Beth and I got away for a rare date night yesterday, and when I say rare I mean we got out of town together. We always want to go somewhere we've never gone before but usually wind up getting sushi in town and then going back home. But this time, I looked around for somewhere that we literally have never been before and looked good online. So we headed out and I didn't tell her where we were going until we were there. The Goshen Brewing Company! It looked good from the reviews so we went there. It's a small place and kind of confusing for first-time guests (where to sit, how to order, etc) but we figured it out. I got a sandwich called the Hot Mess which was a pork BBQ with pickled jalapenos, excellent, and Beth got the Vietnamese noodles, which was absolutely gross. It came with some kind of sausage balls on a skewer that smelled and tasted nasty. It was very nice to get out of the house and get away along a little bit, especially since I planned a nice date, but gee whiz. We moght come back, but certainly never get that one again.....

We got a letter this week from the attorney working on our adoption case, letting us know that it is done! The judge actually signed the order on the 2nd of this month so the adoption is now finalized. We got all the paperwork and the court order included a name change, so now we just need to get a new birth certificate and she will be officially Natalie Knight.....We have a new minivan. New to us, anyway. A nice 2013 Toyota Sienna with about 114,000 miles on it, and hopefully any more to come. I had it checked out at Ab & Tom's on Monday, they found a few things (front tires really worn, worn out bits in the front suspension) which the dealer agreed to fix. The suspension was a bit of a job because it took them a few days. The salvage company came to the house to collect the Chrysler on Thursday but the Toyota wasn't quite ready yet, so we were down to a single vehicle for a day or so. We finished off everything by Friday and took possession, so it is a done deal. Someone is probably going to buy the T&C at auction as-is and do well with it. Although the blowers did quit working this week before they took it away, and the dents did make a pretty loud whistle when up to speed, and the radio quit working too......Alex's VR system is finally up & running. The converter thing we ordered last week got here early this week, and it just did not work. At all. Which left us with an I do not know what we are going to do about this moment. Lucked out a bit though, since the graphics card Alex bought a few months back when he was trying to upgrade out old PC fit into the new computer we just got, and it has the correct input for the headset. It's a better card than what the new PC came with and is compatible, so we swapped it out for the old one and now it works perfectly, and the headset doesn't show an error message for insufficient hardware any more. We may never see him again.....Saturday was the Purdue Boilermaker Half Marathon. Since I have decided to never again run the Veterans' Half in Columbia City, I was looking for an alternative and thought this one would be fun. It was a lovely day, cold but not that much, sunshine, not much wind, but the course was a bit hilly in places. It was a nice course through the town and campus, across the river a couple times, started and ended by the stadium on the Purdue campus. I finished it in 2:07:38, good for 627th overall out of 1186.

I have returned from a conference in Philadelphia. A rare work trip. And I was told I was going just a little over a week in advance, and also just after the company announced there would be no more non-essential travel for the rest of they year. I guess I'm special. No really, it was the UHMWPE conference and my new bosses thought it would be valuable to send someone to see what's going on in the world of poly. I was only gone for a few days; I left for O'Hare Wednesday just after lunch (the rental car return setup there is now bizarre, seems to me, and the car GPS was confused. The toll transponder also did not work so I had to pay those myself). I got to Philly in the evening and rented a car for the short drive to the hotel, but I should have gotten an Uber because I did not move the car from the original parking spot until I left. The conference itself was held in a place called the Union League, which seems to be an old school gentleman's club, from a time when that meant where rich men go to hang out and smoke cigars and tell their big game hunting stories with other rich men. There were places in the building that were marked members only, but I walked through anyway. They have a dress code, but I wore a tie on the first day and just a polo the second day when I decided they weren't going to enforce it. After the first day (Thursday), dinner was at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which was super cool. We had a private dinner in a museum of dinosaur skeletons and a butterfly garden and animal specimens. I had a fun time texting pictures to Missy; that place was right up her alley. After it was over Friday I walked down to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, sort of on a whim, to see the Rocky statue and maybe run up the stairs. But when I got there I didn't. It suddenly seemed silly. After seeing the whole huge crowd in line to take selfies with Rocky, I just wasn't that interested any more. But at least I saw it. I headed home right after that. And the airline managed to lose my luggage on the way home.....Speaking of our minivan that can't catch a break lately, I got a message from our insurance company just after landing in Chicago on Friday. They have concluded that the van is not repairable and it has been totaled. The settlement amount is about $5300 which won't buy us a new van, so my first thought was to cancel the claim and just drive a van with a bashed side for a while. But by Saturday I'd changed my mind, since we'd never get that kind of money out of the van any other time, and the settlement could pay off the truck loan and pay for both girls trips to Europe next year, which would be a net savings of a few hundred dollars a month even with a new loan. So we went van shopping Saturday and found a could nice ones on the same lot where we found the T&C. Test drove them both, liked the Toyota better, and put a hold on it. So looks like we're getting a new van.....I did some shopping with Missy for her Halloween costume this weekend too. She has an idea for a dragon warrior kind of thing, so she wants to build a dragon head helmet of sorts. I'm going to give it my best shot. She also needed a cape and some gloves which she bought herself. She wants to paint the cape green and doesn't want to hear that it probably won't work.....Alex finally got his VR ready computer (the one that was cancelled twice) Saturday, but we still had to run around to get it to work. He needed a particular kind of cable for the monitor that we did not have, so we had to find one at Wal-Mart, and also needed a digital video input for the graphics card that we also did not have and could not find. In the end we had to order a DVI to display port converter on Amazon today, so his VR set still does not work and won't until sometime in a few days.....last week Natalie had her first choir concert, "Autumn Leaves," at the PAC center. She is the choir historian so she is supposed to photograph all the choir events this year but couldn't get the actual camera to work after changing the SD card, so she used my phone which doesn't take good photos inside in low light, so it didn't work out that well. The concert was nice though.Nat is in the beginning women's choir but some of the more advanced choirs were very good.

The van just cannot catch a break lately. Friday Beth was picking up the kids from school and some kid backed out of a parking space right into the side of the van and put a pretty good bash in it. The kid was also driving with a suspended license, due to underage drinking, and got really mad about Beth calling the police, reporting the accident to our insurance, taking pictures of his car.....Friday was also homecoming for the high school. Alex and Natalie both had dates, although there was no dance so I'm not really sure what for. Then Nat's date cancelled on her, but she hung out with Holly instead. I dropped the kids off at the football game (while Beth and Missy were in Goshen for Erika's wedding), Nat called to be picked up just after halftime but Alex hung out with his date for the whole game. She's in the color guard so she was working for a lot of it. Both dates also hung out at our house most of the day Sunday, and Alex may have a girlfriend there.....Unbelievably, the Dell PC for Alex's VR set has had to be cancelled and a new one re-ordered, again. Something in the PC I ordered after the last one was cancelled was also no longer available, again. So I placed an order for another PC, again. This time it's supposed to be delivered by next Friday, hopefully.....