Before heading out to school this morning… she’s such the cute little rebel. She had been yammering for shiny black doc martens but they don’t make the style she wanted in her small foot size but we lucked out and found them elsewhere. I should have had her pose with her new black ‘punk princess’ messenger bag. I fully expect to see her with her guitar fronting a band dressed just the same in a few years but with more snarl and less hugs 😉
We had a long day – Hayley came home from my folks, went to a birthday party, headed to our neighborhood Fall/Halloween Festival and then watched Twilight outside at the Lanes’ house on their huge projector screen. Cold but much fun!
I was helping during the festival so I didn’t take many photos.
I posted a few before but here are all sixty photos from the party!
Fhew, what a great birthday this turned out to be! Hayley had Emma, Kennedy and Mason over and they started with manicures and pedicures at Sweet and Sassy, the limo ride, dinner at Ginza, a Japanese steakhouse, then home for cake, Wii, movies and sleepover.
See more photos from this set: Regular view (easiest to find one in particular or print) Slideshow view (easiest to see them all)
A few early photos from the Birthday spa/limo/dinner/sleepover extravaganza Saturday.
After mani-pedis at Sweet And Sassy:
Getting in the limo outside of Sweet And Sassy:
Limo ride:
Dinner at Ginza (japanese steakhouse):
Playing Wii:
And then they went up to the playroom to watch Bolt until the week hours… I made waffles that morning and they played for video games and everyone headed home about mid-day.
Several of my friends named it Snowbama day since we got six inches on Tuesday the day of the inauguration of President Obama, it made me chuckle so I keep using it. Besides all we did that day was either snow or inauguration related anyway.
See more photos from this set: Regular view (easiest to find one in particular or print) Slideshow view (easiest to see them all)
Hayley found this stunned complete half circle rainbow on the way home from the beach. We had to pull over and take photos it was so lovely. At one point there were two, one echoing the other.
See more photos from this set: Regular view (easiest to find one in particular or print) Slideshow view (easiest to see them all)
Yeah for REAL, Hayley’s photo and Michelle’s words are on CNN’s website! They were doing a special on Harry Potter and asked for good quality photos of kids in HP gear. So I sent them a really good one from Halloween. They CALLED me on Monday to talk to me about it all.
And then whammo, we are in the gallery of photos and the story!
Turns out they picked seven photos for the gallery and Hayley’s photo was one the seven posted! She is #3.
You will be getting a formal letter regarding your admission and next
steps, but I wanted to be the first to let you know. I am certain you
will do well in the program, and I think you also can give us feedback
to help us improve what we are doing.
Cool article about a group of researchers who are staking out a local historical house to see if they can get the rumored ghosts to appear.
It’s extra cool to us because we had our wedding reception at the old house. It’s a great old house with a gorgeous lawn. ….
Researchers to see who gives up ghost Durham center invites ghostbusters to work
By ANNE BLYTHE, Staff Writer
CHAPEL HILL — There no doubt will be much spirited debate during this event. Ghost hunters plan to hole up in the historic Horace Williams house tonight to try to coax answers to mysteries that have haunted the 1840s farmhouse for nearly half a century.
The investigators — from Seven Paranormal, a nonprofit organization based in Carthage — are likely to arrive with infrared scopes, motion detectors, thermal scanners and different kinds of recorders to log anything paranormal that might happen.
Horace Williams, a frugal, eccentric philosophy professor, lived in the cozy, one-story home for the last four decades of his 82-year life and for the first four of the 20th century.
It is he, residents have said through the years, who reappears as an apparition.
Images of the thin, bespectacled man also have been reported in the halls of the venerable Caldwell Hall, a 90-year-old building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus that once housed the campus philosophy department.
“I guess that’s how he stays so thin,” joked Catherine Frank, an administrator with the Chapel Hill Preservation Society, which has offices in the Horace Williams house. “He moves around a lot. I know this is serious research that they’re doing, but it’s one of those things that if you don’t approach it with a bit of levity, it can be tough.”
Not only have there been reports of the phantom philosopher appearing, some objects in the Horace Williams house seem to disappear from one room and mysteriously resurface in another without the visible or admitted aid of humans.
A trip through the house today offers a second close-up look at the old haunt. Ghost hunters took their first look around Feb. 8.
“The places that they found any activity at all were places like the office where electronic equipment could have been part of the reason,” said Frank, who opted to stay home with her young daughter that night. “They said they found some violence in the bathroom closet and at the end of the evening, they said there had been a presence following one woman the whole time.”
There is one theory about the paranormal presence in the bathroom.
Williams, who was said to be very tight with his money, was loath to spend the cash necessary to hook up to public water and sewer. His wife, so the lore goes, returns to the house, which now boasts such modern amenities, and flushes the toilet just because she can.
Who knows whether any ghosts will be given up tonight, Frank said.
The investigation is a try-out of sorts.
Durham’s Rhine Research Center, one of the world’s oldest institutions of paranormal study, is sponsoring the event as part of a series of ghost hunts at historic homes to do a bit of research. In recent years, the interest in paranormal activity seems to have surged, according to Maggie Blackman, publicist at the Rhine center.
“We get so many calls here,” Blackman said. “We seem to be a lot of people’s first point of reference.” The center, though, does not do such field work. The idea behind the hunts was to get a look at some of the people who do such research and review and compare their methods. With a better understanding of the kinds of ghost hunters in their midst, center staffers might feel more comfortable referring calls.
“We’re just trying to take a look at what people are doing out there,” Blackman said.
