It’s been a busy and good and productive weekend. Friday Beth and I had an appointment with the attorney’s office to get the process started for adoption! We have to inform the bioparents, but first we have to be able to find them, which may not be that easy a task. We have a follow-up meeting on Monday, also Nat’s birthday, to sign some papers and get things started. Nat’s coming with us so she can sign some as well…..Friday evening was the Komets teddy bear toss game against the hated Toledo Walleye. The Boschains unfortunately couldn’t go with us this time though. Beth had been busy all week making soup for the big Wawasee craft show Saturday, so it was against her better judgement to go to the game but she did anyway. I swung through Goodwill on the way home from work and picked up some extra stuffed animals (a whole big bag for $6) and the girls picked out a few of theirs as well. Then, since Alex was working until 7:00, we had to pick him up on the fly and drive hard to get to FW in time. The puck was dropping just as we got to the parking lot, so we were hoping we didn’t miss the first Komets goal. No worries there, we missed the first few minutes of the game but there was no score. Nor was there a Komets goal for another period and a half, by which time they had gotten down 2-0. Then they tied it up early in the 3^rd period, and it remained 2-2 until the end of regulation. 3-on-3 hockey in overtime is crazy…and they scored with about a minute left in overtime to win it 3-2! Big crowd at the Coliseum for this game, and going nuts. Over 3000 stuffed animals collected, I heard….Of course we didn’t make it back home until near midnight, and Beth had to get up early to make two pots of soup for samples at the Wawasee show, so she got very little sleep. She got the soup made, and I got the van all loaded up and ready to go; as we arrived at the school there was a decided lack of people unloading stuff for setup and the parking lot was already packed, so we had a pretty uneasy feeling that Beth had gotten the time wrong. By an hour and a half, as it turned out. She was supposed to be set up by 7:00 and she thought she was supposed to be set up by 8:30. So, the show was already well into full swing by the time we got there. And they had given her spot away since she didn’t show up. There was an emergency spot for her to set up in, though, which turned out to be a really good one. It was near the back of the main hallway and looked out of the way at first glance, but there was a lot of foot traffic going that way because it was the way to the food sales, I think. She also forgot her paper bags so I had to run home to get them, but when I returned to the school I had to park in the overflow across the street at a church. But their parking lot was full so I had to go to the overflow to the overflow, which was a grassy field. And all the snow from the last week or two had just melted, and it was raining, so the ground was sodden and I knew driving into the field was a bad idea as soon as I did it. I got about 20 feet before the van got stuck in the mud. However, there was already a tow truck on the premises, towing another car that was stuck before me. Then a pickup truck tried to go around me and got stuck, and a full size van tried to go around me and got stuck, and a bunch of other cars that had parked earlier got stuck...and the tow driver was a busy guy. He pulled a couple others out of the mud before getting to me, and by that time someone had parked in the driveway behind me and the full size van so he could not pull me out from behind. He got creative though, and hooked up my van to his tow cable (as fully extended as it can go, I think) from the side and just pulled the van sideways until the back of it was facing open ground. Pulling me past the full size van, my van missed hitting it by about a whisker. But he got me out successfully, even though it tore the hell out of the grass. But there were several others to get out as well, and it looked like the grass was going to be in even worse shape later. Anyway, after that I finally made it back to the craft show with the bags and Beth had already sold a ton of soup. I stayed to help out for the rest of the show, until 3:00, and sales were very steady the whole time. In the end we counted up $905 in sales from this show. $1005, if you count a $100 sale I had at work just Friday…..Sunday was a work day, mostly, after church. I raked leaves (not an easy task in the freezing wet), rented another storage unit to put the camper away for the winter (had to call Patrick to come over and help me push the camper into the storage unit), and tried to put Christmas lights on the spruce tree in the front yard. Nope, it is just too big, I can’t reach the top any longer.