In the 'who needs this' department, the van finally quit this week. It had been chugging on startup a bit lately, and finally Monday afternoon it wouldn't start. And Beth was at Owen's, with a full load of groceries including frozens, and needing to pick up the kids soon. And I was in Columbia City at the time it died. So fortunately she was able to get a hold of Jessica who came right away to get her and take the groceries home, and the kitchen window was unlocked. Meanwhile I ran back and tried to jump the battery (didn't work), then called a tow truck. It took a few hours before he made it out there, and he was able to jump the van with a heavy duty power pack thing, but I had him tow it to Ab & Tom's anyway. I left it there overnight, and they checked it out in the morning. Turns out the battery was not just dead but shot, strange since it is not that old. There must be some sort of short in there somewhere. So Tuesday I got it back, $320 later but with a new battery....On a run Saturday morning I saw there was something going on at the village in Winona Lake, which turned out to be Canal Days. So Beth and the girls and I (Alex at work) went to check it out later on, got lunch from a food truck (which took forever) and checked out some art displays and the shops. We found nothing we needed, so we finished up there and went to the Heirloom Tomato Festival in Pierceton for a bit. Mostly, we visited with the McDonalds' at Kelsea's shop (Scott had their restored vintage camper on display there too) and got a drink, and found not much of interest there either.....I cashed in some stock purchase plan stocks a little bit ago, got the money this week so I have ordered a new computer. It's a new Dell PC that can run a VR headset, which Alex has been saving up for for quite a while. He's got enough to buy it, so I went ahead and bought the computer. We'll see if this turns out to be a good idea....Today I went to FW to visit Mom again. She was sitting up in the TV area in her wheelchair when I got there, and seemed better than she had been today. She drank some Boost from one of the boxes, and I got her to eat a whole little dish of applesauce. She even spoke; it was unintelligible and I could barely hear her but she spoke. And, she even laughed at something while I was there. One of the nurses sat with us for a little while and told me that Mom was her favorite....I took the opportunity of being in FW on a nice afternoon to do a little geocaching on campus at Purdue FW.....Natalie went with her friend Holly to some water park today, apparently it looks nicer on the internet that in real life (she had thought it was Deep River, but it was actually in Marion and was not in the best part of town), but she had fun....

School started back up again this week. Alex is now a junior, and the girls are both sophomores. The first week seemed to go pretty well, except for when some kid that Natalie was trying to be nice to basically told her that he was way too popular to bother with her. He almost made her cry. That's high school for you. She did make another new friend the next day though so that was good. Alex and Missy didn't report anything like that, fortunately.....Beth has decided she is not well enough to go back to work. Her meds have not been working much lately, and she feels like she is going backwards. Monday I went to the school with her to see her boss and tell her that she was quitting. She hates to leave them high and dry because they are sorely in desperate need of aides, but it is what it is, and Beth cannot do it right now...Something I ate disagreed with me on Tuesday, apparently, because shortly after getting home from work I started feeling really queasy and puked my guts out a few times, but after that it pretty much was over.....Wednesday was water wars for the youth group, and it always seems that the temperature drops precipitously when that comes around. It's been cooler and occasionally rainy for a couple weeks, but things held out just long enough for the kids to have some water fun at church.....I spent a lot of time at Iotron in Columbia City this week and last, and probably more coming up, including talk of me going out to the Vancouver plant again.....This weekend we've tried to just have chill days so nothing much going on. I got a few things done around the house, mostly working on staining the window trim in the living room (haven't worked on that in a couple months (it's been unstained for 13 years) and on the camper. After the last camping trip I decided that we really don't need to worry about resale any more (the thing is 23 years old, after all) so I also have modded it by removing all the water system to increase storage under the benches. We never use the water anyway. I'm working on replacing the sink (which flipped upside down for storage) with a tabletop that we can store more things on.

I've wanted to get a few things done on the house and camper this weekend but it hasn't worked out. Saturday, Beth sprung going to Fort Wayne on me, said we talked about it, I have no such memory. But we went, I mostly to visit Mom again. No telling how long is left. She's still losing weight and looks so very skinny, eyes sunken and everything. In the hour or two I was there, she was in her wheelchair at the table in the dining area. They started getting things out for dinner but Mom wouldn't eat any of it. I tried to give her some soup but she wouldn't do it. She did have a box of Boost there and I was able to give her some of that a few times, until she had drank most of it, but that was all. Beth and the kids went to the mall while I was visiting Mom, mostly to Barnes & Noble and a few stores on the mall.....Today we went up to Michigan to visit with Marve and Beth at their house. They had invited the siblings together to have a cookout and swim in the pool. So we were there with the kids (we also brought Natalie's friend Holly with us so Nat felt more comfortable there), Neill & Judy were there, and Ted & Monica were there. It was a bit cool for the pool (for me anyway) so not everybody swam much, but we had a really nice cookout dinner (chicken & corn, fruit salad, etc) and visit for an evening.....Lauren stayed with us through the middle of the week after camping last weekend. Beth took the girls shopping a few times and Lauren totally tried to play her. Judy was down to our house to visit last week, and helped the girls work on their painted chairs. She took Lauren back home with her.

We are back from a short camping weekend at Chain O' Lakes State Park. Ric and Nickie are on a vacation for their 25th anniversary, so we agreed to have Lauren over for a few days. Beth drove up to meet Stephanie for a handoff during the week, and she'll be staying with us for a bit longer. We haven't been particularly entertaining, I don't think, but as long as we can avoid drama it'll be fine. Anyway, after work of Friday we hitched up and rolled out, and got set up with plenty of daylight left. We had a very nice campsite, although there was pretty much no grass in it. The weekend was dominated by the beach, we spent time there Friday night, and again Saturday (most all day, except for a run to town to go shopping at Dunham's for beach stuff. We spent way too much money on floaties for the beach). I got a 7 mile run in Saturday morning early too, and my high ankle (which has been very sore lately) was feeling pretty good. Sunday we hit the beach early, then came back later to rent boats. Alex got a kayak, Missy and I got a canoe, and Nat and Lauren got another canoe. We went out for a sojourn on the lake all the way through one of the channels to the next lake over, then just back to shore because the girls were fighting and couldn't stand to be in the boat together any more. We packed up and headed for home on Monday (we got to see pretty much the whole park empty out Sunday, and were pretty much alone Sunday night. Our campsite neighbors even gave us a tote full of firewood as they were leaving because they couldn't use it).....earlier in the week Beth got he sleep study results. In the study period, she stopped breathing 57 times per hour on average. It is sever enough that she is going straight to having a CPAP. It'll be delivered to the pharmacy sometime in the next few weeks, she'll get fitted for it, and then she'll sleep with it from then on. I hope there's a big difference. She's so tired all the time, this might be why.