Bluebells

Spring time is a magical time of year with flowers and trees blooming and bright colors coming back to nature. A few weeks ago, I saw someone post pictures on Facebook about the bluebells being in bloom and I decided I needed to try to see them again! 

I saw them in April of 2021 with two of my friends. Here's the link to that time that I went to see the bluebells.

This year, I took my niece and my nephew, Bridgette and Davin, with me to see the bluebells. We drove to Bull Run Regional Park on a beautiful sunny Tuesday morning (the kiddos were on spring break and I was staying with them while their parents were out of town).

It was so pretty! It's hard to capture how cool it actually was in person. If you ever get a chance to see fields of bluebells in bloom in person, I highly recommend it! Pictures don't do it justice.

Bridgette, Davin and I on the bluebell trail. It was a beautiful sunny day that day! 

I actually got to see two different places of beautiful bluebells blooming this year. I heard that River Bend Park near Great Falls had some bluebells also. I had time and it was a nice day on a Monday morning (and I wasn't watching my niece and nephew any more) so I decided to do some hiking at River Bend Park. 

 

 It was soooo worth it! It was gorgeous!

There were bluebells on both sides of the trail and the Potomac River on one side.

 I wish my camera did better at close ups but alas it's not great.

Once again, if you ever get a chance to see bluebells in bloom in person, I highly recommend it! They're so pretty! I'm so glad that I got to go to two places not too far away and see the bluebells.

Clara Barton Missing Soldier's Office Museum and National Portrait Gallery

One of my friends told me about the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum in downtown Washington D.C. that she had visited a couple of days before. 

 

I had never heard of the museum but it sounded really interesting. I invited two of my friends (who I also used to work with) to go with me to the museum.  I really liked the museum!

 

 

It took about an hour to go through the museum and it cost a little bit of money, but it was worth it. It was really interesting and I learned a lot about Clara Barton. She was an awesome lady!

 

Before going to this museum, I actually hadn't even heard of the Missing Soldiers Office. Clara Barton opened the office in 1865 to help family members of soldiers find their loved ones who were captured or had gone missing during the Civil War. The office stayed open for four years.

In the 1990s, the building where the museum is now was sold to a person who was going to knock the building down.  Someone was searching through the attic before knocking it down and found some stuff connected to Clara Barton. 

After some research they realized that Clara Barton had lived in that building and that the Missing Soldiers Office had also been located in that building. Finding that stuff in the attic saved the building from being knocked down. 

I'm so happy that they didn't end up knocking down the building because what a piece of history would have been lost if they had. Obviously we would have still known about Clara Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office but to be in the actual room where the office was located was awesome!

I don't know if this picture will be big enough to read if you click on it but it's quite an interesting story. The letter on the left is from a sister of a soldier who hadn't heard from her brother in over two years and she wrote to the Missing Soldiers Office asking for help in locating him. Clara Barton put the soldiers name on the Missing Soldiers list that was posted in all of the major cities. 

The middle letter is from the brother to the Missing Soldiers Office. He ended up seeing his own name on the list and wrote back saying he was mortified to see his name on the list and that he would contact his family when he wanted to. (But he hadn't written them in two years and he didn't think that his family might wonder where he was. What a jerk.)

The letter on the right is the letter from Clara Barton to the soldier. Clara Barton wrote the soldier back and put him in his place. I like that the letter shows Clara's personality and let's the soldier know that he was jerk (although the word jerk was not used in the letter). 

The sign they found in the attic of the building that gave a clue that Clara Barton had a connection to this building. 

 

This room is where the Missing Soldiers Office was located when it was open. (Obviously the chairs and the projector were not part of the original office) ;)

Sandy and Heather and I outside of the museum. If you're ever in Washington D.C. and looking for something new to do, I highly recommend visiting this museum!

Since I knew we were going to be downtown around lunchtime I looked up places to eat near where the museum was. I found a pizza place with good reviews (Ella's Wood Fired Kitchen) and we decided to try that. We ended up not eating there, though, because when we arrived there to get a table they couldn't tell us how long the wait was going to be. We were worried the wait might be a long time (since it was clearly a popular place) so we decided to find someplace else to eat.

I remembered this pizza place around the corner (Pi Pizzeria) from previous times I had been downtown and we decided to go there instead. Their wait time was only twenty minutes but ended up being only five minutes. Yay!

Sandy, Heather, and I shared garlic knots and a pizza and we all thoroughly enjoyed the lunch. :) We all said we would happily eat there again. (I really loved the garlic knots there; they were delicious!)

After we ate lunch we visited the National Portrait Gallery to see the new life size painting of President Abraham Lincoln. Not that the painting is new itself (because it was painted in 1865 by W.F.K. Travers) but that it's new to the National Portrait Gallery. It's on a long-term loan from the Hartley Dodge Foundation.

I should've taken a picture of myself with the painting so you could tell how big the painting actually is. Oh well. It was cool to see though!

 

We walked through all of the Presidents Gallery at the National Portrait Museum and I really liked this painting of President Barack Obama.

 

 We saw some other exhibits at the museum and they were cool but I didn't take many other pictures.
 

Going to the National Portrait Gallery was the last thing on our agenda for the day, but Sandy wanted to see the cherry blossoms while we were downtown (especially since the weekend we were there it was peak cherry blossom time).

So we made our way to the Tidal Basin. Along the way to the cherry blossoms we saw this happening in front of the Washington Monument, some sister nuns (I don't know what they're called) playing frisbee. That was a unique sight to see.

We made it to the Tidal Basin! It was really crowded so we didn't walk all of the way around but we got to enjoy seeing some of the cherry blossom trees. 

I didn't take any pictures of the flowers myself because there were so many people and I've been there before and knew I wasn't going to get any great photos that day.

But Heather took this photo and the photo below!

Heather had a nicer camera with her and she's much better at taking photos of flowers than I am.

It was a fun day visiting downtown Washington D.C. and going to a new museum. Thanks Heather and Sandy for coming with me on this field trip!

California Girls' Weekend

A couple of months ago, one of my sisters suggested a girls weekend with all of us sisters and our mom. We found a weekend that worked for all of us and booked tickets to go. The meeting place of choice was southern California.  My sister, Kristina, lives with her family in southern California.

I flew out of National Airport which can be cool if you sit on the correct side of the plane to see the national monuments in downtown Washington D.C. from the air.

Lara, K and I on a walk near K's house the first evening in California.

The next day Heather, Mom, and I went to the San Diego Zoo while Lara and Kristina stayed at K's house to take care of the household until K's husband got home from work.
 

We knew we were going to be hungry by the time we made it to the zoo, so I researched places to eat in the zoo. The only restaurant inside the zoo with decent reviews was Sweet Shack (but there also were only two reviews). We decided to test it out and eat at Sweet Shack. The food was delicious! (Just as a side note, although it's name is Sweet Shack, it did not only have sweet food there).

After we ate lunch, we saw most of what was on that side of the zoo. We saw cool birds and reptiles and monkeys etc.

We took the skyfari to the other side of the park and saw more cool and cute animals.

 

We saw red pandas and leopards and elephants and bears and giraffes and all sorts of other kinds of animals that I cannot name here. (H took the pictures of animals I have on this post.)

The San Diego Zoo is apparently one of the best zoos in the world. 

Mom, Heather, and I spent a lot of the day at the zoo and got a lot of steps in. It was a really nice sunny day that day (which was nice since K said it had been raining most of the days before that day).

 

After the zoo, we met up with Lara and K and walked around the area that our Airbnb was to find food for dinner.

We ended up eating at Marcy's Taco Shop which was delicious! I got a chicken taco and a carnitas taco. I enjoyed both, but I think I liked the chicken one slightly better. :)

 

The next day we headed back north (just for the day) to see my nephew, Andrew, do shot put at an invitational meet he was invited to.

 

 Andrew ended up getting third place overall in shot put. Good job Andrew!

We ate lunch at Burger Lounge which was really good!

 

 We got donuts from Sidecar Donuts for dessert!

 

We got six different donuts. Lara got a gluten-free one and the rest of us tried a little bit of each of the other five. They were good! I liked a couple of the donuts more than the others but they were all good.

 

After we ate, we went on a whale watching boat tour. It was a two hour tour and we saw two gray whales making there way north to the Arctic waters to feed. 

We were able to follow them from a safe distance and saw them blow out of their spout quite a few times and saw their tales multiple times. It was a nice tour. (I didn't get any pictures of the whales because they were a little too far for my camera to catch a good picture).

 

You know when you're on vacation, calories don't count right?! ;) We got ice cream at Cowafornia after the boat tour.

We headed back to San Diego and drove to Old Town San Diego to eat dinner. Old Town is a fun place to walk around and go into the different shops and look at all the restaurants etc. We ate at Miguel's Mexican restaurant. I don't remember what I got, but I remember enjoying it!

The next morning, Lara, K, Mom and I went on a walk near our Airbnb. It was a nice area and a lovely walk. 

We went to an hour of church this morning where the parking was horrible. K had to park a few blocks away, because no parking was available closer to the church building.

We got food from The Crack Shack, a chicken place, for lunch. It was pretty good! 

We wanted to hang out more in this part of San Diego but we had a hard time finding parking near where we wanted to go so we drove to Cabrillo National Monument.

Cabrillo National Monument has a beautiful view!

 

A view of downtown San Diego from Cabrillo!

 

 

 

After Cabrillo, we headed back to K's house. It was a fun, mostly relaxing weekend in San Diego with awesome company and delicious food!

Lara, Heather, and Mom left the next day (Monday) to go back home. I stayed until Thursday and hung out with K and her family. I might do a separate blogpost about the time after everyone else left, but we'll see if I actually do.

 

Temp Agency

Job searching sucks. I know the best way to find a job is through connections, but that's really hard to do. Especially when I don't know exactly what type of job I want (since I loved my most recent job and I don't think I can find another job like that one) and it also requires talking to people about my situation.

About a month ago, I decided I needed to change the way I was looking for a job and ended up signing up for a temp agency. I knew it was something I should do to at least have some money coming in even if it was only for a day or two job. 

There were a lot of things holding me back from applying for a temp agency earlier.  I was stuck, I was scared, I was insecure. I still struggle with all of those things but I finally got a little bit of courage and applied for a job through a temp agency. It was scary, but I did it.

I had a phone interview with one of the recruiters and at the end of the call she asked if I'd like to do a one day job the next day answering phones and greeting visitors in an office. I said yes but I was super stressed the rest of the day and didn't sleep very well that night in anticipation of the job. I was trying not to panic on my way to the office the next morning. But you know what, it ended up being okay. 

The next week I got a call from my recruiter saying that that same company would like me back for three days. And then later the next two weeks. I just finished my second full week at the temp job. I'll be there next week too and then we'll see what happens after that. It's been a learning and growing experience and I'm glad that I finally got a little courage and signed up for the temp agency.

I have no idea if anything will come from my employment with the temp agency but at least I'm gaining some experience and I have some money coming in for now.

 

So this post isn't all just words, here's a pretty picture on one of my favorite trails!