The Final Brown-Belt Test!

It's Calebs final brown-belt test before he can test for 1st level black belt. That will be a while yet as I believe the lad has to be 13 years old for that test. No matter, he wants to take a break for a bit and he has a little leeway for just such a situation. 

He's been doing Tae Kwon Do for a little over two years now with not many breaks and does pretty awesome at it.

Kickin' Cousins!  Caleb on the left and to his left in the photo is his cousin, Jonah!  I have no idea who took this photo or the one that follows it, but I suspect it may be from the Martial-Arts America web page, so thanks for the great pics of our boy!

Caleb has good form on his high kicks!  Well, pretty good on all of his kicks, really.

Schmitz 2018 Vaca, Post 6 - Pt. II, Boston "ducks" tour

Part II of the Boston duck boat tours starts where we left off last time with driving around the city and now going into the Chawles (Charles) river!

I've said in many prior posts on this blog that I am not a huge fan of being in water.  I love to look at it, I love hearing the sounds it makes.  I love seeing what it can do to rocks and riverbeds as far as shaping them, but to be in it, whether swimming or in various boats... not my thing.

But here we are!

The bridges that you can see from the 2nd picture from Part I of our Boston time.  Now we're under them and getting ready to enter the Charles River.

Heading down the ramp!  The dude in front of us was on his phone the ENTIRE tour... no joke!

This was a part of another picture similar to the one above, but I happened to catch the face of a boy (Robby!) who looks like he is having some doubts about whether a bus that drives around the city should be driving into a river.  Not gonna lie, it seemed like a bad idea to me too.

But this little ham n' egger is still smiling.

In the water and sort of thinking about the duck boat in Missouri (I believe it was) that got caught in the storm in mid-July where 17 people lost their lives.  The weather says otherwise, but water is water and I don't trust it...

I believe that largest, longest building in this shot is the Suffolk County Sheriffs department and county jail.  I believe the "Codfather" made a comment about the "lock-ups" having the best view of the harbor.

A shot of the narrow pass where boats and their tour guides need to coordinate with other heading in or out, on various tours.  This shot is quite evident in the last pic on this post of our path.

What the heck is going on here betwixt the "Codfather" and Calebber????

AHHHHH!!!  He was being "sworn in" as an official driver of the duck boat tour!

Time to leave... apparently.

The man.  The myth.  The legend!   The Codfather.

The black line in the water is indicative of our path for this part of the tour.

Next up is the final part of our Boston time with us walking all over the friggin' place!

Schmitz 2018 Vaca, Post 5 - Pt. I, Boston "ducks" tour

Next up after driving up and around NYC proper, we headed off thru Connecticut, into Rhode Island and up to South of Boston in a town called... uh...  Milton!

We stayed at an AirBnB off of Randolph Ave. which was ran by a lovely woman who got us dialed right into the Browns game and then mocked us for liking the Browns and Rams...

Wouldn't you know it, she was a Patriots fan!  I almost couldn't stay but she was soooo nice, so fun, you just had to forgive that one short-coming.

She was also the one who gave Momma detailed instructions on who to work the bus lines down to the train lines that would take us to within two blocks of where we wanted to land in downtown Boston the next morning.

Can't beat that!

I still feel bad that when I was giving out feedback thru the AirBnB page that I only gave her 4 out of 5 stars because there were tiny ants in the kitchen...  she more than made up for the few little varmints and deserved 5 out of 5.  Or at least, 4.75 out of 5 but, at the time anyway,  their site was only set up for whole stars.  Anyway, still feel bad about that.

On to that next morning...

That's our ride for the next hour or so...  the duck boat, not the dinosaur, although that would have been pretty sweet too!

Waiting to leave and getting some ground rules laid down, I snapped a picture, unknowingly of course,  of where our duck boat would enter the water.  It's way back there under those bridges.

Boston Holocaust Memorial finished in 1995.  Right on the back side of this is Union street which houses the ye olde Union Oyster House, which is where we had a most excellent lunch! 

Part of the Freedom Trail hike, this building contains the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Co. as well as the Bostonian Society Museum shop, a creamery and a few other things.  I think that's a statue of Samuel Adams that you can sort of make out if you squint really hard.

The site of the Boston Massacre at the Old State House.  We stood in the very spot of it later on while hiking...  you'll see that later, should you come back.

Couldn't tell you where we were at here, but it was amazing to me how you had these little cematerys were in the middle of this very large city, and I'm guessing the were not back when they were started! 

Not that you can tell it from this pic, but the tile work on this building was truly amazing!

This is the Boston Public Gardens park, also now known as the Good Will Hunting park as there were apparently a few scenes filmed here.

And just around the corner, but still across the street from Boston Public Gardens is the bar where Cheers was filmed as you can kinda tell by the yellow flag.

Another side of the Boston Public Gardens.

No clue what church this is and the picture doesn't do it justice, but the stone work was amazing!!

Again, no clue...

Even better stone work that you can't really see.  Beautiful old church!

Our tour guide, The Codfather.   He was funny as crap, knew his history and wasn't afraid to talk!!

And last before we drop into the water, the Massachusetts State House.

So that's enough for this post...  part II will be the duck boat in the water and then likely a part III for while we were walking around, and we walked a LONG ways!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

For a while there thru late Fall and into the early winter, it seemed as if we would never get snow.  The dam finally burst, as they say and we had a good snow event followed by another respectable snow event only a week later.

Now we have a wintry mix in the forecast for tomorrow along with another weather system expected to bring an additional inch or two of snow on this coming Thursday.

Wooo-hoooo!!!

Less than 36 hours before the first decent snow fall,  there was a night with a most beautiful sunset.  Fire in the sky that night as Facebook lit up with pictures of it from various places across the U.S.  Oh, it was in the mid-60's in the afternoon on this lovely day.

36 hours later...  Note that this isn't at our house and I did NOT take these pictures but rather friends of ours and Caleb was over at their house staying the night.

Speaking of Caleb, that's him on the right along with his buddies Jack and Max clearing their driveway.

Meanwhile, back at our house,  I was teaching Rob how to use the snowblower without losing any appendages.  He was not real confident about this once he felt the power that this thing has, but he did good.

After snow event #2, Robby and I had got the driveway cleared until the next go-around.

A make-shift path over to the neighbors house so the boys don't track a ton of snow in when the go over there in the mornings that we both are at work.

Tasty Taco Face

Caleb has discovered Tasty Tacos thanks to our friends the Cunninghams!

Basketball Scrimmage, Part I

Rob had his first basketball scrimmage tonight.  other than the fact that he didn't get on the court until 56 minutes after I thought he would, he did AWESOME!!!!

Robby's first shot was a 3 pointer from the top of the arch and he made 3 other baskets on the night, accounting for 9 of their teams 19 points.

He also stole the ball at least 4 times and had one juke on a kid where he stopped running and dribbled behind his back for a quick pass to the teammate under the basket for another 2 points.

Fun night overall!

Rob is number 25 defending the fella with ball in this shot.

This ref is awesome and this certainly is NOT the first time that she has appeared in this blog-space!  She has more fun than the kids and in this pic is inviting Conner (sp???) over to inbound the ball.  Conner has Down-Syndrome and works hard on the court!   

The boys all did great making sure Conner got some playing time!

You can't tell, but I snapped this one while Rob was clearly in the field of play and in site of the camera.  He's behind that scrum of  players in the pic getting ready to shoot.  He missed this one but it was rebounded and made by a teammate.