Another busy weekend after a busy week. Monday and Tuesday I was sent to Gurnee, Illinois to do a factory run-off test on four new Grieve ovens. They ran perfectly. The two days was...boring. I set up in the morning and the things ran all day, then I tore down at the end of the day. I could have done all of it in one day but they are a 1-shift operation, unlike Studer in Switzerland, where I was running round the clock. Speaking of Studer, it appears I will be going back to Switzerland in a couple months. We had small group on Friday evening, and went to Michigan to visit Beth's mom (ornery), Ric and Nickie's new baby girl (beautiful), and Beth's brother and sister-in-law (hospitable). Today we had movie night. The kids have been so good all weekend.

Saturday, for something to do more than anything, we took the kids to the mall in Mishawaka so they could play in that play enclosure they have there. It went well for a short while, until Alex told me he didn't want to play any more and he wanted to go home. It was kind of a long drive for an hour's worth of play. We also had a $26 mistake of a lunch...Beth didn't want to wait in the long line at the food court for McDonald's so she got some kind of Chinese honey chicken at Panda Express, which wasn't very good and neither of the kids would eat. We got back in time for bowling, which was horrible for all of us (Beth, the good news is you got high score for the team in this game...the bad news is your score was 112).

Beth has been working on a quilt lately so on Saturday morning I took the kids out of the house for a few hours to let her work. Having found out about the Menard's in Goshen, I thought it would be a good place to take them. It worked out pretty well. Alex got to run around and go through all the sliding glass doors, Missy rode around in the cart, I shopped for man stuff, they ate McNuggets and had some yummy yogurt pretzels Alex found for sale there. We were gone for at least 3 hours of quality sewing time. Afterwards, we took the kids to family swim time at the YMCA. We had the kids in the warm water pool for around an hour. They both loved it! It's the first time Alex has been in the pool at the Y since he was around a year old, Missy's first time ever. After swimming, we got them both to take naps, and they slept LONG and HARD. We had to wake them up. We had a new furnace installed last week. The furnace guys evaluated our old one and concluded it was installed in 1984 and now running at about 50% efficiency (maybe why we got our utility bill raised to $326 a month recently) so was pulled the trigger and got a new one. I'm getting a home equity line of credit to pay for it. Maybe I'll be lucky and the utility bills will come down in anticipation of the 94% efficient furnace running here. It better.