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....