The Accidental Boilermaker

The last week of July, Meredith and Hans came to visit. Oma, Grandpa and Mimi were here too. While it will make for a long post, here’s everything we did together.  Played slot cars. Went fishing. Played board games. Were generally silly. Enjoyed yummy treats.  We visited the downtown library to check out their Dino exhibit for summer reading.  After the library we went to Promenade Park to splash around in the water feature.  We also went to the zoo which was a lot of fun since we hadn’t been in forever. 

 The Sunday before school started we went to a TinCaps games. It was quite warm but eventually our seats were in the shade.  The TinCaps did not play very well.  But we still enjoyed ourselves. There seemed to be a lot of foul balls near our area too. Of course there’s always foul balls and you should always be paying attention, but this game felt different.  So guess who came home with a foul ball? As it came back off the roof towards us, I put my hand out to shield Jameson and next thing we know it’s in his seat. He said the ball hit him in the chest and then bounced into his seat. Obviously he felt it but he wasn’t hurt. A first for all of us. 

 I have a lot of catching up to do. And I will try my best. But for now we will start with back to school which was last week.  5th and 7th grade are off to great starts. 

 I got home yesterday from Cleveland where GOTR hosted Summit, their every two years conference. I left Saturday so it was a long trip (in my opinion). We did some fun stuff, learned some good stuff and meet a few new people. Saturday our council director, Sarah, had training so Megan, our board president, and I explored downtown. We found an outdoor festival, the public library, and this beautiful hotel. Sunday we had to waste more time in the morning so we walked to the West Side Market inside another really fun building.  Finally Sunday afternoon, Sarah’s training was finished and Summit began. We had some networking sessions, dinner and the kick off party at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.  This was my favorite part. Monday was day one for all general and break out sessions. I didn’t sleep great and woke up early to do a short run with a local running group, so it felt like a long day. For dinner we met a former board member who just moved to Cleveland, watched some soc...

 Evelyn had a track meet yesterday evening.  It’s an open to the community, anyone can enter type of event but consisted of mostly kids.  Little kids all the way to high schoolers and maybe some college runners. Evelyn participated as part of her summer running group.  She ran the 1600  and the 4x400 so that meant we were there for the whole meet.  Evelyn ran a 7:41 for the 1600 and just beat out her friend from school to take 3rd place. Their relay team came in last but she was just happy there were enough girls who stuck around so they could participate. 

We had a busy week! Evelyn and I volunteered with VBS at church. We were in charge of a group of graduated 3rd graders. They were a great kids and we had lots of fun.  Jameson had soccer try outs and he made a travel team for the fall. My parents visited for a few days and we celebrated the start of the World Cup by getting Chiptole (bogo if you wore a soccer jersey).  Thursday night a storm went through. It woke me up but didn’t sound too terrible. In the morning however there were several tree branches down. We even lost a small tree in the backyard. It fell on the deck and didn’t cause any damage but Nate did stay home to take care of it.  Saturday morning we drove to Chicago to stay with Claire and Peter for the weekend.  We went to a Juneteenth block party where there was free food, music, bouncy houses, and vendors. Then we walked to a brewery and got more food. Back at the house the kids watched a movie and we hung out and relaxed.  Sunday we went to the ...