Finally! We have sent off for our passports.

We've had the intentions of getting a passport for a couple of months now, just on the off chance that we decide to go to Canada even though Cliff's brother and his wife can't, this year.  One day we had plans to do it, but something else came up.  Another time we were in the right place at the right time with our required documents (birth certificate and driver's or non-driver's license) but Cliff didn't want his picture taken for the passport until he got a haircut.  
Today we went to Richmond, first to Walmart to get our photos taken and then to the post office, because that's where I thought we were supposed to go to get a passport.  I was wrong; they told us to go up the street to the courthouse.

No matter which door you enter, the first floor looks the same.  We saw the open door of an office and asked where to go for our passports; we were sent to the third floor and found our destination.  I wasn't counting on actually getting the job done on the first try; I figured there would be some pesky little detail that would postpone us yet again.  But everything seemed to be in order, and we only have to wait four to six weeks for our passports to come, and our birth certificates to be returned to us.  
This is where we got lost, because we exited through the wrong doors.  As I said before, standing in the center of the first floor, any direction you look appears the same.  To complicate matters, the city's fair, called The Mushroom Festival, is going on, so streets were blocked and booths and tents were set up all around the square.  We couldn't figure out in which direction the car was, even though it was only a block or so away at the post office.  Cliff asked a guy where the post office was, otherwise we'd still be stumbling around Richmond.  
When we were waiting at Walmart to have our passport pictures taken, a lady was there having about two dozen ballons filled with helium, half of them white, the others purple.  The woman doing the filling just let the balloons go to the low ceiling above her; when she was done, she proceeded to put them in two big, plastic bags.  Not an easy task, I will assure you... once there were a couple of balloons in the bag, it soared above her and she had to work to get others in without letting go of the baag.  Mighty tricky.  She gave the two bags to the lady who was buying them.  
When we went to our car, we saw the lady and her husband struggling vainly to get the bags into her not-very-big car.  Here's the solution they finally came up with:

The man was evidently holding onto the strings tightly, because the last we saw of them, they still had the bags of balloons.  The driver wasn't letting any grass grow beneath her, either!  


After arriving home and eating dinner, I went out and picked strawberries.

Yes, two and a half ice cream cartons.  And this is AFTER foraging twice, earlier in the day, for breakfast and dinner strawberries.