failed miserably. We made it to the “F’s”. And all the others we put into categories (all the x-men in one pile, etc.) We piled the rest on the coffee table. We spent over 2 hours starting to sort them out.

Our vacations weren’t over for long because the Muellers came to our house last night and we started the drive to Virginia Beach. We ate at El Sombrero, like usual. Ben had the la cucaracha feast and drank from the el Baño special drinks.

When we got to the hotel, we went straight to bed (it was midnight). When we woke up

passing time (IT'S HHHHHHOOOOOOTTTTT!!!!!!)

Hello blog readers, It's hot. Hotel Oscar tango, hot. Today it reached 103, and felt like 110! The one advantage I can see is that I've caught up on my summer reading, finishing "Before We Were Free" by Julia Alvarez. It was O.K and only took me two days to finish. It was very violent. It was about the fall of dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. They have to go into hiding and then flee to the U.S.A. It was sad and moving. Today I saw the Harry Potter movie one more time. It was just as good this time(maybe even better). I can't wait for my cousins Nic and Devin and Cole to come soon (tomorrow).

Connor

passing my time without acting camp

Hello blog readers, as you probably guessed from my title my acting camp for this week has been canceled. That means I have no formal plans for this week so I've had to do stuff with my family. Today we went to the movie theater to see Cars 2. It wasn't good. The plot wasn't very good but I did laugh. The only real reason I saw it was because the first one was really good. Another way I passed the time is I'm directing and acting in a family mystery film. It's about murder and revenge... It kind of took the place of my acting camp.

I'm also trying to learn nautical radio code. India tango-india sierra-hotel alfa romeo delta (it is hard). Basically there is a set of spoken words for every letter, like A is alpha. Every space is just a pause. The problem is there's 26 words to have to know and that's hard.

I've also been shooting my bow which I got for my birthday. I'm getting more accurate (and so is my Dad who often shoots with me). I'm having a nice relaxing week before my cousins get here. India-charlie alfa november ' tango- whiskey alpha india tango-(I can't wait).

post more soon!

Charlie oscar november november oscar romeo (connor)

demo and trumpet

This is probably the first or second post of mine that you are reading this year ( I'll tell my dad to send the reminder email earlier next year). So for those of you who don't know I just got back from Maine where I visited Acadia National Park. The other thing that most people don't know is that my Dad bought me a new (technically used but new to me and in fantastic condition) 1983 Bach Stradivarius model 37 silver plated trumpet with a rare first valve trigger and a very weird but cool case. Most of you are probably wondering what half of that stuff means so I'll tell you. A first valve trigger is a little lever I can push on that makes my first valve come out (picture below) to lower the pitch a quarter step. Silver plated just means it's silver and looks really cool.

first valve trigger OH YEAH!

heres the trumpet plus the case

the case has a cool storing area

the case when it's closed. There's a trick to unlock and re-lock it
the other thing that happened was the karate demo. It was great but REALLY HOT. My two best things I did were "the edge" ( a sword kata) and the arnis sticks both in my last video post

Aidans flying side kick

my three directional kick

universal 3 face to face

Aidans split kick

the bow form

a fight that I led

my flying side kick

I will continue posting on my blog and I hope that you will read this. So far it's been a summer to remember. Looking forward to my cousins coming to visit next week.

Connor

Newington Extravaganza Videos

portland sea dogs game

Hey I'm back those of you that are reading this blog. Today I'm going to be posting about the Portland Seadogs baseball team (they feed into the Red Sox, my favorite team!) game that I went to on my last day in Maine with Grandpa and Chris (I know I'm home now sorry!). We got seats up near the home run area but no balls came to us. It was a good game to watch even though the Seadogs lost, because the team they were facing was the ROCKCATS! For those of you that don't know, the Rockcats are our home team from Connecticut (even though feed into the Minnesota Twins) so it was bad and good. At the end it was really close 5 to 4.

The high point of the game was during the 5th inning. My dad paid a message board guy to send up the message "DEB, I LOVE YOU! - MIKE KISS ME!" and it ran over and over and over again for the entire 5th inning (see the picture). Mom was completely surprised, though willing to kiss Dad every time it came up.

Acadia day 2 and 3

Hello blog readers, in this post I will address yesterday and today. The first thing I did on Tuesday was I went for an "easy bike ride. " It turned out to be really hard for me because I caught my brother's Walking Pneumonia (a sickness were you can pretty much do anything you want but you won't want to eat, and you'll have a lot of phlegm.) All of the phlegm in my throat restricted my breathing and I couldn't catch my breath. At the end though it was all worth it because I had so many popovers during lunch at Jordan Pond. Then we went to Sand beach and skipped stones.

In the evening, we went to the Great Maine Lumberjack Show, it looked like a lot of fun to be up there on the stage. There were tons of events where the two teams (green and red) battled it out lumber jack style. There was speed chopping, crosscut sawing, speed chainsaw, peavey log lifting, pole climbing, ax throwing, and log rolling. It was really fun to watch and at half time Aidan got to go down and use the cross cut saw! My favorite events were the climbing (they wore spiked shoes!) and the log rolling (look up log rolling rock and roll on the internet, SO COOL) overall we had a great time!

Starting off today with a bang we hiked up Bubble Trail North and down Bubble Trail south(so named because big rocks (ie. the bubbles) were left there from the melting of the ice age). The trail difficulty was labeled "moderate" unfortunately for us we were unaware that they were currently debating that fact. There were metal rungs and steep cliffs, they were even workers up there performing maintenance!

Right after today's lunch we went to Asticou gardens and Thuya gardens. There were tons of pretty flowers and great views of boats. It put everyone in a good mood, so good that dad let me take a few pictures WITH HIS CAMERA, my Dad loves his camera!

our view of the boats

a puffy flower

a pink dahlia

one of my pictures with Mom and Dad

our view from the top

my family at the Bubble Rock post

Bubble Rock

the workers

more of the view

crossing a bridge (called deb 18)

Aidan crosscut sawing

climbing

the pro's crosscut sawing

we all wrote I love deb at least 6 times at sand beach

me looking for skipping stones to beat my Dads high score of four skips

Yesterday/Today

O.K. lets start with yesterday. We went to Fort Knox as well as the Fort Observatory it was really cool and extremely huge. I loved the observatory. It's the fastest elevator in Maine. When you get to the top it feels like you can see everything. The fort had an interesting history. A TON of work went in to making that fort but the kinda depressing thing is that it was never attacked, not that it's a bad thing it's just that a lot of work went in to it for nothing.

Now on to the subject of today... Today we went to Cadillac Mountain. We took a long hike up and down it. It was great! The one thing that really made it great was that through the entire trail there were stone steps put there a long time ago... THANK GOD, even with the steps the trail was very hard! The view at the top was great. There was a beautiful river on the way up and at the very bottom there was a patch of wild blueberries. We ate so many of them, they were delicious.

We also went to Diver Ed. A fun boat ride were a diver dives down into the ocean, gets sea creatures and then educates us about them. He also does ALOT of funny stuff like stick a sea cucumber in his mouth and kiss a crab! it was totally worth it a second time.

Overall my time in Maine has been GREAT.

Connor