Beth and I now own 3 houses. We closed on the latest one Friday. I almost had a heart attack when the realtor told me how much I needed to bring to closing because I thought she wasn't including the down payment in the amount so I was envisioning needing big cash advances. But, I found out we actually had plenty, whew. And we dropped the price on the Arkansas house again, trying to get it to move. Everyone who looks just loves it but think it's too much. I guess Arkies would rather buy a cheaper dump. Not surprising, believe me. I'm hoping we don't have to rent out the house but if worse comes to worse and we have to, so be it. We'll give it a while at the new price and see. I'd think that at the new price AND $2500 closing costs paid by my company to boot, someone ought to go for it.

Homecoming & baptism weekend. My 10-year reunion at Rose-Hulman was this weekend. Beth and I got on the road to Terre Haute as soon as I got out of work so were were in town in plenty of time for the pep rally. I met Bob there, whom I hadn't seen in 10 years, so we sat with him to catch up. he was one of the AXE brothers with me there. The pep rally was...interesting...it's just weird to see sorority girls at Rose (during the cheer competition, one of the sororities did theirs, which made Bob observe "what have they done to our school?") and Rose now also has a dance squad, which performs at the games, presumably...and all the cheerleaders are students at Rose now instead of ISU. Another weird thing, the president of the school appeared to be smashed drunk during a speech we gave, which I thought unlikely. Slurring his speech, seemed disoriented. I wondered if he had had a stroke and I hadn't heard about it. Actually, he was having one at that moment. A mini-stroke, actually, and had to be dragged to the hospital afterwards, but appeared to be fine and recovered in time for the football game the next day. Speaking of football and back to Friday night, a couple of the banners the frats/sors made for the pep rally said things like 'put out the Flames' or 'the Flames aren't rising,' which was strange since we were playing the University of Chicago Maroons, NOT the University of Illinois at Chicago Flames. But speaking of flames, the bonfire was pretty impressive. A big ol stack of railroad ties, looked like a 40-foot wedding cake, soaked in creosole, lit up awfully fast and made us walk backwards for quite a distance. My eyeballs almost dried up. Saturday, we did the campus tour, meeting several old professors (Dr. Hariri told me he still has my old report on filtration I wrote in 1991...I asked him "was it that good?" apparently it was. Go figure.) We met up several guys I hadn't seen since graduation 10 years ago, and spent a lot of money in the bookstore on Rose-Hulman by-products. We skipped the reunion dinner, figuring I really only knew the ChemE's in my class anyway, and we went to Outback for dinner with several of them instead. And we stayed in the Travelodge on 3rd Street, which was a trip down memory lane in and of itself. Overall, homecoming weekend was a really great time. The biggest surprise to me was that the Wabash Ave K-Mart isn't there any more. Sunday, another trip down memory lane...actually a trip down US-41 from Terre Haute to SR-10, SR-10 to I-65, I-65 to I-94, I-94 to US-131, the same route I used to drive home and back when I was at Rose to go see our great-nephew Sam get baptized. Home really late Sunday night. Oh yeah, we had to move out of the apartment by the 16th so the last thing we did before leaving town was move all our stuff to the new house.

Our stuff is now in Warsaw. And as it turns out it wasn't in Fort Wayne all this time, but Cincinnati. Why? Don't know. Anyway, we're settled up with the moving company and all our things are in storage here in town. We close on the house on the 21st this month, but since we have to be out of the apartment on the 16th we're going to be living with the current residents for a while. They're asking people to help move them out and us in at the same time, but I think moving them out is going to be quite an event by itself. We want to shampoo the carpets and paint the walls before too much stuff gets moved in. anyway. We've joined a bowling league lately, got our very own bowling shoes, too. The first league games were a week ago and we did pretty well considering how long it had been since we bowled. My average was about 130 and Beth's about 85. However, we bowled again yesterday (non-league) and did considerably worse. Maybe it was the shoes. Or the ball. Or the lane.