The new dryer was delivered and installed this week. They hauled the old one away, and the new one smells a whole lot better than the old one did. Beth has been having crushing guilt this week over Ruby, but she does know we couldn't let her cause any more damage. Iris has been acting more and more friendly again too.....I finally tried this week to start dealing with the boxes of things I still have from Mom/Grandma, by listing one of the antique postcards (postmarked 1908!) on eBay. As of tonight, with only hours left in the auction, it had 7 views and no bids on an opening of $2.20. If it doesn't sell, I'm just going to start getting rid of stuff by trashing, donating, or whatever.....Nat went to the doctor again this week, for feeling awful all the time. She either has mono (again) or strep throat, I hope it's strep but mono would explain a lot.....We all went up to Michigan Sunday to clean up Becky's grave, since today was her birthday (she would have been 20. Hard to believe). Looks like nobody's been there in a while. We cleaned up the weeds and did some edging around Beth's dad's grave, and put new flowers in the vase for Becky. We were going to go pick blueberries after we were done, but only a couple u-pick places were open on Sundays, and the nearest one looked deserted when we got there except for a man out mowing the yard, who told us that they closed the u-pick down a couple weeks ago, early this year, because the crop had been so bad. The berries got all "punky" and shriveled, probably because it's been so hot and dry this year. So, no berries, and we just went to Plainwell Ice Cream instead. Then, with nothing else to do up there, we called Stephanie to see of they were home and dropped in on the Pinksters instead. We visited with them a couple hours before heading home.

Alex and Missy started school again this week. Alex is a senior. I need to start figuring out what exactly we need to do about getting him into college. I wish I knew more about that but I have very little memory of what I did myself back then. I have no idea how I figured out what colleges I was interested in without being able to Google them or look at YouTube videos. Anyway, first things first: let's get them through the year. Only 3 days into the school year, it was announced that there had been a positive case in a student who had been in the school. By the time we knew about it, the kid's family and the families of all students who had been in close contact with him had already been notified, and they are all going to be out of school for a while. The rumor mill at the school is already saying that school is going to be cancelled and go to online only next week, but I don't believe that.....I donated blood last week, my company was having a blood drive one of the times I ran in for a bit, so I donated while I was there. The Red Cross does coronavirus testing on all donated blood, and mine came back negative, so I've avoided exposure up to now.....Friday night Alex had a birthday party/sleepover, so the rest of us with nothing to do went out to dinner in Fort Wayne (we wanted Red Robin!).....We are once again short one cat. Ruby has been peeing on the carpet again, including once right in front of me, and a new thing last weekend: in the dryer. There was a dry load in the dryer, someone left the door open, and she jumped in and peed in the clothes pile. That was a last straw. We tried all week but couldn't get the smell out of the dryer. Ruby went to the vet to get checked out if she had a UTI or something, and there was no medical reason why she was doing it. So unfortunately she is no longer with us. I hated doing this again but I can't have it.....on a related topic, Beth and I went shopping for a new dryer this weekend. We bought a new one from Smith Appliance in town, bye bye $909.50.....

This coming week Alex and Missy go back to school, in person. They're a bit nervous about it, and I wish I felt better about it myself, but Beth and I are pretty sure that it's the best thing. They're required to wear masks in the hallways, and classrooms have been socially distanced as much as possible, and we still have only have around 900 confirmed cases of the virus in the county, so it's not really a hot spot around here, but we've all seen the pictures of schools with big crowds and no precautions. I just hope all the teachers will be ok, too....I've been sewing more masks from the fabric we picked up last week, and tinkering around with the pattern and the elastic to make them better. I've had a few experimental models that worked pretty well, and some that didn't. It seemed to work best when I made a paper pattern from a store-bought one and made a few alterations.....We all spent the day Saturday at Judy & Neill's (and Ted's) cottage on the lake in Michigan.We took a cooler of food and drinks and spent the day on the lake, and grilled some hot dogs and had a big picnic dinner on the patio. They also showed us their new toy - they sold the Airstream and got a used motor coach. It's the biggest thing I have ever seen. The rest of the day we chilled at the lake, went out on kayaks and the pontoon boat or went swimming (the lake bottom is slimy there)...since we didn't find a good desk for my home office at Ikea, I moved a few things around the living room and put up the folding table that usually goes in the camper. It's not perfect but it's better than the dining room table.....

School has officially begun, sort of. Natalie is still doing online school (as she was even before the pandemic) and her testing began this week. As of now, Beth and I are still not exactly sure what her schedule is; I think they may adjust it based on the testing, or something. But we've already had a lot of confusion with the school about how it all works because it's hard to tell from the website, and twice last week she was apparently supposed to be in class of some sort even though as recently as 11:00 the previous night there was nothing listed on her school schedule. So we'll see how it goes, I suppose......Alex and Missy are both a little nervous about going back to school at the high school, so am I. That starts a week from tomorrow, I believe this week there is a chance to go walk through the building to walk your schedule.....It's been announced at work that I can expect to be working from home until at least the end of the year. I need to upgrade my work space. I'm still just clearing a space on the dining room table every morning, and setting it all aside every evening, and sitting on a hard wooden chair. To that end, Beth and the girls and I all went to Ikea near Indy this Saturday, looking for a good desk. However, there were not a lot of goof options, and very few were actually in stock. Most desks they had on display had little tickets saying 'temporarily unavailable' on them. So just a trip out of town, nothing to show for it. Not that I actually have anywhere to put a desk in this house anyway.....the dryer that we just had fixed is making an awful racket when we first turn it on, pretty much every time now. It has been going away after a while but we just had it fixed.....On the same topic, the van is making clunking noises under the front end again, we just had that fixed as well. Only the noises sound different this time.....since it looks like the pandemic isn't going anywhere soon, I thought we should make some more masks since I still only have the two I made in the spring. We all went shopping at Lowery's and Wal-Mart looking for some fun fabric and we picked out a few yards each. I made a couple masks already, lots more to go. I'm going to try improvising some elastic ear loops instead of ties this time, as well.....

Missy finished up her road driving part of her driver's ed course this week, driving for around an hour out of 3 hours each of 3 days during the week. Now all we have to do is finish up her 50 hours of logged driving and she'll be good to go. I've added Alex to our auto insurance policy, which pretty much doubled the premium. At least with Missy, the premium won't go up quite as far.....Thursday I took a day off work and we went to the zoo in Fort Wayne (except Nat because she hates zoos). We picked up the Monsma kids on the way out of town and got there as soon as it opened since they're operating at reduced capacity. It wasn't that crowded though, which was what we were hoping since it's the middle of the week. I haven't been to the zoo since Missy went on a field trip in something like 4th grade. It's pretty much all still where I left it. The skyride is still fun but there's a lot more overgrowth since last I remember, so you can't see into the animal areas much. Anyway, we all did the zoo over a few hours, then Googled a good new place to get a fro-yo sundae and found a cool place at Jefferson Pointe.....Nat starts school next week, Alex and Missy a couple weeks later. I wish I felt better about them going back to in-person school.....