Lego Love

At the end of our vacation, we had a treat for Zane.  It was stupendous.  It was colossal.  It was...The Lego Discovery Center! 

Yes, they have one of these places in Grapevine, and apparently it is Nerdvana for children and men alike.  We had to wait in line, because the joint was slammed with people.  In the first portion of the visit, they discuss how they make the lego bricks, and each child gets a commemorative brick for "helping" to make some legos.  Then the children are let loose, and a frenzy ensues.  Okay, maybe not a frenzy.

These legos were HUGE, and soft.  I wish that they sold these, because I could totally build a nice castle in my bedroom using these bricks! 

I wasn't the only adult thinking of playing with these bricks--there were a couple of adults IN the pit building a tower with these legos.  They originally showed up with a child, but I'm pretty sure that they bricked her up in the tower, which ended up being well over six feet high. 

There were lots of cool things made out of lego bricks, too.  I admire the patience of people who spend hours and hours and hours doing nothing but putting legos together to form buildings or mountains or whatever.  I am also sure that many of these people do not date. Ever. When would they have the time?

This is downtown Dallas, Texas.

I am not really sure what this is, but I thought that it looked cool.

This is the gigantic Ferris wheel that shows up at the State Fair.

This is an airport, and an airplane built out of legos. It may actually fly.

Zane and his father had a blast, and I had a blast watching them have a blast, so it was all good.  Zane is currently into Ninjago, and there's a ninja named Zane that we were trying to find, with no luck this time. 

That's it for our wonderful, kid-friendly vacation.  We had fun, got sweaty, and slept in hotels for a week, but it is time to go back home and do laundry and upload pictures and all those wonderful things that make a house a home.  I will be glad to pet my cats and see if my houseplants survived.  School will be starting up soon, but I'm not going to think about that! 

"We Was Semi-Robbed"

This morning right after I got out of bed, went downstairs, and turned on the coffee pot, I took my "briefcase" and some other stuff out to the car. I do this often because then I don't have to worry about carrying four tons of things while rushing around trying to get out the door. It was still half past dark, but I still noticed that our neighbor was getting into his car to leave.

When I opened the trunk, I paused. All of the stuff that we keep in the trunk-reusable shopping bags, a blanket, a camera tripod, a first aid kit and various random items, was not where it was supposed to be. It looked as if we had slammed on the brakes and all of the stuff had been flung around. This made my Spidey-sense tingle a bit, but I chalked it up to randomness, put what I had carried out of the house into the trunk, and went back inside. I was picking up the paper and anticipating my hot cup of coffee. I decided to yell at Larry about leaving the car unlocked later.

About forty-five minutes later, it was time for us to go. Zane and I headed out the door first, and I opened the car door and let him get in. I went to put my purse on the front seat, and I noticed that there was stuff all over the floorboards. I looked at it, blinked, and registered that most of it was stuff that was supposed to be in the glove compartment. Then the little tiny refrigerator lightbulb in my brain clicked on, and I opened the door of the glove compartment. It was empty, because most of the stuff that had been in there had been pulled out.

I looked in the center console. There were more items strewn about, and more things that weren't where they were supposed to be. I put Zane into his car seat, and I noticed that all the items that had been in the seat pockets(pullups, wipes, maps) had been thrown on the floor. It became obvious that someone had been in our car. Larry had by this time come out of the house, and I informed him of my deduction. He was less than impressed by my conclusion.

"What the heck did he take?" he wanted to know. So I started looking. All the loose change that we kept in the center console, which probably added up to two dollars on a good day, was gone. Three or four cds were missing. As we looked through the car, I gathered the 'trash' and put it in a bag, so the car would be clean. Later, I would realize that a sandwich bag of about 60 tokens from Chuck E. Cheese was also missing(I had left it in the glove compartment). That was all we could think of that might be missing, because most of what stays in our car is child related. Not really anything worth stealing.

As we were driving up our street discussing whether someone had indeed gone through our car-trash and taken some stuff, Larry spotted two police cars and some people standing on their front lawns. Larry pulled in behind one of the police cars, got out and spoke to one of the officers for a minute. Apparently someone went up and down our street breaking into cars. He also tried to open someone's garage door, which set off an alarm and got someone's attention. That person called the authorities, I guess.

I am feeling a bit creeped out about all this. I spend more time worrying about surviving a Zombie apocalypse than having our car broken into, and now that bugs me. What if this guy had been nearby when I walked out to put the stuff in the trunk? This guy was probably only looking for loose change(and if he didn't have an overhead light on, that bag of game tokens must have felt like a ginormous bag of quarters), and items he could carry off quickly, but if he had taken me out, the front door of our house was unlocked. Easy pickings with my husband and son asleep upstairs. That thought makes me extremely angry. It makes me want to hurt this person, who is probably just a random teenager who decided to see what he could get in the way of spare change. I still want to punch him in the face. A lot.