Beth and I had a date night with friends for the first time in quite a while last night. We shared babysitting with the Boschains, and we went out to dinner at the new Yamato Japanese  restaurant in town. They look busy, which is good. The food was good but it's a bit pricey. The sushi, according to Beth, was very good. Nice and fresh. I only had a California roll so I don't know how the raw stuff is. Anyway, I hope they make it. The BBQ restaurant that was in the same location last year left after a short run and we had liked that too.

Help a neighbor day (through church) was today. After church everyone who volunteered to help was broken out into teams. I had volunteered for manual labor, which usually means cleaning up someone's house/yard, but this year we were short of jobs for the inexplicable reason that four of the jobs we had lined up were at a trailer park that will not allow yard work on Sundays. Hmm? What? Apparently, the residents can't even cut their grass on Sundays. Anyway, we were short of work to do so I was in the trash detail. We formed a team to go pick up roadside trash. We picked N150W from G&G Hauling to the Tippe River bridge, because I happened to know it is seriously strewn with litter. So I and about 5 others sent a few hours collecting enough bottles (probably 80% of the trash was bottles) to hold Lake Superior. Colt also found a snake. Meanwhile, Beth and the kids were doing yard work in town, mostly gardening. Last Tuesday the Cub Scouts did almost the same thing; we worked down at the day camp picking up sticks and generally clearing the area of limbs and such getting it ready for camp this summer. Afterwards we took everyone who had showed up to DQ for ice cream.

Ag Day at the fairgrounds was last Tuesday; the Cub Scouts went, but somehow things didn't work out so well. We were supposed to meet at the gate, but I guess Alex and I missed the group, because we wandered around looking for them but didn't find anyone until it was about time to go home. Alex got in on the pedal tractor pull and got a ribbon for participation (there were some young bruisers there who won). Alex and his class took a field trip to Indianapolis on Friday, to the Indy Science Center. They left early, like by 8:00 am (Alex was all excited), and got back in the evening around dinnertime. The bus must have gotten lost along the way because it came back quite late. Alex seemed to have a pretty good time with his friends there, since he asked if he could have Timmy over to our house the next day, which we did. We also did clothes shopping for the girl at K-Mart yesterday. What a sad store. But we did get loaded up on all the girl needs, after about $300 total.

We're back from Chicago. Vacation didn't go quite the way I had envisioned. But overall, a good time and a good vacation. Beth was not feeling well for the whole trip. I tried to reschedule our reservations, but it was too late to just push things back by a few days, so we went even though she felt terrible. We drove out there Monday morning, planning to get settled and hit to hotel pool (just me and the kids, not Beth) before heading to town on the L for the American Girl Doll store and Lego Store at the Water Tower Place and the Sears Tower. Tuesday we would ride the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier first thing, then see Sue at the Field Museum, and spend the rest of the day at the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. Wednesday we would drive to the Science & Industry Museum and head home after sending the day there. We had bought City Passes for all of the museums in advance. Mistakes made / lessons learned: first, we were staying too far out from the Loop. The L ride from O'Hare (nearest our motel) to the city took almost an hour each way. Next time, we will take the South Shore into the city and stay closer to downtown. Second, we went to Navy Pier. The plan had been just to ride the ferris wheel (naturally, it was closed for maintenance all day when we went) and move on, but we spent way too much time and money there. It is a big overpriced money pit. Especially the maze, which was so scary (mostly just noisy and disorienting) that the kids freaked out and we had to bolt for the emergency exit after about 2 minutes, bye bye $30) And we got lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp, which turned out to be the most expensive lunch I've ever had. Third, we planned too much and underestimated how long each museum would take. We thought that Sue would be the only thing the kids wanted to see at the Field Museum and we could do it quickly, then we could do the aquarium and planetarium both in the same day, but that didn't work: we went to the Field Museum after Navy pier and the kids wanted to stay and see the other stuff (mostly Missy; she wanted to look at everything, but Alex wasn't that interested in dioramas, except the Egypt stuff), by the time we left, the aquarium was closing in an hour so we called it a day and went home (scary guy on the L most of the way to O'Hare). The next day, we were in the aquarium all day and never made it to the planetarium, or, of course, the MSI. Fourth, we miscalculated how much we were spending on train fares and bought a pass too late to fully utilize it. However, we did make it to Vito & Nick's Pizzeria, which we saw on Diners Drive-ins and Dives once, before heading home. With 2 unused tickets in each City pass. Well, anyway, we're back, and I'm going to try to use the rest of my week off to get a few things done around the house. Today I called in a guy to come grind out the maple tree stump in the backyard, and it was gone in a flash. Now I just have to cart off the wood chips and fill in the hole, and maybe we can have grass there. I'm also going to try to finish off the retaining wall by the southeast corner of the house that's been unfinished for a couple years because I can't find the same bricks I was using. I may have to be creative.

For once, I got the final NCA game of the year right! But that was about the only one. I had Kentucky beating Kansas but overall my bracket was horrible.

Nothing happened this week. April Fool! Really, not much did. The kids and Beth and I muddled through the last week before vacation. Plans are made, we're going tomorrow. However, Beth has come down with something nasty in her ears, nose, and throat. She missed church today and I tried to get our reservations changed to give her a few days to get better (couldn't). It started yesterday. We took the kids to Goshen yesterday afternoon so we could get a poster framed, then when we unrolled it there we found out it was damaged so we didn't. It was an old "Jurassic Park" poster that's been in a closet since 1993. In the evening, our first date night in over a month (what with Katie's wedding coming up and all) we went out to see "The Hunger Games" and to dinner; by the time we got to dinner she was feeling awful. The movie was one we had been looking forward to for a while, even though it got scathing reviews from Laura and Thomas. We liked it more than they did, Beth more than me. I thought it was rushed, and they were trying too hard to keep it at PG-13, and there was no emotion. Tomorrow, we're headed to the windy city for a whirlwind adventure!