Memorial Day weekend was pretty good. It’s been chilly and wet and windy so it seemed a good thing that there was no thought of camping this year, but if we had, it would have ended well. Saturday morning was wet, not raining exactly but not not raining either. I had been asked to lead the B group bike ride Saturday morning, which was the only reason I showed up. If not, I would have gone back to bed. As it was, I rode down to the Trail House and waited, but nobody else from the B group showed up, and not many from the A group either. So I just went home. I thought I might as well ride since I was up already, so I did a virtual ride for an hour instead. Today, it was very nice outside. Enough so, that since I was off work and had nothing else planned, in the morning I took off and went to Goshen to bike the Pumpkinvine Trail. Perfect day for it. It took a while to find a trailhead where I could park, but once I found somewhere, I got on the trail and rode all the way to Shipshewana and back. There were a lot of other riders on the trail too. The Amish love recumbent bikes, they do. I also found a nice BBQ and ice cream place in Middlebury that smelled good but wasn’t open when I went by, so Beth and I came back later on for lunch.

Tuesday the softball team pulled off a pretty rare feat – we swept a doubleheader! We won the first game 9-7 and the second one 9-8. The first game was a back-and-forth affair with us taking and relinquishing a lead a couple times, but finally came out on top. I was batting as the game ended. In the bottom of the 6th inning the clock was winding down as we were batting. I came up to bat with 2 outs and maybe 30 seconds on the clock. If I’d gotten out before time expired, we would have played another inning…so there was no way I was going to take a swing if I could avoid it. The first pitch was a strike and I stepped out of the box to take a “practice swing” before coming back up to bat, and the clock ran out, ballgame. 

I had my follow-up with the doctor that scoped me on Thursday. He had basically nothing to report except there was some irritation in my esophagus but nothing major. So I’m going to be on the acid medication for a while and then wean off it, and hopefully the acid reflux will be over with at that point. 

Missy came home for the weekend. It’s a long weekend, and there’s a wedding she wanted to go to (more on that later) so she drove up Friday afternoon. She’s only planning to stay for the weekend though, and head home Tuesday I think. But she’ll be coming back again next weekend too!

I dropped off our old grill with Jacob (Nat’s bf) on Friday, along with Nat. I was going to scrap it since we just got a new grill, but he said our old one was in better shape than theirs so could they have it? I said sure and took it over there in the truck. They’re going to fix it up, I hope. It needs new burners and diffusers at least. Nat was planning to spend the whole long weekend with him but on Saturday, she came home because she had not been feeling well and had an upset stomach. She was only home for a few hours though, and she was feeling fine then, so I took her back (Jacob etc were at the races in New Paris so I dropped her off there). She was successfully gone the rest of the weekend. 

Also Friday: a new Star Wars movie! “The Mandalorian and Grogu” premiered tonight, so I went with a small group of friends from church to go see it. Overall I would say it was good. It would have made a really good half a season of the Mandalorian TV show, and everyone would have said it was great, but you just expect something bigger and better from a movie, and in the end I say I liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and I give it a 6 or 7.

Saturday was our friends’ daughter Lydia’s wedding. She’s getting married just before heading off to Duke University seminary or something like that. She was pretty excited too, she was hopping up and down throughout most of the ceremony. They had a chess cake at the reception too, with a real chess set on it. Before cutting the cake they sat down to play a game. They each made about 2 moves before he conceded. It was a beautiful ceremony, and though they had a communion during it, they did not fall into the same mistake that Beth and I did and have the bride hold the juice. Reception followed in the backyard at the church.

Last week Monday I called in to “Fresh Out of Bed and Head to Head” again, and won pretty easily. I called only because they were giving away South Bend Cubs tickets, and I thought that would be fun. I won again the next day, and the next, and the next, so I’m now a 4-time hall of famer on Pulse FM. However, when I got the tickets in the mail Wednesday, instead of 2 tickets for 1 game there was 1 ticket for 2 different games, next Thursday and Friday. I asked Corey about it after the Thursday contest, and he apologized and said he would send me the other tickets for both games and I could go to either or both. Then on Friday I got in the mail, 1 more ticket for a 3rd game. I sent a message to Pulse and they told me I could trade them all back in and they would give me another ticket for whichever game I wanted. So, Beth and I are planning to go to the Cubs game on Thursday. They’re playing the TinCaps for that series, should be fun.