Made In America

FB Washburn is on Made In America tonight at 9pm on the Travel Channel!

There will be repeat broadcasts at 3pm on Saturday, Dec. 2 and Tuesday, Dec. 19 at 9:30pm. The Washburn segment is the second one in the show. The old building looks great! Queenee isn't in it, but it's fun to see nonetheless.

Kold in Key West

It is 59 degrees right now... We are freezing.... Send help...
It was fun for a day, but now we are over it.. just too cold...
Talk about a bath!!! We put our bathroom heaters on and stay in
our bathrooms in hot soaking tubs!
It looks like snow outside right now. Burrr..
Our teeth are chattering... are lips are chapping... soon our noses
will be running... burrrrrrrr
Our outside shower is almost finished being built and we're afraid to go out and use it! burrrrrrrrr

webwabbit takes a bath

Now this really sucks. I know my fellow bloggers have things to post about, and it only takes a few minutes. But I'm reduced to posting about taking a bath to fill the dead air in here.

So...tonight, I had a bath. For those of you who are healthy and limber enough to be able to get in and out of a bathtub, this will seem like a stupid thing about which one would be so pleased. However, if you have been unable to bend one knee for a few years and have no elbows and wrists to hoist yourself up with sans two legs, it is a big deal. I always loved soaking in the tub and I have the accoutrements to prove it. It took me a good long time to scrub the tub out to begin with - something I did seated in a chair and bending over. The downside to having knee replacement surgery is that you cannot, under any circumstances, be on your hands and knees, and you cannot imagine how inconvenient that can be. Anyway, having a sparkling clean tub tempted me to try lowering myself into the bath for a soak. What a treat. And by using one arm on the edge of the tub and a safety rail with the other hand, I was able to get enough of my legs under me to pull myself up. Success! I can once again lounge in a hot bath without needing help to haul myself out!

webwabbit is 50

I'm not inclined to do much celebrating on my birthday. It always seemed to be just another day to me, and honestly, this one would have been no different. But that's what family is for, right?

Dinu stopped by in the morning with flowers and a couple cards, then left. PopPop and I spent the day puttering around while Queenee went to a 90th birthday party for Beverly's father.

Dog and FluffyDuf arrived at about 6:30pm and a bit after 7pm, DamCat and Deacon came bearing mass quantities of Chinese food. The girls made their own wonderful cards and H found a beautiful turtleneck sweater that is perfect for me, my favorite chartreuse green! DamCat gave me a lovely green marble rabbit, which now has a place of pride on my computer. Queenee found lots of things for me - several pairs of socks (which are great because it's something I always forget to buy for myself), sweats and pj's (my uniforms), a Munch The Scream t-shirt, ginger, a beautiful wooden box (y'all know how I love boxes), sugar scrub ... well, she went crazy, as usual. And FluffyDuf found a blanket with skulls! How cool is that?

Queenee got me 50 roses; they are so beautiful, we refuse to take them off the table. Queenee also got me my favorite cake, carrot cake, on which H creatively spelled out 50 with the candles (since she was a couple candles short of actually having 50). I failed to blow them all out, but I think that's just as well, since I would have ended up coughing and spitting all over the cake and that's just gross.

The highlight of the evening was Helium Karaoke. C was hysterical, doing her interpretations of Abba and The Band. I have some of it on video and will link to it when I get it edited. She had us in tears, we were laughing so hard. [Edit: here are the videos - I'm comin' out, Fernando, and last, but definitely not least, The Weight.]

We had a great time, and I enjoyed my birthday in spite of myself. Thanks, everyone!

Dinu - US citizen

The whole process is finally complete and he has reached his goal. Dinu is a US citizen.

The ceremony itself was only about 20 minutes, maybe 25 minutes. The wait was forever. His appointment was at 9am, and if he has learned nothing else from me, he has learned to be early for appointments of importance. Unfortunately, I was also there at 8:30am, because I thought he needed a copy of our marriage certificate and might have forgotten to take it with him. Turned out he didn't need it, so I didn't need to be there before about noon.

Anyway, having arrived at 8:30am, he got in the queue, turned in his green card and went into the Hynes auditorium to his seat. He was lucky to get an end seat in about the eighth row. I went upstairs to the visitors balcony and found a good seat. And then the wait began.

The appointment form tells you that the ceremony may take six hours. What it *should* tell you is, bring a book, or a magazine, or something to entertain yourself, because 5-1/2 of those 6 hours will be spent sitting in a rather uncomfortable chair, waiting. Those of us in the balcony had some small measure of padding on our seats. The wretched masses on the floor were sitting on metal folding chairs.

Dinu's 9am appointment was the earliest scheduled check-in, along with maybe 200 others. Altogether, 1804 people became citizens during this ceremony, and we were told that is a smaller than usual group. Average is closer to 3000. I sure hope they break that into a morning and afternoon session.

All that is left is getting a passport, and he's done. At last he is beholden to no one.