Grace's First Museum

Today I am down in Virginia Beach visiting Grace's great aunt(s). Today we went to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. There was an exhibit of Black & White photography that Owen(Grace's great-uncle) wanted to see.

Grace did really well with the visit. The stroller was a slight challenge, but fortunately I had an umbrella stroller, so I could just pick-up the stroller with her in it for the unavoidable steps. She was pretty quiet for the beginning. We saw another baby there and Kathy(Grace's great Aunt) took her to visit with the other baby. I looked at the exhibits some and went back and found that Grace was having a lot of fun with the other baby. I carried her through part of the Museum and just pushed the stroller with her bag in it. She did make some noises(almost like singing). It seemed that the other visitors were amused rather than annoyed by her sounds. Grace was very well behaved and she seemed to enjoy the museum as much as could be expected. She ended up taking a nap on the way back to Kathy and Owen's house.

The art was pretty cool. A lot of it was pictures of train which makes some pretty interesting photos. I found out afterwards that Owen actually has a couple of works from the artist at his office. His grandfather was a postmaster in Southern Virginia and he met the train to get the mail, so he ended up running into the artist and his truck even ended up in one of his photos.

Apprentice All-Stars Seasons 2 to 4

I will come back and give my reasons when I get time.

Season 2


Ivana Ma
Andy Litinsky
Maria Boren
Bradford Cohen

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Season 3


Tana Goertz
Alex Thomason
Bren Olswanger
Stephanie Myers
Erin Elmore
Danny Kastner

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Season 4


Rebecca Jarvis
Alla Wartenberg

Apprentice All-Star Team season 1

Since I miss some of the characters from the old seasons on the apprentice, I made an all-star team from all 4 seasons.

Bill Ranic was not included because he won already. I considered Omarosa for her entertainment/drama value, but her 15 minutes are up... they should have been up 14 1/2 minutes ago.

Season 1 All-Stars


Amy Henry - she was a superstar and made it to week 13, far more interesting than Nick
Kwamee Brown...I mean Jackson - seemed to ba a good mix of ambition and being likeable, I may be a little biased due to his DC birthplace.
Troy McClain - entertaining, engaging guy, lasted to week 12, was a good underdog story
Sam Solovey - he makes this list solely for his ability to create a train-wreck which makes for good television, I may also be biased due to his hometown
Kristi Frank - was on a roll until she got fired after her first loss, seemed headed to being an apprentice superstar and it would be interesting to see how she would do if given another chance

Apprentice Burn-out

I have been a big fan of the Apprentice since the first season. I have not kept up with it as much this season as I did in the past.

I caught the second half of the finale last night and I think I might be starting to get burned out on it. I liked Randall and thought he should win. I think it was in many ways the closest final competition in the series so far.

It seemed like a jerk move telling Trump he thought there should only be one Apprentice. I think he was right in doing that, because it would have been saying that the final competition was pointless. Not only did Randall put a lot of effort into winning that competition, so did his team and giving it away would have devalued there efforts.

In season 3 I was pulling for Tana, but I think she did not have a chance given the team she had to work with.

Mid-Week post

Not too much is going on here. Someone actually stumbled accross my blog and left a comment :) I checked out their blog and signed up for BlogExplosion. They apparently have sent 5 viewers to my blog already.

You can click on this link if you want to sign up and put your blog on BlogExplosion.

Grace has a little bit of a cough and congestion, but she seems to be doing pretty well. From talking to other parents that seems to be a pretty common occurence for kids in the winter time.

She still does not seem to be in much of a rush to walk. Crawling and climbing seem to be her preferred methods of getting around. When she does want to stand, it seems like she needs only very little support to do it.

I have been taking a tax course at Liberty Tax Service and I will be moonlighting there some during the tax season.

I think at some point I may want to get into financial advising rather than computer programming. This seemed like a low risk way to try it out and see if it something that I would enjoy doing. So far it has been mainly just learning about the tax code and how to do income taxes by hand. We have started to get into a little bit of promotions of the company and since the office is just starting out there is a little bit of feeling of ownership. Now that the class is meeting in the tax office it feels a little bit like being in an episode of the Apprentice.

Weekend

Our weekend got off to a slow start. The week had tired me out, so I ended up sleeping about the time Grace went to bed. It was nice to get to bed early, but I ended up waking up very early and not being able to go back to sleep.

I had a pretty productive day, mostly just running errands. I was able to make it to the gym and Grace enjoyed the Y-baby-C-A :) Although she was a little sad when I left her there.

In the evening Grace and I went to Ma&Pa's(Angela's grandparents) house. I stayed for a little while. They were quite happy to see her. I talked to Angela's Aunt Karen and she said they were in great spirits because they got to see Grace.

I went to a party at Ryan and Rebecca's house. They are conveniently located across the woods from my house, so I walked over. Kelly & Carla were there and so was Simba(Steve) and his wife were there. I talked to Steve a fair amount. He is really fired up about the rugby season next fall.

I went to church before I picked Grace up. They had a Christmas tree with a list of needy children. I took one and then went shopping for him. I went to Target and Best Buy, but I could not find any PlayStation 1 games. After Best Buy I went over to the book store and got a couple of books in addition to some games from Target.

I went over to pick-up Grace during the first half of the Redskin's game. Grace seemed to be doing quite well. Ma & Pa sang at Church and Grace was right with them and loved it :) At half time Grace & I headed back home.