Since I checked my calendar and found that about all I can see that needs celebrating is my dental appointment on Wednesday, I thought I'd check to see what there really was to celebrate this week.

Several, such as Black Forest Cake Day or National Chip and Dip Day sound like celebration to me, others not so much. Every day is National Near Miss Day when you work in a high school and the only person that enjoys National Weed Celebration day is the gardener that I have yet to hire. (Anyone have a good one let me know.)

Check out the list below and see if there is anything you'd like to celebrate for yourself.

March 22

March 23

National Chip and Dip Day
National Near Miss Day
National Melba Toast Day
National Puppy Day – Typically celebrated on March 23rd, however observed on a Friday or Monday when falling on a weekend

March 24

National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day
National BraveHearts Day
National American Diabetes Association Alert Day – Fourth Tuesday of March

March 25

National Lobster Newburg Day
National Medal of Honor Day
National Toliken Reading Day
Manatee Appreciation Day - Last Wednesday of March

March 26

March 27

March 28

A week or so ago was National Classified Employee Appreciation Day. For the most part, classified employees are the staff at the school that aren't certificated teachers, custodians, kitchen staff, and paraeducators (that's me). The office staff made little treats for us classified folks and I thought they were so cute. This particular cute minion came from "Dispicable Me".

A more realistic definition of minion comes from Dictionary.com:

minion

[min-yuh n]

noun

a servile follower or subordinate of a person in power. Yup. That's me right there in definintion #1.

Since I am low on stuff to share this week, I'll include some pictures of Bear and Nitro. They have been notably absent from my blog recently. Here's Bear waiting like a nice doggie for cookie I have in my hand.

Here's a not so happy Bear waiting for the command to eat the cookie that's been balancing on his nose the entire time I juggle my camera to take this picture.

Nitro's pastime is to look outside and watch birds. We've set up several feeders for him so he'll have something to watch from inside the house and his cat-io which is just off to the left outside. Nitro finally figured out that if he didn't do the kitty bird chatter and whip his tail around the birds would ignore him and come to the feeder that's about two feet away from his catio for his viewing pleasure.

Same activity, different window.

Saturday we met Carissa's lifetime friend Eileen and her family Ben, Eleanor, and Ronan at Athens Pizza. Eleanor has a ton of food allergies and this longtime family owned restaurant happily makes the dinner pleasant for her. Reagan, however, is wondering exactly why she doesn't have a sandwich to eat. Carissa got Kyanne's signature hair cut and I kept thinking she was Kyanne all weekend.

Reagan and Eleanor visit after dinner.

Hopefully I will have something more exciting to report than my dental appointment next week. Y'all better be thinking up activities for us.

Sadly, these are the last of our vacation photos. I hope you won't be too disappointed. Maybe I'll find another series of photos to keep you on your toes.

After leaving Jerome, Arizona we hit the highway to return to Las Vegas. Not only was it dark when we arrived, it was the first time we had a car so of course we had to drive through downtown. What a cacophony of light and sound after being in the quiet of the desert for a while.

We checked into our room at the hotel. When I opened the curtains I found we had a pretty good view of the "High Roller" and the new shopping area as well as the top of the Flamingo's parking garage.

First stop? Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. The green glow in the background is an 8 foot tall blender that turns into a volcano on the hour in homage to a couple of his songs.

Characters on the street accept donations to have their pictures taken with you. Although rare in the past,

they were EVERYWHERE this year.

We were in Las Vegas during Chinese New Year and the Bellagio had a beautiful display in their atrium. The smell of all of the planted flowers was amazing and there were many Chinese dressed in their traditional outfits posing for pictures.

The colorful red and gold of the display was stunning.

New York, New York had a giant lighted dragon in their lobby.

The light show on the canopy over Old Las Vegas' Fremont Street was amazing this year since the lighting has been converted to LED since we last saw it. All the lights are synchronized to music and the canopy 90 feet overhead basically turns into a movie screen.

I took some video if you want to get the full effect of the sights and sounds, see it here.

One of the casinos had a "Lobster Me" shop. At first I didn't get the double meaning of "Give me lobster!" and "ME = Maine". I hear so much about lobster rolls from Chris I just had to have one to see what all the fuss was about.

The lobster roll was not the mayonais-y drippy mess I was expecting. It was light and yummy with homemade chips and cole slaw. But...at the $17 ticket price, I won't be having another one any time soon!

Bob's lovin' being forced to pose with the Coke bear. Snaps with the bear were free but this is the pose you got. If you paid (dearly) for their pictures, you got real cute interactive bear pics. Needless to say, we took the free stiff bear pics.

The Luxor Casino front door.

Since there is no rhyme or reason on how to choose the perfect slot machine, I chose the one with the Jaguars on it. I settled in, ordered water from the hostess like a high roller, and fed my $5 into the penny "slot" machine. It kept lining up jaguars and giving me money so I kept playing. Here I was at $21.50. I doesn't sound like much, but remember this is a penny slot machine. I eventually chickened out at $60, took my ticket and ran.

In 'n Out is an international favorite. Almost everyone there was making the stop because it was the "it" thing to do. All of us there were tourists looking to say "We went there!"

After out trip to In 'n Out, we went back to town via Old Las Vegas and Fremont Street. This is the end of town with all the cool old signs and historic Vegas landmarks.

Between Old Las Vegas and new(er) Las Vegas is the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop from the TV show "Pawn Stars". There was no chance we were going to stop by since the line to get into the store went down the sidewalk around the corner and up the block. What a tourist trap!