March 2024

The first weekend in March was dominated by the Emerald City Comiccon.

Say hello to Tanjiro Kamado (green checkers) and Sakonji Urokodaki (clouds) from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.

And to Ash Ketchum of Pallet Town.

Along with Ash's friend, Brock, from Pokémon fame.

We had a good time wandering through the booths and enjoying all the creative cosplayers.

We stopped to play some Klask and rest our feet for a bit. 

 

We also enjoyed a late afternoon snack and performance at the Dreamland Maid Cafe.

They had kawaii drinks and maid karaoke.

We headed up to get seats for the annual cosplay competition.

There were many amazing costumes, and we had a good time geeking out.

After the contest, we headed out to get some dinner.

When we got home that night, we remembered that we had not taken a group photo.

Whoops.
Here it is.

A sampling of desserts in March.....

A gluten free, dairy free s'more made with Grandma cookies for Mikey.

And, delicious macarons from a local shop for Katie.

Katie was taking a Biomedical Innovations class at school.

Her and her team created an antivenom kit to carry on hikes.
They had to come up with schematics and then actually build a replica of the kit.

Here's a syringe....

And this is an epinephrine pen.

Sadly, I don't think I have a picture of the physical mockup of the Antivenom kit.
It was pretty impressive.

I'm not sure what's going on here.

Maybe homework?
There's a little too much laughing for homework.

Prep work and painting for Cinderella was happening on weekends.

Around this time, we saw "Something's Afoot" a mystery musical, and Katie voted in her first Presidential Primary. 

In our state, kids aged 17 can vote in a primary if they will be 18 when the actual vote happens.

Mikey went to the state thespian festival and came back knowing how to sew.

Decision Day for college applicants was fast approaching.

Katie had to choose between her top two schools - University of British Colombia and Oregon State University.

We decided to squeeze in a visit to both of them to try to aid her with her decision.

Canada was up first.

She took a tour of the campus to refresh her memory.

In true Pac Northwest fashion, it was raining.

The first bunny of the year was spotted in our yard.

The following weekend, we headed to Corvallis to reconnect with Oregon State.

Say HI to Big Benny!

They have a very big tree on campus.

With the college campus refreshers out of the way, Katie had a little more info to help with her decision.

In the meantime, she and her Climate Action Clubmates planned a "March for Climate" event.

The event started with a march to the center of town.

At the end of the march, they had invited local groups to host tables with information on how to mitigate climate change on a local, national and global level.

After the march, we dropped Mikey off to help with some Cinderella scenery prep.

And then, wouldn't you know it, the end of March was here and brought with it, EASTER.

It was a beautiful sunny day for an egg hunt.

At first, the eggs are easy to find.

Watching out for Ralph laid "eggs".

Mikey is ALWAYS last finding his eggs.

Ralph enjoyed a little sunbathing.
This year he did not "find" (aka sniff out and crunch) any eggs.
Must be getting old.

Egg hunt success!

Ralph may not have found any eggs, but he did catch the scent of Mr. Rabbit and proceeded to sniff at the deck for 15 minutes.

As you all know, the egg hunt is only the first part of our Easter Eggstravaganza.

The next is the Easter Basket Search (TM).

This year's clues were created with the help of ChatGPT.

Some of the clues were easy and others....well, they were very obscure.

Eventually, they found the haul.

And then proceeded to rifle through their rewards eating quite a bit of sugar as they went.