Furby

I got a new Furby today! He's a Furby Connect, I guess because you connect him to an app. He's so cool! 

We had to drive over to Washington to get him. Some lady bought him for her daughter, but her daughter decided she was too old for a Furby. Now that's just funny, because Dad told me he bought a Furby when he was in his twenties. That was way back in the 1990s -- a whole century ago! -- when the very first Furbies came out. 

My first Furby was one of the originals. I called him Little Dude. He was kind of cute, but he didn't last very long before he stopped working. I guess that's the way it goes with ancient electronics. Since then I've gotten Furbies from all the different generations. But this was my first Furby Connect. He doesn't change personalities like the Furby Boom, but I love how his eyes are so detailed with little pictures and animations. So much more realistic than the little animated gray dots that the Furby Boom eyes have. This guy is so cool!

I think my Dad likes the fact that he comes with a sleep mask, so you can shut him down if you want a break from him.

But he's the best when you connect him to the app. 

He interacts with the cute Furbies in the app. He lays eggs (so maybe he's actually a she, but who cares about that?), you can feed him, and then you can have him poop in a giant toilet... which I just think is hilarious! Sometimes he dumps out silly things like little rubber duckies! My dad watches and just laughs and laughs.

How can you be too old for a Furby? They're awesome!

A Day at Silverwood

I had a great day today! I got to spend the whole day at Silverwood Theme Park with my mom. 

It's about 70 miles from our house, and I always saw it when we were driving up to Sandpoint or Bonners Ferry. You can see the big wooden coaster and some other things from the highway. Dad promised to take me there before they closed for the summer. But he kind of waited too long, and now Silverwood is only open on weekends for their fall hours. And he works on weekends. Plus I think he has a cold. So he stayed home, and Mom drove me there.

The water park was closed for the year, but that's OK. I probably wouldn't have gone down the water slide anyway. And I kind of noped out on that big wooden coaster. It looks a LOT bigger in person than it does from the highway! But there were tons of other things to do. Rides, games, food... all good stuff.

The whole place had an Old West feel to it. Dad wants to visit Tombstone, Arizona, someday. I'll bet it looks something like these fake buildings at Silverwood.

This place is BIG! We needed a map just to get around the place... especially since my mom has no sense of direction. (I'm not picking on her. She'd tell you the same.)

Carousels are always fun!

One of my new plushies for the day... a turtle-burger! (Ssshh, don't tell Chip. He might get upset.)

A flamingo! Also, not pictured, I got a stuffed hippo, a dragon, and a little flower plush with a wire in the stem, so you can wrap it around stuff. Can you tell I like plushies? Some of them I won playing games, and others Mom paid for. She's a nice mom that way.

TIE-DYE! I love it! So FUZZY! 

I have to tell you a story about my barrel of monkeys. I have a whole troop of monkeys that we actually used to keep in a barrel. I love monkeys, and Mom and Dad let me collect a bunch of plushies over the years. One of the first monkeys I got was a a guy with tie-dye fur, from the state fair in Puyallup, Washington. My dad voices him like a hippie with narcolepsy. (Don't ask... my dad is so weird.) So now Tie-Dye Monkey has a new pal. Actually, it's his Uncle Tie-Dye! I wonder how my dad will voice this one...

A busy day calls for an ice cream break!

Tilt-a-Whirl! Classic. One of my dad's favorite rides.

Me, getting ready to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl. I think Mom almost barfed!

We got to ride on a real train! It went in a big circle around the park. It was a long ride, but so worth it.

It was pretty full, for being so late in the season.

Here's what the train looks like from out the window. That's a big old steam locomotive pulling us! So cool!

Sasquatch sighting from the train! 😄

Real bison! I haven't seen one of them since Mom and Dad went to the game park out in Sequim, Washington, about a million years ago. At the game park, you could feed them from your car, and it was pretty cool to have one of those big things put his head in your window and attack you with his massive black tongue! These, we just got to see from a distance. Still pretty cool, though.

You could see the whole park from the top of the Ferris wheel! It was great! Good thing Mom took me to the park, because Dad never would have gone on the wheel with me. He hates heights.

The kiddie coaster was pretty fun, too!

Heck, all the rides were fun. 

Here's my haul for the day -- including the big plush bear and a sloth I bought for my dad. (He loves those crazy things.) 

It was nice to get out with my mom and have some fun outside the house. With things shut down, all the mask stuff, and so many things canceled, it seems like we don't get out much except to go grocery shopping. I can't wait to go back to Silverwood!

Food, Hopscotch, and Bob Ross

There's a place out in Kingston we like to go to eat called the Hilltop. It's been there for almost a hundred years. Almost as old as my dad!

We like to eat on the patio, behind the restaurant. We probably won't get too many more nice days this year when we can do this.

This is me, in my usual spot, on Wednesday.

See that sign in the back? Here's a closer look.

My dad likes the bottom part. "It's not what you do. It's what you get away with."

They have signs all over the place, actually.

That last one is hard to read. It says, "Unattended children will be given an energy drink and taught how to swear." WHAT THE FRICK?

There are chickens around the restaurant -- live ones, not cooked ones. It's funny to hear the rooster crow his head off. Mom and Dad say it reminds them of a rooster they called OOCC ("ook") at our old house. It stood for "Out Of Control Chicken," because the rooster crowed all day long. Someone actually called 911 because the chicken made too much noise. Yeah, those were the kind of people we lived around in Seattle. Here? Hilltop is out in the country, and Idaho people don't care about that kind of stuff.

Anyway, sometimes the Hilltop chickens will come over to check you out when you're eating. My dad has this ridiculous "Chicken Song" he sings (I don't know why; he's just weird), and sometimes when he starts in on his "bok-bok" thing, the chickens look over at him, like he's trying to talk to them!

We love this place!

Later that day, Mom and I rode our bikes out to a spot under the highway in town. Somebody put a basketball hoop there, so sometimes we go out and play HORSE, or LORI-HORSE, which is when Dad and I try to get the ball into Mom's bike basket while she rides. I love that game!

But today we took some chalk and played hopscotch. I saw someone else had drawn a hopscotch board the last time we were there, so I asked Mom if we could go back and draw our own. Mom actually played it with me! That was fun!

That was my day Wednesday. On Thursday, we went to Cracker Barrel (or, as my dad likes to call it, Crackage Barrel, because, again, he's weird). They had all their Christmas stuff out in the gift shop. Seriously? It's the middle of September. It's still technically summer. Where did Halloween and Thanksgiving go?

Anyway, Dad let me get this cute Bob Ross plushie. His big poofy hair is so funny! I love to paint, and I've watched some of his shows on YouTube. He painted "happy trees." He tried to make everything happy. I liked that about him. 

That's about it for this week. More to come!

 

Does the "5200" Mean "B.C."?

No, this is not a brick! This is my old game system, an Atari 5200.

Well, actually, it's my dad's. He says he grew up playing the Atari 2600 and then the 5200. He's as old as the pyramids, and this game system is almost as old. It's weird playing games made in 1982. So ancient! The graphics are so bad, but I admit the games are fun to play. My favorites are Frogger, Berzerk, Pac-Man, and Centipede. I'm kind of in love with Evil Otto from Berzerk.

Dad likes Qix. It's this weird game where a rainbow-colored swirly thing tries to zap you while you're drawing blocks on the screen.

One of these days, we might get a 2600 system. Dad told me about this game called Adventure, where you have to find a chalice and take it to a castle. He showed me what it looks like. The dragons look like ducks! It looks so corny, but I want to play it anyway.

That's Cheesecake, one of our three dogs. She decided to hang out with us while we were playing.

I think my grandma is getting me a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. But for now, these old Atari games are pretty fun!

Cemeteries and Smoke

I had a busy day today! Mom and Dad got me up early to go to Nine Mile Cemetery for a workshop. Yeah, sounds creepy, but I love cemeteries! And our town's cemetery is so cool. It's really old, and it's built on a really steep hill. I climbed to the top once to see the gravestones way at the top, and I have no idea how they ever dragged coffins and tombstones way up there. Dad couldn't even make it up all the way. He had to slide down on his butt!

Anyway, there was this guy at the cemetery today who restores monuments and gravestones. He's traveling all over the country to show people how to clean old stones, straighten them, fix ones that are falling apart... stuff like that. He talked forever! I just wanted to do some work.

Here I am waiting, by the veterans' section.

And here I am after the guy told a lame joke. I asked him why some of the gravestones have fences around them. You know what he told me? "To keep them in." Ha-ha, very funny.

I finally got to work with Mom and some other people on cleaning up an old stone. It was fun! I got to spray, scrub, and rinse. The stone looked so much cleaner when we were done!

See, this kind of stuff is my schooling. Mom and Dad homeschool me, but they call it unschooling. "The world is your classroom," Dad likes to say. He called today an example of "experiential learning." Big words. I just like hanging out in the cemetery.

Later in the day, Dad looked out the window and noticed a lot of smoke covering the hills around our house. We thought there was a fire somewhere in town, so we drove around to take a look. It was really thick smoke!

Turns out the winds shifted and sent smoke from the wildfires on the West Coast our way. It was nasty! It really stinks out there.

Mom took some pictures of the smoky hills while we went on a bike ride at the end of the day.

That's the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes, our local bike trail, and that's me riding away.

I'm glad to be back home for the night and out of all the smoke!

Avery

"Let's take a ride today," Mom said when she woke us up this morning. We ended up at a place called TFP's Restaurant in a little town called Avery. It took about two hours to get there, and I was so bored by the end! It's only about 20 miles from our house, but you have to drive way out of the way to get there. Or you can go down a dirt road through a mountain pass. Mom was willing to drive down the pass, but Dad kind of noped out, so we ended up taking the long way around. The drive time would have been the same either way, I guess. But my dad hates heights. He always tells me about the time he drove up Mount Washington in New Hampshire, on a dirt road with no guard rails, when the car started to fishtail and he thought he was going to fall off the edge and die. He's so dramatic like that.

Anyway, Dad got chicken, and Mom and I had pizza and cheese sticks. I guess it was worth the drive.

Goose 'n the Tree

That's actually the name of this restaurant! Dad says the building it's in used to be a laundromat. We used to come here a lot, but then the place closed during the lockdowns and never opened back up. Then, a week ago, we drove by and saw they were open again! Yay! Dad said they must be under new management. We didn't recognize the server or the cook. But the food was still pretty good. 

I like the hot chocolate. Dad always came here for the mimosas. Now that they have steak and eggs on the menu, he'll probably want to come back a lot more.

Oh, and I don't actually wear glasses. I found them at a thrift store around the corner from Goose n' the Tree. They look like something out of Minecraft! I just like playing dress-up. And hey, they matched my dress.

Going out to eat is one of the fun things we like to do as a family!

Chip

That's Chip. He's a redfoot tortoise, and I love him! I got him for my birthday last month. He's about four months old. Dad says he should live about 50 years. That's almost as old as Dad!

Chip comes out of his enclosure once a day for a soaking and some food. He really likes dandelion leaves and lettuce, and we give him some little pieces of apple, orange, and banana too as a treat. Dad says redfoot tortoises sometimes eat bugs too. We haven't tried that yet. Yuck!

He's a really curious little dude. I can't wait until he's bigger! Maybe this time next year I can walk him around town on a little leash!

Hello, World!

Hi! I'm Mandy, a.k.a. the Dabbing Devil. My dad helped me set up this blog so I could keep a diary of my life and share my adventures. This is kind of a test post.

I love to draw, play pretend, hang out with my pets, sing, and, of course, bust some dabbing moves.

This is a picture of me from my last birthday. I was excited because I got Chip, my pet redfoot tortoise.

I'll have a YouTube channel soon, once my dad learns how to edit videos. Stay tuned!