I tried to take Beth out for a fun evening for her birthday weekend on Saturday, but it didn't go as planned. At all. I got tickets through the ZB club at work for a show at the Clyde Theater (which I'd never heard of before....more on that later) in Fort Wayne. The show was called "Face 2 Face" and featured two guys doing tribute shows, one to Billy Joel and one to Elton John. The show reviews made it sound like you would forget that you're at at tribute show for both of them. Anyway, I hadn't told Beth what we were doing or where we were going, so she didn't know until we were walking up to the theater and she read it on the marquee. Now friends, the Clyde Theater is a former 1950s era art-deco movie theater that was totally renovated just a few years ago into a concert venue. It's new enough that many people attending may not be entirely familiar with it, including us. So what we noticed right away was there are no seats. We knew we had general admission tickets, but we didn't know there were no seats (except for a few in VIP boxes in the balcony area). There are two floor levels (they leveled things when they converted it from a movie theater), and it is all standing room. The higher level has a bar...the bar area was one of several. Anyway, with Beth's knee and back hurting as much as they have over the last year plus, there was no way we were going to stand on concrete for an entire show. She was willing to give it a try until I told her the tickets had been free through the ZB club...and then she said let's just go. So that was a total bust. After leaving, we just went out to dinner at Smokey Bones. I looked for any other show that might have been playing in FW that night but there wasn't anything we would have wanted to see. I suggested we try one of the newer comedy clubs but Beth wasn't into that. But in checking all the venues in FW and SB, we found several other shows we now want to go see. So that was good, anyway....

Friday, Beth's actual birthday, she had the re-scheduled Ladies' Ministry Christmas party, delayed over a month by the Omicron surge. Which is still going strong, but everyone's tired of dealing with it. Anyway I've never been so glad for her to get something out of the way. She has been stressing about that party for weeks, because she was basically catering it. Somehow she volunteered to make soup for everyone for the party, some 80 people, who all want something different. She spent her entire birthday making soup. And stressing about how she was going to be able to make it all, would there be enough, how many were going to show up, yada yada yada...but it went off just fine, everyone had enough, there was plenty left over, and everyone thought it was just wonderful. Both of the girls went with her, so they all came back with some white elephant gift or other. 

We are returning to Petoskey! I got reservations for us for Petoskey State Park in July, which wasn't easy. It's a popular destination, so the sites go fast, and you can only reserve a site 6 months prior to your arrival date. So we knew what dates we wanted, and when I went online to make the reservation I found very few sites available for those dates, because people had already reserved from dates prior to July 16 onward, but there were maybe a dozen sites coming open on July 16, so at 9:00 am on January 16, I was online and ready to click 'reserve.' And there was a rush. As soon as I clicked, things changed immediately to "there are no sites available for the dates you have chosen." And suddenly there was nothing available starting July 16. So I had to do this again on January 17 for a July 17 arrival. Wondering if I would have to do this every day and would I ever get a spot. There were only a few sites coming available on the 17th, so at 9:00 I was all set and ready, and the website froze. Nothing was happening for around 20 minutes, but I didn't leave just in case it was crashed for everyone. Which I guess it was, because around 20 minutes later suddenly it all just loaded all of a sudden. And no sites had been taken, so I grabbed one and I got it! I wondered if the site went down until people started giving up and logging off. Anyway, I got our site for July 17-23, and then all the other available sites disappeared within moments. 

Monday was a holiday, so Beth and the girls and I went to the antiques mall in North Webster for something to do. The weather was supposed to get nasty or we would have gone farther from home, but just in case we stayed a little closer.

I gave blood last week for the first time in a long time.