How cool is this? Thursday night the GT class association sponsored a real live astronaut to come visit the students. He gave a presentation to the school during the day, then in the evening the Sharpies and Zillionaires (and some middle school STEM kids) did their own presentations on some space exploration aspect. Alex's team did a presentation on the International Space Station, to which Col. Kevin Ford has actually been fairly recently! After the kids' presentations, he did another presentation of his own with new material, then took some questions and signed pictures and met with the kids and other attendees. Alex got him to autograph his model of the ISS, that's so awesome!
In other news, my bracket is horrible but the Spartans are back in the Final Four baby! Woo hoo!

Busy weekend. NCAA basketball and all. The weekend really started early this week because Friday was practically a party day. Alicia at work was having a send-off as she goes to do her rotations for pharmacy school,  which was at TG's Yogurt around lunchtime. After that, Michigan State's opening round game was showing at BWW, so I spent an hour I had blocked to catch up on training that I didn't have there watching the first half of the game with most of packaging development. By halftime I was confident we were going to win, so I went back to work. In the early evening I was working at the carnival at the school. I was doing the elementary school version of beer pong, only we were using a dozen mason jars filled with colored water. If you got the ping-pong ball in a jar within 3 tries, you won a 2-liter of pop. If not, you went to the endof the line and tried over and over. Some kids had 6 bottles before we were done. We did just run out of pop as the thing was ending. Missy did get the stuffed dog on the rigid leash that she had wanted this time, which was good after last year's debacle.

Here is my NCAA 2015 Final Four, in order: Kentucky, Duke, Arizona, Louisville.
And while we're on the topic of sports, the coach's meeting for the 2015 church softball season was yesterday. I expect after last year we will be moved down to the lower league, where we belong.

This weekend has been all about Alex's birthday. 12 years old, hardly seems possible. As desired, Alex had a sleepover Friday night, with 5 of his best friends over. I picked them all up after school (with the truck, which was pretty packed) and took them to our house, where they began the process of playing video games in earnest. Pausing just barely long enough to eat pizza and do cake and ice cream and presents in the evening. Not sure how long they were up, but it was pretty late. We did refuse to allow them to set an alarm clock for zero dark 30 this year, but they were up early enough as it was for pancakes and sausage before we all headed to SkyZone for an hour (Beth did not go, instead she took Missy to get pedicures). Alex hurt his back a bit but otherwise no injuries.We were back home before noon for all the boys to be picked up. Now, all Alex has really wanted for some time now is a Wii U, and with the Financial Peace University class Beth and I have been taking, we came up with an idea we liked. We decided to agree to match whatever Alex saved, dollar for dollar, towards the purchase. So, he asked everyone for money towards the Wii U instead of presents this year, and between what he's saved over the last couple of months and his birthday money, he had enough. So we went out to Wal-Mart Saturday and he bought one. Now that's a birthday present. Sunday, we had the family from Michigan visit (some of them anyway). Ric & Nickie and the kids and Marve all drove down here together to visit for the afternoon. We weren't sure anyone was coming because Nickie had been throwing up yesterday but now she seems just fine. Anyway, we had another cake and a nice visit, and between all the presents Alex got today (again, all cash) he was able to buy a new Wii U game he's wanted. However since we weren't willing to run straight over to Game Stop to get it, he bought it online for download. So far it's been downloading for around 4 hours and it says it has 20 hours to go.

Happy birthday to Alex! And just as a reminder of what getting older means, tonight there was an informational presentation at the middle school for all of next year's 7th graders, on what they can expect and what classes they can take in middle school. Alex is pretty stoked about the STEM stuff. There were robots and computers and all that. He's also interested in learning Chinese. Boy, middle school has come a  long way since I was in it. Thankfully.

Today we had an occurrence that was new on me. I was at my desk at work at about 5 minutes before 2pm when there was suddenly a general announcement that Zimmer building 5 would be closed at 2 o'clock and would not be reopened until the evening, and everyone should leave and take your belongings with you immediately. Nobody knew exactly what "closed" meant but everyone left and didn't come back, except me, because I had a 2:00 meeting in another building that was not "closed." The meeting, of course, was supposed to last a half-hour but lasted an hour and a half. So my free few hours off was cut short. Anyway, as we learned during that meeting, the reason for the abrupt closure was a bomb threat. WTH? Apparently there are disgruntled workers at Zimmer.

I have already called in to work to tell them I won't be there tomorrow, since it is still snowing like crazy and school has been cancelled for tomorrow, and Beth is in no shape to take care of the kids yet. The thing about being done with painkillers a few days after surgery....nope. She's hurting bad. So we all get a snow day. It stormed so much that even church services were cancelled today.