Beth and I tried a new tack to get our small group together this week, she arranged a meeting at American Table instead of the usual study at the church building on Monday. Mixed results, two other couples came but mostly declines and no-shows. Well, we'll keep plugging at it and maybe things will improve. Not much else going on this week.

It seems Beth and I are now old; she told me some time last week that she had reserved spots for us for a spaghetti dinner at church on Friday, but I didn't realize until we got there that it was a seniors dinner. They were doing a fundraiser for the youth group to do a trip to the CIY conference, which I did know about, but I noticed when we got there that we were maybe the youngest ones in attendance. Well, I guess there's no getting around it, we are old. Anyway, Saturday afternoon there was a guest speaker at church which I didn't really want to go to, but the pastor asked me specifically if I would attend, so I did. My guess is that many others turned him down...there was practically nobody there for the afternoon talk. Well, there were maybe a couple dozen, but mostly they were from other churches. Only a few from FCC were there. 

About the only other reportable thing from this week is the leaves. We've had something of a warm spell for the past week, so the snow is gone...which uncovered all the leaves in the backyard that stayed in the trees until our first big windy snowstorm in November. It's frustrating when there aren't even any leaves to rake until the snow comes, but that's what you get with our trees sometimes. So I've been raking up one or two tarpfulls of leaves after getting home from work. There are a lot of leaves....

It has been a slow week. Not much going on, and we didn't stray from the routine. Beth and I did go to Owen's Meat Market in Leesburg on Saturday for something to do on a slow day, one of those places that we drive by occasionally and say "we should check that place out sometime." Otherwise, not much reportable happened this week. Sunday was the super bowl watch party at church; the men's ministry had a get together for the big game and I and Alex went. It was a lot lesser attended than I thought it would be, maybe 20 or so there, and only a couple that I knew. Alex came late after work and left at halftime, he didn't know anyone there. And the game itself was lame.

This was the weekend of the special getaway for Beth and me. Friday after work, Beth and I headed over to Fort Wayne. I know that's not exactly glitzy but not the point. Beth got us a reservation at the Holiday Inn across the road from the Coliseum. We checked in, and the hotel is nice enough but not spectacular and not exactly new either. And we couldn't get into our room at first, so they had to give us another one on a lower floor. Beth had got one on the top floor. No matter. We went out to dinner at Storming Crab by which time it was already 9:00, so we just went back to the hotel to do some hot tubbing. That was actually the #1 reason we got the room there, was for the hot tub. Guess what? The hot tub was out of service. Empty. The pool was open, but we weren't really interested in that so we just went back to the room and spent the evening there. The next morning we swung by the Coliseum, exchanged the Komets tickets we still had for the game that was cancelled in December for 2 tickets for Saturday's game and refunds for the rest. Then we went to Stitch & Frame to pick out framing for my cross-stitching of Clarence & Smokey, which I just finally finished a few weeks ago (I started stitching that during the lockdowns for the covid pandemic, so almost 6 years of off-n-on work). We picked out some that I think will look really cool, and picked out a next project as well. So did Beth. Afterwards, we went to the big even which was a glass blowing class. I had bought Beth a groupon for a glass blowing class for 2 about 10 years ago... for some reason she didn't seem enthused about it and I never knew why. But I recently found it again and was determined that we were going to do it anyway. We took the paperweight class so both of us got to do it. The guy that runs it lets you do as much of the procedures as you feel comfortable doing, so we did about everything except the actual dangerous parts. Beth made one with red, green, and white which looked like it could be Christmas so then she added blue and black. I made one that was go-green-go-white. It took around an hour or so, and at the end the guy put then in the kiln to cool slowly so we could pick them up the next day. That was the big thing for the day, so we then went on to the other stuff I'd found to occupy us for the day. It was a short list really...we went to Hyde Brothers Booksellers which I'd found online, which is a cool used books store that has rows and rows of books stored floor to ceiling on two levels with everything you could imagine...and a shop cat named Scout. How cool. We spent an hour or two there, Beth found some mystery novels to buy, and we headed to lunch. By this time Beth's back was hurting a lot so we just went back to the hotel to rest. In the evening, we went to Barnes & Noble to look at some new books, then over to the Coliseum to catch the Komets playing the Tahoe Knight Monsters (dunno...must be a Vegas farm team). I'm not sure we've ever seen a shutout before, but the Komets won this game 6-0. By the end of the 1st period, the K's were up 3-0 which was the same score as the last game we went to that they ultimately lost. Not so this time: a dominant performance start to finish. The next morning, we decided to try breakfast at a restaurant we'd never been to before so we went to Don Hall's Hollywood Drive-in. We were kind of tipped off as to what kind of place it was when we saw only old people there...it was basic, and it was fine, and we don't have to go there again. Anyway, we went to pick up our paperweights after breakfast, and headed home.