We are back from Thanksgiving trip to Indiana Pennsylvania to visit Laura and Thomas. But didn't we just see Laura in Chicago a couple weeks ago? Yep. We left Warsaw as soon as I got out of work and headed east, got there pretty late as we usually do. We had a nice Thanksgiving visit with them, possibly highlighted most of all by the first time Beth and me playing "Cards Against Humanity" with them. I made Thomas just about lose it at one point: to his card "It turned out that _____-man was neither the hero we wanted nor needed." I played the card "insatiable bloodlust." For a graphic novel fan that must have been quite a mental picture because he could barely go on after that. We all got to the point where we were laughing so hard we couldn't go on several times. In the morning after that Alex told us we were pretty noisy and he heard us say some inappropriate things. Dear me, I hope he didn't hear too much. Friday it was an unusually warm day so we all headed out to a nearby park/lake with a dam. We did a little hiking, waking the dog, hit the playgrounds, some exploring, a bit of geocaching. The cache at the park required a bit of hiking, climbing, and a little bushwacking, which intrigued Thomas so the next day we went off together to do some urban caching. We drove all through the town looking for benchmarks and caches (didn't find the benchmarks we were supposed to find, but did find several caches), until one hidden somewhere at the fairgrounds stumped us. We must have spent an hour looking for it. He doesn't like to not find something as much as I don't. But it was getting late and rainy so we eventually gave up. Alex found the Battle Ball game set in the basement so we learned how to play that and had some epic battles. While we were out the ladies took the kids shopping or something. Later in the afternoon we took our leave and headed to somewhere outside Pittsburgh, where we have learned that our good friends the Caspers have moved. Brian is now a civilian but he still works for the navy in something to do with procurement or materials development, and he does this from the Pittsburgh area now. So since we were in the area we spent the evening at their house and spent the night. It was almost like we've been together all along, it was really just like old times and we all just had a great time. Their little girl is now graduating from high school (we still love to tell the story about when we had dinner together just before we left Virginia in 1999, and as we parted Gracie was strapped into her car seat and waved bye-bye to us with one finger in her nose) and their son is 14, I think. Brian also makes trips to a vendor in Indianapolis fairly regularly, so we're going to plan to get together whenever he goes there. We had a great visit with them, then hit the road again the next morning and headed home. Long drive.

This weekend we hosted Lauren for a sleepover. We departed for Michigan as soon as I was home from work, picked up Lauren, and headed home again. We set up an air mattress in Missy's bedroom, and we were all set. The girls giggled and played with their tablets a lot but weren't up too late. They basically did more of the same most of the day on Saturday. That day, I thought I needed to get all the leaves raked and cleared out before the snow hit, which it began to do (lightly) as I started working. I was hoping to stay ahead of the great mass of leaves that covers our back yard every fall, and the great mass hadn't fallen yet, but the backyard was still pretty leafy, so I worked with rake and tarp. It took about all afternoon to clear the entire back yard but I got it done. By the time I was done the back yard was getting pretty covered with snow. And it continued to snow until evening. We had arranged for Ric and Nickie to meet us in Shipshewana at Essenhaus and have dinner after the Lauren handoff, and I'm glad we didn't have to drive any further than that because the roads were getting really slushy. The Wiessners had a long drive home with the snow getting worse and worse as they went.
Today in the afternoon (snow was pretty much gone by then) we headed down to Kokomo for Renee's father's viewing, as he passed away last week.

Our new kitten Ruby is a bit of a wild one. She's kind of a biter, and certainly hyper. I'd like to not de-claw her (I regretted de-clawing Iris and Opal), but she puts those claws out a lot. Anyway, it was kind of a freak accident, but she scratched Alex's eye pretty good last Tuesday. Alex was sitting on the couch when she jumped up on it, then he moved and startled her so she jumped and bolted, and her back leg caught him right in the eye. He was complaining about how much it hurt the rest of the day, but we both just kind of told him to suck it up. Then the next morning it was so red and painful Beth kept him home from school and took him to the doctor, who reported he had a scratched cornea. Yep, we felt pretty small about that. So he had a big patch to wear, and stayed home from school and out of the bright light the rest of the week. Saturday was the Veterans Half Marathon in Columbia City, my second time running it, and I came in better than last year, at 2:04:40. Beth and the kids came to watch me finish and get my medal, featuring the Navy this year (I think, maybe it was Coast Guard). Then I just had time to run home to shower before we hit the road for Chicago, second time in just a few weeks, since Laura was going to be there. She had a convention or something, presenting a poster and all. We headed out and picked her up downtown when she was done (we had to wait for a while, so we headed down Michigan Avenue a bit and got lunch at M Burger), then left her the van so she could go pick up her friend Jen while we went up the Willis Tower. Or so we thought: there was a long (like 3 hours) wait to get up to the top, so we cancelled that plan and had Laura come back and pick us back up again after she'd picked up Jen. Then we headed for the suburbs to visit with her friend Monica. Monica has become guardian of a special needs elementary school aged boy, who is a real sweetheart. I'm not sure what his story is exactly, but anyway he stays with Monica most of the time. He got along with Alex and Missy pretty well too. We visited with them through dinner, then took our leave and drove back home. Laura is staying with Monica for a couple days.And today, we went to the farm to pick up chickens!

Today was the Lincoln Elementary Veterans' Day program. I made it to this one, although Missy was not presenting. It was a very nice program, with the kids reading poetry, choir singing the national anthem and some patriotic songs, and a play. Afterwards I stood in the hall with the other veterans and got to shake hands with all the kids, and several of them gave me cards. A very nice program.

We've been on the move pretty much all weekend. Friday was John Pinkster's college graduation party up in Kalamazoo, so we headed up there as soon as I was out of work. Interesting note about that: while we were there we met Marve's new girlfriend. Named...Beth! He had been saving that news to surprise us...but he told us he wanted us to meet someone so we had a suspicion. Not about the name, though. Anyway, Saturday we went to the mall in Fort Wayne. Barnes & Noble had advertised that they were hosting a "maker" event in the store, which we all thought sounded really cool, but it turned out to be not that much. They had some guy demonstrating a little 3-D printer, making some sort of doo-dad or other, but all you could do was watch it print. There were a few other displays but nothing sticks in my mind. In other news, our new small group seems to be going pretty well so far. We hosted at our house tonight, with pretty much everyone here, including a lot of kids. We did a breakfast for diner think so there was a lot of breakfast casserole and bacon and such.

Ah, the joys of a lost retainer. Last week Alex realized hours too late that he had left his retainer on his lunch tray at school, and it was gone. Any clutching-at-straws hope we had of it turning up in a pocket, or a lunch lady picked it up, or something, were for naught. So, with all of a couple days of use out of the retainer, we spent $195 to get a replacement for it today.

Alex got his braces off this week Monday! He's been looking forward to that for quite some time. You know, it always seemed like I had my braces for a lot longer than my kids had theirs. but actually looking at it I don't think they did. I had mine for part of 6th and 7th grade, that's about what they had. Anyway, he was happy to get them off before Halloween. No snow this year, but we did have rain. Not too badly though. Alex was Batman, and Missy was a witch (or, a pretty peasant with a big hat). . We met up with the Rahns to go trick or treating in town along Main/Fort Wayne Streets like we usually do (one of Abby's sisters wore Missy's geisha costume from a couple years ago). The kids got a decent haul of candy before we punched out. Tonight, Beth and I joined a new small group, with several families that we don;t know as well. Hopefully it will go better than our last one did, where we met at our house and attendance was so spotty. Frustrating. Also, this weekend I finally got back to where I was running before the pneumonia; I finished a half marathon distance in town Saturday morning! So I've got 2 weeks to keep it up.