Quincy's World

I was going to title this March Madness, but this madness will run into April. Some of you know this and others do not, but we are getting a new puppy in April – a Bernese Mountain Dog. I know, quite a big difference from Ashby – that was sort of the main idea. Well, we won’t know if our dog will be a boy or girl until about a week before we leave to pick him/her up (pick up date is April 17th). We have our list of names and thus the reason for this post.

If your NCAA brackets blew up because of Kansas losing last week, well, fear not – you can try our name bracket! We have 32 names for girls and 32 names for boys. We haven’t even decided on a name yet, but we have narrowed it down to a Final Four in each gender. Over in the sidebar, you will find links to the ‘Berner Brackets’ I created. I have four sections of seeds ranked 1 through 8. I have the official answer key made up already except for the end. Our Final Four is set for both sexes, but we still need to decide who will win.

The first round will be this weekend. Check back and see how your guesses have matched up to the winners. Yes, I have free time on my hands, but Dara is the one who came up with the names to fill in the gaps. Not sure if this information will help anyone, but the breakdown of the litter is: 5 girls and 2 boys.

I came up with a “game” schedule where I will post the winners of each round. April 15th is the date we meet our puppy in person, but we’ll already know the gender and name by then (but not by much). Let’s see if this makes the time go by faster or slower . . .

March 28th – down to 16 names each.
March 30th – down to 8 names each.
April 2nd – down to 4 names each.
April 4th – down to 2 names each.
April 7th – winner of each gender.
April 15th – puppy’s name revealed.

I will be continuing our Florida narrative shortly, but had one other quick thing to write about. Quincy loves LEGOs. And he loves the Star Wars LEGOs. I’m not sure how many of you know this, but there are a lot of people out there who make stop-action movies using LEGOs of all varieties. In the past, I would scour YouTube for homemade movies to show him. There’s one he liked a lot that is simply a LEGO elevator with Star Wars LEGO guys going in and out saying different things. He loved it. I started to wonder what it would entail to do that with him here at home.

Turns out, it isn’t that hard to do. I have all the equipment already and just needed time and patience. I have the time – patience is being worked on. We have made a few test movies and practiced different techniques so far, but yesterday Quincy bugged me for a while for us to make one. We made a short movie that came out pretty well considering we are newbies at this. I did the stop-action work, sound effects and music, but Quincy did all the voice work and had some conceptual ideas as well.

Here’s where you can find the finished product. Needless to say, we’ve got more things in the works, but it takes a long time to do and I need to come up with some different ideas. If Quincy’s cousins have any ideas – shoot ’em over! Stayed tuned from Quincy’s Hampden Studios!

The post title is a joke. Some of you will get it, but most won’t. A guy needs to have some fun with his readers. Okay, so we didn’t drive to Florida, but this series of posts will be about our trip to Florida that occurred over the first week of March. If you’ve read the timeline recently, then you have an outline of the events that went on during our visit.

The last time Quincy flew was March 2009 and that was down to Maryland. A couple things were different this time: the flight would be much longer (almost 3 hours) and Quincy would be ditching the car seat and flying like and adult (if adults could fly, we wouldn’t have needed the plane I guess). But I digress. When flying with a young child or children, I would recommend direct flights as much as possible (when available). It simplifies things tremendously and helps me, personally, as I have a very large fear of flying. Well, not so much the flying itself, but the crashing and burning that could result if we stopped flying. On this trip, I dubbed planes “coffins with wings” – I felt it was accurate. Back to the narrative. . .

Our flight was out of Manchester, NH and scheduled at 1:25pm. Since it takes us almost 4 hours to drive to the airport from our house, we decided to drive down the Saturday before and spend the night locally. It makes the travel day go so much more smoothly (as we have done this before). I re-read my post from 3 years ago about our trip to Florida and noted that we stayed in a different hotel this time – a Hampton Inn. It was very close to the airport and they have a hot breakfast – always key for us.

Checking in was interesting. A lot of New England (but not us in northern Maine) had been hit with snow and ice a few days before our trip. There were lots of power outages in New Hampshire. The Hampton Inn was full and our room wasn’t even ready for us. There were a lot of people in the lobby area just waiting for their room to be ready. I’d guess we had to wait about 30 minutes or so before we could check in. We just hung out and Quincy played games on my iPod Touch.

There were only two things we wanted to do before bedtime: 1) let Quincy “swim” in the pool and 2) have a nice dinner in Manchester. We did both of those things but #1 made #2 almost impossible. The reason? Quincy was very tired by the time we headed for dinner due to the swimming at the hotel. He loved his time in the pool, but it wore him out. Remember how I mentioned the power outages? Well, it didn’t dawn on me that would make people go out for supper. Whoopsie. Restaurant number one had an hour wait. We knew that wouldn’t work at all. We went to another place close by and the wait was much shorter. The food was so-so, the service was worse and Quincy was trying to sleep in the booth. Needless to say, not an ideal dinner.

On the way back to the hotel after dinner, Quincy fell asleep. We’re talking a 5 or so minute drive. That little cat nap actually gave him enough energy that he had trouble going to sleep. We had two queen-sized beds, so he was king of his castle for the night. Dara camped out in the bathroom reading and I watched an old MST3K on our bed while Quincy attempted to fall asleep. He finally went to sleep, but got up at 6am. The plus side to that was the fact that breakfast started at 6am too. So, we were able to have a nice breakfast without hoards of people gobbling up all the food. I’m not sure how, but they did manage to screw up scrambled eggs. Maybe they were powdered.

Since we were up, we decided that getting to the airport early would be the best option for us – mainly because we didn’t have our boarding passes yet. I tried to get them the previous night, but was only allowed to print out “security documents” – something that has never happened before when flying on Southwest. We were nervous about what that meant.

I love the Manchester airport. It is never crowded. We got to the SW counter at just before 9:25am. How do I know this? You can’t check your bags in more than 4 hours before your flight. I had to re-check them again and this time they went through and we got our boarding passes – Group C (not good). We passed through security in about 2 minutes since there was no line (wait til I get to Orlando later) and headed for the gate.

What does one do with about 4 hours to kill in a small regional airport with a 4 and a half year old? I’ll let you all mull that over until next time . . . .

This Olympic go ’round is really the first one that Quincy can watch and enjoy. It is funny to find out which sports he likes and those he does not. In the “I like” category we have: ski jumping, biathlon (due to the shooting), moguls, hockey, snow boarding events, and curling, yes, curling. In the “Don’t care” category we have: luge, skating (sorry mom), downhill skiing, cross-country skiing (no shooting) and ice dancing.

I wasn’t sure how much he was really absorbing until today. I haven’t really explained the whole gold, silver and bronze medal thing to him explicitly, but he must have picked it up from us and the announcers. Today, he decided to put “medals” on his Olympic Team of bears. He even told us who won the medals in what event. So, below, I have a picture of the team with and without the coach.