This weekend was mostly about attic work and other errands. I'm still digging around in the attic and trying to get everything put in place with the new recessed lighting. The insulation makes it so hard to get the lamps in place. So I spent a good chunk of Saturday up there with a respirator and coveralls on. The van, I was told, also was slipping and sliding on the slick roads quite a bit lately, so now it has two new tires from Discount Tire which was just built across from Menard's fairly recently. No throwing the tires through the window. The good news about that is that gas has been so cheap lately that there was enough cash in our automotive envelope that we could pay cash for the tires. That was $367.41, too, and there's still some left over. The kids also had free passes to the Warsaw varsity basketball game Saturday night, vs. Elkhart Central, which Warsaw won easily. The free passes just happened to be for being on high honor roll :) Friday was Jacob's birthday party, which both the kids were invited to, so Beth and I had a mini-date and went to the Boathouse. First time going there in a while, and neither one of us were all that impressed...seems even more overpriced since last time we were there.

I had grand plans for this weekend, but it turned into a lot of nothing. We’ve been saying we should go try out the toboggan run at Pokagon State Park for several years now, but never have, so I decided that this shall be the week we do it. We even went so far as having the kids call friends to see if they could go with us. But the Boschain kids were all sick and Luke had a prior commitment so we were just going to go ourselves…until Alex started having a stomach ache later Friday night, which is how Missy started earlier in the week. So we decided it would be better to do the toboggan thing some other time. The stomach ache receded by Saturday night without any barfing, but then Beth was getting sick too. The weekend turned into 2 days of TV and video games for everyone. Oh well, I got to watch what’s probably the last Brady/Peyton game, and Peyton won it. As I mentioned, Missy was sick earlier in the week; she stated with the stomach ache Tuesday evening and we were smart enough this time to get out some totes to stack a wastebasket on so she could throw up into something during the night if there wasn’t time to get down her ladder…good call…so she missed school on Wednesday. I came home from work Wednesday to find her lying on the couch binge-watching “Dr. Who” on Netflix. Beth’s birthday was Thursday, the last one she’ll ever have (49, OMG); I got her an ice cream cake coming home from work and found that she had already picked on up herself…so we have a lot of ice cream cake…and the kids and I got her some more of those Home Grown animals. The kids were supposed to go to a birthday party at the Boschains Friday night, but Ben is sick so it was postponed, so we just wentout for sushi Friday night. Then the weekend.

We have got a stocked freezer again. Today was cow day; we drove up to Nappanee and loaded up half a cow. Big cow this year, we have 371 pounds.

We were over at the Boschains today for Benjy's birthday..not the party, just the birthday...and old friends the Horbetts were there! Without the slew of kids. We had cake and pizza and Gary brought up how much he wanted to install a ceiling fan in each room in their house. So, Adam and I being old hands at that sort of stuff, offered to help him put one up in their bedroom. Now. Right now. So we 3 ran out to Lowe's and Gary picked one out, then we got down to work. It involved some heavy duty recon work; the attic access is not real close to where the fan needed to go in, but from there it looked easy enough to cross the house and find the spot where we'd be hanging it. It turned out to not be as easy as it looked, but Adam was the one doing the attic crawling so it was ok. We had lights and wires poking up through the ceiling so he could spot the location, but the joining of the house (it's a prefab) and where the insulation was made it hard to find. But we did find it eventually, and we even learned what that second switch on the wall in their bedroom was for that they never had known. It was for just in case they wanted to install a ceiling fan, one switch for the light and one for the fan. Easy peasy. We did have to improvise a bit to get the junction box supported well, but after finding the right tools it was no problem and in an hour or two we had the thing all hooked up and working correctly, balanced so well there was no wobble at all. Gary is just ecstatic over it.