Memorial Day weekend...again not camping, but a good thing because it was unseasonable hot this week/weekend. It actually topped 100 degrees at times. Softball lost 18-4 during the week, we played about as well as we're going to, I think. We were also short our best player so I filled in in the outfield (I may be the only one who caught anything in the game). We mixed things up a little, but it didn't help. Anyway. The kids are now done with school, thankfully, and a final push to get things done at the end came up a bit short but Nat passed almost everything anyway, so all 3 of the kids will be in high school next fall, yay! Alex wants to look for a job now. I'm going to have to get the pool set up soon. Beth took all the kids shopping quite a bit in the last week or so because they also all need shoes for summer gym which is starting up in a week. Saturday we went to look at a couch/loveseat that someone at work had for sale, but it turned out to be 2 loveseats and they were really mushy so I knew that was a no-go as soon as I sat on them. Also Saturday Alex went to a birthday party for one of his friends, so he was gone all day (they were going to FW to play laser tag), and the rest of us took a drive up to Goshen to pick up the framed portrait of all of us on the beach at Virginia Beach. I've put it up in the living room where the framed photo of Beth, Alex, Missy, and me at the Birmingham Zoo all those years ago used to be. It looks great! Saturday was pretty low key, Beth and the girls did more clothes shopping and I stayed home with Alex. I got some cache maintenance done too. Monday I had the day off so we all went to Dutch Creek Animal Farm or whatever it's called; the place where Beth and the kids went last year when I was in Arizona without them. Beth had been sure it would be really crowded so we went super early...and it wasn't. Which was fine, but we had seen everything by lunchtime and headed home. It's a nice park though, fun tractor ride and feeding the animals, and quite a variety of animals to see. But it was frakkin hot. Also this week we had Mark do some minor landscaping for us; finally getting stones put in the circle around the crabapple tree in the front yard (looks great), and leveling a pad in the backyard for the new pool. Which I'll have to get set up soon.

Softball got mercied this week, 13-2. Based on how well we can actually play, that may be more like how the season goes. Natalie's choir went to Cedar Point this weekend. It's lucky that she was able to go at all, since she had gotten herself suspended for a day on Thursday, for threatening to fight another girl over social media. I wasn't really sure how much to be angry about it after hearing why she did it; the other girl deserved it. Really. Anyway, she spent Thursday at home without her phone or Kindle, but she went back to school Friday and we did go. Some of her teachers had expressed concern about a panic attack at the park and maybe someone should go with her, so I did. The bus left town at around 5:30 am. The school paid for my ticket, which was very nice. She wanted to ride the bus so I drove separately (somewhere in northern Ohio, I looked up and noticed that the bus wasn't in front of me anywhere anymore, so I used to GPS to get there on some back roads and still beat them there) and we got there by opening. I went around with her and 4 of her friends for a couple hours (2 of her friends did the bungie slingshot thing and one of them passed out 4 times during it) until she told me "you can go ride the rides by yourself if you want to" which I took to mean she was ready for me to be away from her. The Lancasters also happened to be there that day, so I met up with them and we went around together for a while. After lunch we were at the Gatekeeper when the rain started. It had been sprinkling while we were in line, but just after we got into the shelter at the head of the line the downpour started and it rained HARD for about half an hour. At first they were still running the ride and people were coming back drenched...I didn't really want to ride it in the rain...but just 2 people in front of us they shut it down. Unfortunately for some, the last train back had to wait outside while the attendants got everyone unbuckled, which took several minutes, strapped in, in the pouring rain. But we were in the shelter and never got wet. After about 45 minutes they started running it again and we rode it dry. Then we got in line for another coaster but after waiting an hour or so I got a phone call that Nat was having a panic attack. The ride where they drop you straight down, plus her friend screaming, had sent her over the edge. By the time I got to her there was a medic there but she was still crying really hard. She managed to calm down a bit after a while and we went to the aid station, where it was cool and dry and dark and quiet (nobody else there) and she fell asleep for about 45 minutes. The medic didn't let her friends into the aid station which was good also. She was better after that, and she wanted to get some frozen yogurt. So we did. While we did that she complained about how her friends had been driving her crazy all day and they weren't listening to her. She wanted to ride the wooden coasters but nobody would. One of her friends had her shoes so we had to get a hold of them and meet back up, but afterwards I tried to make sure Nat was in charge. We rode the Genini and the Mine ride, and were going to ride Gatekeeper, but ran out of time. The bus left at 7, and we stopped at a rest area for dinner, at which point Nat decided she didn't want to ride the bus any more so I drove us home. We got home around midnight or so, and in the morning overslept and missed church (Beth and Alex went without me and the girls).

I finally got the downstairs cable working, but I somehow missed the fact that we do not have a DVR with our new cable service. We have lots of on-demand stuff, almost everything we watch in fact, and Netflix included so no need to stream it through the DVD player anymore, so we’re going to try it out without a DVR. I already don’t like it, because we even have to watch commercials with the on-demand shows. Do not like it, at all. We’ve had a DVR for 15 years, can we ever go back? We’re going to try. In other news, finally a real softball game this week! It wasn’t certain at first since there were a lot of circumstances amongst the players and only 8 showed up. We recruited one of the players’ teenage son and he played catcher for us, and bailed us out a bit. We won the game, 13-11, although we tried hard to blow it in the last inning. We had an 8-run lead that turned into a 2-run lead by the time we were done. Our outfield is a bit shaky, and balls were taking bad hops, and Bob and I were colliding chasing a popup and such. Also the game started 20 minutes late because there was a car crash right at the entrance to CCAC just before game time and the police weren’t letting anyone pass. Wednesday I took a vacation day from work, I figure school is going to be out soon so it’d be nice for Beth and I to get to spend some time alone together. We went out to breakfast, went shopping at the Amish grocery store, did some geocaching up around Bremen, and some other stuff.

We had another weird softball preseason game this past week, but at least we played against another full team. And we turned a few 6-4-3 double plays in the process, which is always fun. Natalie had gone to the library for a painting class just before the game and was walking home so I had to do a mad dash to find her and get her and get her home to get to the game on time. Saturday I emptied the storage unit (overdue since the storage loft in the garage has been done for a while, but this will save us $70 per month), which was harder than I thought it was going to be since one of the camper tires was flat flat flat. I couldn’t move it by pushing or pulling, so I had to get creative in wangling the truck into position to pull the camper out enough to be able to get the tire pump to reach as far as the flat tire. But the camper is back in the garage. I may get another unit next winter for the camper, but for now I’m trying to save money. On that same note, I’m switching our TV provider to Comcast cable because the Dish price just went up again and I’m paying nearly $100 now. And the internet just went up too so I’m trying to bundle and save. Looks like I can save around $60 per month there between internet and TV. Although as of today, I’ve been trying to get the downstairs TV working (involving running some cable through the walls downstairs, which is always fun…sort of) for several days and it still can’t communicate with the set-top box. In other news, the church picnic was this weekend, Beth spent way too much time cooking and getting food ready and got up way too early (I helped) to turn the crock pots on in time (I turned one of them on but forgot to plug it in) and such, but in the end we had a beautiful day for it and a good turnout with plenty of food.