Skipped everything but the last 2 pages. Hope everyone's doing well. The trip to TN was great.. except the ride home. Took 12+ hours instead of the 10 it took to get there b/c of construction and disabled vehicles.
We visited the Ripley's Aquarium, Knoxville Zoo, Rainforest Adventures, Forbidden Caverns, saw Spiderman in the theater. Ate too much fast food. Spent wayyy too much $$ on junk. Kids only got to swim once. Spent a lot of time at the convention center & got a lot of team bonding in.
My daughter's clogging routine got platinum, 5th place over all, a judge's award for "owning the stage", and a callback. They performed again on Saturday & didn't win, but they did win $100 cash prize.. so that's like $16 when divided between her teammates. The other routine got high gold. The other clogging routine my daughter isn't in got double platinum & 10th place, but their division was much more cutthroat.
We had 2 performances, both clogging, in the callbacks. It was a really great week. We had a lot more stuff we wanted to do, but dance stuff came first and the days were long so there was little opportunity to do anything on dance days.
We grabbed a box of Georgia peaches on the way home for $20.. spent last night blanching a freezing most of them.
Links to her dances:
Beautiful Life - Clogging (my daughter is the giant)
Tribute to Mom - Jazz (my daughter starts in the back left)
I've got a question for you all in the south about something. We stopped at a DQ one day for lunch. We got our food and everything was fine. The cashier was an older woman who was super nice. The cook messed up my daughter's sandwich and they were super nice about fixing it. Then while we were eating an older man (75+ years old) came towards our section w/ a tray of desserts and asked if they were ours. I said no, he didn't seem to understand. I told him we had our food, our number was 33, and that food, number 3, belonged to someone out in the main area. He left and came back a little while later and wiped off the table next to us and said he found where that other 3 went. We chatted w/ him a little b/c he seemed like a nice old man. He asked where we were from and I told him Ohio, & we're here for the dance competition. He turned to my older daughter and asked her what kind of dance she did. She said clogging. He told us that there were cloggers there the day before, also from Ohio. I said "Oh, she was probably one of ours, there aren't any other cloggers here from Ohio". Then says "but you're more attractive" to my daughter. Then he goes on to ask "How old are you? 17?". She says she's 16. I don't remember what he said after that, but as soon as he walked away we gathered our stuff and left. As we were walking out he says You girls come back again. We walked quickly to our car, locked the doors, and left.
So my question is: Is that just how southern people are or was that guy a total creeper? I didn't get the pedo vibe from him originally, but any time someone asks my teen daughter's ages it bothers me. I'm going to email the DQ people about it, but I can't tell if he was just being a weird old man, or if he was being a pervert.
We encountered several people who made me feel a bit uneasy while we were traveling (people staring a little too long), but this was the only time someone blatantly said something that didn't seem right.
Awesome! 
20 years further in to global warming just to get even.
Google Seattle weather, or just wait for that brief glimpse at the tiny little mild in the mostly hidden corner on the weather channel and HLN morning maps.
