I've been driving back and forth from home to Fort Wayne a lot lately. I've managed to get some Fort Wayne geocaching in as well, even retrieved some travel bugs. I took Beth home today, which was good because Beth's roommate, apparently some 300-year-old matriarch of the trailer park, has been driving her nuts. Not so much her, I suppose, but 1) her whole family trooping into the room at 6:00 am reeking of smoke and swearing like truckers, shouting at her because the battery in her hearing air was dead, 2) The nurses coming in all during the night to give her medication, also having to shout at her to wake her up, and 3) whatever was wrong with her, it must have been giving her gas because she was one flatulent old woman. It was loud, frequent, and foul. One morning when I came to the hospital I found Beth down the hall because the smell had driven her out. The smell alone had actually woken her up during the night too.

Beth had her surgery today. The doctors had said to plan for 3 hours, it took maybe 90 minutes. The doctor said everything went really well, there were no problems. Beth was lucky enough to get a room fairly quickly, only spending a few hours in recovery (they told me that some people had been in recovery since yesterday so I guess things were thinning out). I killed a lot of time waiting for Beth to be lucid enough for me to see her; in the end I just went home since there was no place for me to stay overnight anyway and I figured mom could use the help to get the kids down.

Mixed results yesterday. I took Alex with me to pick up mom, and when I got to the Indy airport he was completely soaked through. I did have some clothes to change him into though, which was good. What was bad was there was nowhere to go to watch airplanes take off and land, which I had told him we could do when we got there. He was pretty disappointed. So we killed some time strolling/walking around and found a good place he could run and be out of the way for a while. When mom arrived, he yelled "Gramma!" and ran to her when he saw her. She liked that.

It was a short work week, but it felt long for some reason. Maybe because I'm going to be gone most of next week with Beth having surgery again. Anyway, Mom is flying into Indy tomorrow (yes, on 9/11) and I'm going to pick her up. Tonight we bowled again, and I had a similar pattern as last week with a great first game (180) and bad 2nd (88) and 3rd (116) games. Ouch.

On Wednesday Beth took the kids and Rachel up to Michigan to visit with her family and to visit our daughter Becky's grave. It was her 5th birthday last Tuesday. Since they were gone until late, I took the opportunity to get some work done on the spare room after work. Did quite a bit of sanding. Saturday we went off to Fort Wayne to do some shopping. Beth has a high school class reunion (20th!) in a couple months and needed a dress for it, also we hit Once Upon a Child and Dick's Sporting Goods (I wanted to get a bowling wrist brace). Then we went to a nice fancy dinner at Takaoka of Japan for some tabletop cooking. We were a bit early for our reservation so we checked out the Celebracion Latina that was going on at Headwaters Park nearby. Didn't stay too long. Sunday (today) we all went out to Chain O' Lakes State Park to visit some camping friends. I took Alex and some friends with us to go find a geocache in the park. Had to do some bushwacking but Linda did a great job of keeping the little kids out of trouble. Monday, Beth took the kids out and I worked on the spare room again. I got two walls completely finished and painted with a primer coat (except for the corners and edges by the carpet). I even got a phone line installed in our bedroom upstairs (had to remove an old style plug and replace it...took 5 minutes...been wanting to do it for over a year).