Back to work for three days now. I've been told to get my passport ready because I will probably need to go to Switzerland by this fall with some of the stuff going on at work. My boss is gone now until mid-July and he had to go through heck to get one on a very short notice. Alex fell out of his stroller onto his face on a tile floor the day before yesterday and his face is still swollen and his mouth still bleeds sometimes. Poor kid. A few days ago we had our new associate minister from church and his wife and baby over for dinner and we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail afterwards. They had never seen it, and always wondered why the kids in their youth groups always said 'ni.'

A lot has happened lately. I'm still on vacation now (Thursday night) but it's starting to wind down, and I feel like I've been off work forever. A week ago Monday Jim and Judy came back and Tuesday my parents came to town too for Missy's birthday. They were here in time for my softball game (and I went 3-3 but nobody saw it because it got so cold so fast, the kids weren't dressed warmly enough and they went home). The following Wednesday (the 15th...Missy's actual birthday) was the appointment for Missy's 1-year-old pictures in Fort Wayne at Picture People. She is SO CUTE! The pictures turned out great. We also got her a stuffed bunny at Build-a-Bear and then ate together at TGI Friday's. Jim and Judy left the next day and mom and dad went to Michigan to visit friends for the day. Then on Friday, Laura arrived. Saturday was Missy's birthday party. It wasn't as big a to-do as Alex's 1st birthday, but we had plenty of family and friends over and Missy got a huge pile of presents, which is hard to explain to a 2-year-old that they aren't his. The biggest thing was the swingset mom and dad helped us get for the kids. Lots of clothes, books, and a Little People doll house. Then Sunday, Beth and I left for Syracuse (Indiana) to stay overnight at the Oak Hill Manor as an anniversary present to ourselves. Did a little antiquing (found a new vaseline glass cup for Beth at the Blue Barn) and shopping in town (only had to run home once, because mom and dad locked the door when they took the kids to the park and they didn't have a key...neither did I since it was inside...so I had to take the locked screen door off the front door frame so I could get the front door open) and had a nice dinner at the Channel Marker. Monday was the most interesting day...in the morning (before the blazing heat) we were going to set out for a day of geocaching. Every caching adventure has a story. This one has a long one. My folks were watching the kids today so we thought we'd go find a few caches a little harder than the kid-friendly ISQs...and I forgot to mark the spot where we parked. The trail sort of petered out about 500 ft from the cache, and even with the heavy cover making the GPS jump around, we found the cache after some serious bushwacking. Then we couldn't find the trail coming back. We took a wrong turn somewhere and after about 90 minutes of being seriously lost in the wilderness (saw some deer, lizards, critters, bugs, thorns) we found a road again, still no idea where we were, until a nice lady driving her elderly father around in an Escalade picked us up and gave us a lift to the DNR station. As it turned out we were a long long way from the car (half a mile as the crow flies, about 6 miles on roads) and they were nice enough to take us to it. Beth was wearing shorts and here legs are ripped to shreds. We know we walked through quite a bit of poison ivy too. After all that we called it a day, and decided to go shopping in Fort Wayne since my parents weren't expecting us until after the kids were asleep. In the parking lot of K's Merchandise, the window of the car fell out of the track. That was the proverbial LAST STRAW. For the rest of the day, we went looking for used cars. We wound up with a 2004 Suzuki Forenza, with only 12,000 miles on it. So, 11 years and 4 months and 170,490 miles and the Geo is gone. We got $800 in trade which means that the broken A/C effectively totalled the car. Since we were home early, my parents, Laura, the kids and Beth and I went out to dinner at the boathouse. Tuesday the 21st (our anniversary) we all tried to do a cache south of town that Beth and I have tried a couple times already but it was so hot, and so buggy in the woods, and Alex wanted to run all through the woods by himself, and Missy wasn't feeling good, we only found stage 1 of 5 before giving up. Mom and dad left soon after. Wednesday (the 22nd) Beth had some sort of meetings almost all day, so I had the day free to get some work on the house done. I did some wiring in the garage (got the halogen work light put in) and the last of the new drywall in the garage is up. That and laundry was the big stuff. Thursday Beth and I headed up to Michigan to place an urn of flowers at Becky's grave and we spent the rest of the day with Pam and Marve. Saturday we went out to geocache again but it was too hot so we only got two easy ones (including one at a really cool mill that operates an organic grain store) and went to Fort Wayne to the mall.

I got an estimate for fixing the A/C on the Geo today...$800. Ouch. The Death Watch continues, but I'm going to go ahead and get it fixed.

There was a neat looking ad for Ashley furniture in the Fort Wayne newspaper the other day so Beth and I went to look at sectional sofas. We wound up buying one. With a sleeper sofa and a recliner. Not sure where it's going to go, we may put the entertainment center downstairs. We placed a travel bug hub cache near where US-30 and US-31 cross today, then looked for a cache in Centennial Park in Plymouth afterwards...didn't find it...so we let Alex and Missy play in the park playground until it started raining.

The Geo hit 170,000 miles today, as the Geo Death Watch continues.

I had a nice 3-day work week last week, between Memorial Day and taking Friday off to watch the kids while Beth went to a Christian women's thing in Indianapolis. I took the kids to the nature walk in town Friday and shot some good video of Alex running around on our new camcorder. In the evening Jim came over and we ordered pizza and watched "North by Northwest." Saturday I got a call from Judy before Beth got home, saying they were on the way to Michigan, traffic was very heavy, and could they stop overnight at our house and go with us to Sam's birthday party Sunday? Sure, I said, but we didn't know about the party. They got here a few hours after Beth did. Jim gave Alex a whole can of yellow tennis balls so Alex loved Uncle Jim. Sunday Judy and Jim watched the kids while Beth and I went to church, then we all headed north for the party. We stayed for dinner with everyone, which was probably too long for the kids because Alex cried almost the whole way home. Too tired to go to sleep.