As I mentioned in an earlier post, my former student Skyler saw me after the youth production of Oliver Twist on Friday, and we arranged to have a game night. Skyler saw that through, and so we hosted a fun little evening of games on Monday.

All of the students who showed up were former members of my improv club, the Royal Fools, and/or members of my now-defunct Irish dancing club at CVCA. Skyler was there with his girlfriend, Micaela, and Skyler’s sister Zivana was there with her boyfriend George. It was just the right-sized group – six of us in all; it was big enough to feel festive while still feeling intimate.

We played a total of three games. We started the evening with a game that Skyler and Zivana brought with them, a game where you had to be the last person to come up with a word from a category that began with a particular letter. So, you might have “Movie titles” as a category, with the letter “B.” It sounded easy, but turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.

We then played a new-to-me-and-Mer game called Funglish, where you had to get the others to say specific words as you described the object using words printed on 120 different tiles. Again, it was trickier than I thought it would be.

We finished the evening by playing 25 Words or Less, a great word game where you try to get your team to say words on a card, but the catch is that you are limited in how many words you can use to describe the words on your card. So, you might only have ten words you can say to get your team to guess all five words on the game card. It is a very clever game, and it is a lot of fun to play or watch.

Skyler also added a twelve-pack of tacos to the mix, and I made cookies. We ate and laughed a lot and had a wonderfully good time.

Saturday was Mer’s day, and she had us head down to Canton around 10:30. We went to the McKinley Memorial and Presidential Library, which sounds really odd if you are not familiar with the library. It somehow grew to be a museum with a science wing, a planetarium, a museum about Stark County, and a space for rotating exhibits. Mer and I had become members of the museum about a year ago, and she wanted to get in one last visit before our membership expired.

I’m glad she did – the science wing had been renovated recently, with some added exhibits about robots, including a couple of interactive exhibits where you got to operate a robotic arm. It turns out that Mer is pretty good at running the arms, even when they are controlled with two joysticks. Much of the rest of the museum was the same, but it included some fossils of dinosaurs and mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, so that was pretty great.

We took in a show at the planetarium, which was about the current summer night sky, with an emphasis on how there is nowhere in Ohio where the real night sky can be seen because of light pollution. The astronomer running the show was funny and entertaining, but it was kind of sad when he said only ten percent of Americans have seen the Milky Way, and only one percent has seen the Andromeda Galaxy, which used to be bright enough in the night sky to cast shadows. I know I have seen the Milky Way (in Maine, in my Dad’s driveway), but I’m not sure if I have seen Andromeda.

We finished the visit in the Stark County section, which sounds tame, but has some interesting exhibits on President McKinley, and on industry in Stark County. We finished the entire museum just as it was closing at 4:00.

Mer then took me to Aunt Zovie’s house; she lives in Canton. Aunt Zovie is an old family friend of Mer’s, and we had not seen her in a couple of years. Aunt Zovie recently tripped on her dog and broke her leg, so she was recovering at home with the use of a walker. As an added bonus, her daughter Marian was home, and Marian is a professional singer who spends much of her time in New York. She is bright and funny, and mixes with interesting people, so she is fascinating to listen to. Aunt Zovie is world’s most gracious and positive person, so she is a delight. An old family friend of Aunt Zovie and Marian’s was also there; Erma works in computers and networking at the University of Cincinnati, and although she is quiet, when she does speak, it is usually pretty funny. All in all, the two hours we spent there flew by. What a great family!

On Sunday, we headed down to New Baltimore with Dale and Carlene to see more old family friends – the George clan was celebrating Ray’s seventy-fifth birthday. Mer and her family have known the Georges since Mer was three, so the families have been close for over thirty years. I have known the Georges for about twenty years, and they are grand people. The party was full of folks from church as well, so it was a festive occasion. All of the George children made it back for the party, and most of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As if that was not enough, there were nine kittens in the barn to watch romp around and occasionally scoop up. Aunt Mary was there as well, and so we got to visit while kitten-watching. It was a fine afternoon; we headed home after a couple of hours to get Dale and Carlene back to Cardinal in time for supper.

On Thursday, we got a chance to go out with Zach and Londa. They took us up to Cleveland, first to go to supper at Piada. Piada is a fast food Italian place that is made-to-order Italian food along the lines of Subway for sandwiches or Chipotle for Mexican food. It was really good, and both Mer and I were pleased to be introduced to a new restaurant.

After supper, we headed over to Cain Park, which is a public park on the west side of Cleveland. The park has two amphitheaters for various performances, and we went to the bigger one; we were there to see the dance company Inlet Dance. Inlet Dance was started by a man who used to go to Zach and Londa’s church, and they had seen several performances by the group and thought we would like them. They were right. We saw several smaller groups perform, and all were excellent. They even had the entire group dance a fully improvised dance to the audience suggestion “escape from the zoo.” It was hard to know where to look on that one, there were so many impressive dancers on stage at once.

Normally, when I see dance, I am impressed by the women because they are beautiful and graceful, and that was true with Inlet; however, on this night I was blown away by the men. There were two pieces danced by a trio of men and a pair of men, and both were jaw-dropping for the controlled power. I actually gasped a couple of times at the strength displayed, and it was all done slowly and with grace. Amazing.

We headed right home after the show, which is not normal for us – we love dessert, and usually go out for some after an evening out. Zach and Londa tried to take us to a tavern that had wonderful chocolate beet cake (really – they swore by it), but sadly, the tavern had gone out of business. We could have stopped at the Cheesecake Factory, since we went right by it, but I felt we had to get home to give some medication to our recovering sick kitty. I’m sure the lack of calories did not hurt me at all.

Friday, after school, Mer wanted to go see Oliver Twist, the CVCA youth drama camp musical production for this summer. The play is only performed once, and is the result of just two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal. It is for ages of about five to about twelve, and they did a creditable job. There were no major gaffes of lines, and the musical numbers often had as many as twenty-five kids on stage at once, and they did well. Mer and I knew three of the children in the production, as they are the kids of colleagues, so that was fun. Also, the camp counselors are made up of recently graduated CVCA drama students, and it was good to see them.

After the show, Mer and I chatted with some of the folks we ran into. One was Skyler, a student who just graduated. Skyler had seen a recent Facebook post of mine talking about games, and he suggested a game night. I told him I thought that was a great idea, and told him to organize it, which he said he would. We agreed on getting together on Monday. So, a social evening out led to a social evening in.

Yesterday, Wednesday, was a beautiful day. It has been hot here, and the heat finally gave way to temperatures in the seventies. I could not stand the idea of not being out in “the nature,” so Mer and headed over to nearby Twinsburg, to the Center Valley Trail, on which we had never been. The main trail of the Center Valley Trail is paved, and about a mile-and-a-half long, but there are lots of side trails into the woods, and Tinker’s Creek runs through the park. The park is surrounded by housing developments and schools and roads, but it does a great job of making you feel isolated from all of that.

We had a ton of rain last week, and Tinker’s Creek was swollen. That was pretty, but meant that two of the main side trails were closed because of high water. We did find a pretty trail that meandered through the woods on high ground that was dry right up to the last ten feet, where we had to pick our way along through a muddy area. We also jumped on a side trail that I thought would take us to the north end of the paved trail, but I kept getting distracted by interesting other trails. We came out on the paved trail, and I was feeling smug until I saw a sign that identified the bridge over Tinker’s Creek as the South Bridge, near where we’d started. Ooops. We retraced our steps along the paved trail, and finished up the hike to the end of the trail, where we turned and headed back to the car. In all, we were hiking for about two hours, which was a wonderful escape in the middle of the week.

When we got home, we ate supper and watched an episode of the TV show Lost. We followed that with a game night – I challenged Mer to Trivial Pursuit – Book Lovers’ Edition. Mer has her master’s degree in English and reads all the time, so when after fifteen minutes we had only answered two questions correctly between both of us, I decided the game was too hard to be entertaining, so we quit and switched gears to True Math, a game about math. I did win, but not by so much as I would have hoped, being a math and science nerd going way back.

Yesterday (Saturday) was an odd day in that it got off to a really late start. I was supposed to go running with Nate, meeting him at 6:00 on the Towpath Trail, but when I got up, it was pouring and in the middle of a thunderstorm. So, we cancelled the run, but then I could not get back to sleep. After an hour, I gave up trying to go back to sleep, and I noticed that the rain had stopped. I checked the radar online, and I guessed I had about forty-five minutes to go running, so I went out and ran 4.3 miles, getting back to the house just as the next wave of storms came through. I showered and got on the computer and got caught up on writing blog entries, and by then it was about 10:00 and I was sleepy. I headed back to bed, just as Mer was waking up; she was happy in thinking I had finally gotten a good night’s sleep, when in fact I was going back to bed. I got up to help Mer with a grocery list and ate some breakfast, and then I went back to bed around 11:00. I was then interrupted by two robo-calls on the phone, and I finally fell asleep at some point, waking up around 2:00 just as Mer was returning home from visiting her parents and going to the store. So, “the day” started around 2:00.

I wanted to get out and about, so I wanted to go hiking in a nearby park over in Stow, the next town over. We went there and set out on the trail, but we had to turn back after about five minutes because the bugs were so thick. Usually, this time of year the bugs are not an issue, but this month has been unusually rainy, so the mosquitoes were out in force.

My Plan B evolved on the fly as I remembered it was the Italian Festival in downtown Cuyahoga Falls, so we headed over there to wander through the streets. There were a good number of people, and there were lots of “fair food” carts, some real Italian food offerings, and even some carnival games. We got to the far end of the grounds when we heard a band playing in the bandstand, so we walked toward it as Mer realized they were playing “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” which was an interesting choice for an Italian festival. We stopped and listened to the very excellent band for about thirty minutes, and they played mostly patriotic songs and musical medleys. Mer accurately noted that the Italian Festival has better food, but the Cuyahoga Falls Irish Festival has more culturally relevant entertainment.

We wandered along the river after the band wrapped up, and we saw there was equipment next to and even on the river, getting ready to take down one of two dams along the Cuyahoga River in an effort to return the river to a natural state. It will be interesting to see how the river changes. We wandered down to the Sheraton Hotel, and then up to the street level. I thought I had seen a boardwalk along the river from the highway, and so we continued along the street until we came to a small park about which we had not known about – the Highbridge Glens park. The park was small, but quite interesting, with a footbridge over the river (the footbridge was blocked on the far side by the highway) that offered amazing views of the river and the gorge below. There was also a small boardwalk that wound down to an observation platform. We even saw a bridal party having pictures taken in the park. It was a good find.

We made our way back to the street and then back toward the car. Along the way, we stopped at the entrance of the Italian Festival to watch the bocce tournament going on. It was being played by eight middle-aged and older men, and they were really competitive. It was amusing to see how seriously the game was being taken.

We went home, where I made supper, and we watched two episodes of Lost on DVD. We managed to have a pretty good day, given how late we started.

Today (Sunday), we had the last of this year’s graduation parties. The party was for Joseph, and we were very close to Joseph’s older sister while she was at CVCA, and so we’ve known Joseph for the last three years or so. We also know Joseph’s extended family pretty well, with one of his relatives teaching English at CVCA. The party was small, but quite fun, with a very talented three-man band playing music mostly from the 50s and 60s. We got to catch up with our colleague Lesa and her husband Jay, and we ate quite a bit of good food. We got to dance to two of the songs played, and we talked for some time with Joseph and his sister. It was a mellow ending to “the season.”

After the party, we swung by Dale and Carlene’s place to visit. We only stayed for about thirty minutes, but that is the joy of having Mer’s parents so close at hand – we can visit whenever we like, so there is no pressure to fit in long visits every time we see them. The “drop by” visit is pretty satisfying in its own right.

We ended the day by finishing off some ice cream we had on hand and by listening to Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!

Last night, Friday, we got a chance to head down toward New Baltimore to visit some old (younger) friends. About a decade ago, we became friends with a family at church, and really hit it off with the two eldest children, who were both in high school. Since then, we have stayed in touch, and Zac has gotten married to his wife Erica and moved to London, and they now have two young sons. Anna has earned an advanced degree in French and studied in Switzerland for years before taking a job in Boston. This is not typical of rural Ohio children, and you can see why we love these folks. The two younger children of the family are now in Columbus, one working to renovate homes for the poor, and the youngest still in school. It’s a remarkable family.

Recently, Zac’s and Erica’s visas ran out, so they returned home. They are in Northeast Ohio for a few weeks before heading off to California to be near Erica’s family. They invited us down for supper and swimming and ice cream, and we eagerly accepted. We thought we would get to see Zac and Erica and their family, and Zac’s parents as well (who are very good people and much fun), but we were quite pleased as the rest of the clan drifted in over the evening. Anna was in town to see her nephews and to buy her first car, and even Joel and Becky pulled in just before we left to go get ice cream. It was really good to reconnect with everyone, even if it was only briefly.

Mer and I did join Zac in the bath-like pool (the water was close to ninety degrees) for quite awhile, while Erica and the boys stayed poolside. After the swim, we changed back into normal clothes, and we went to New Baltimore Ice Cream with Zac and Erica and the elder boy, where we got to visit for another half hour or so. Since the ice cream stand was on the way home for us, we said goodbye to them there. I’m sad for Erica and Zac that their visas ran out, but it was great to see them again.

Wednesday found us back in Kent again, this time visiting with Eric and Shanna, who live in Kent. They took us to the gourmet burger restaurant Bar 145. We spent a leisurely time over supper, chatting. Eric and Shanna are founding members of the band Bethesda, and they recently did a short tour of the Southeast, so we asked lots of questions about that (they said they really loved Ashville, North Carolina). We also filled them in on our recent vacation in Italy.

After supper, they took us to an ice cream stand on the edge of Kent called Katie’s Korner. We got ice cream, which was quite good, and sat outside in the finally-cooling-down evening air, where we talked more about band life and teaching (Shanna and Eric are both teachers as well). We headed back to Eric and Shanna’s place after that, where we said good evening.

That probably should have been the end of the evening, but I could not resist being so close to Insomnia Cookies without stopping by there. Having learned from my gluttony the last time we were in Kent with the Churchills, Mer and I settled quite happily on two cookies.

Tuesday was quite busy – I even took a half-day off from work. We started by going to get Cessy, our sick kitty, from the animal hospital. He was feeling much better, but we will not know how he is doing in his lung until we get the next x-ray, and that will be on Monday. We got Cessy stashed in our room and bathroom, and I stayed with him for a few hours, mostly in the form of my napping.

In the late afternoon, we headed down toward Canton to visit Aunt Mary. She had recently been to the 150th anniversary celebration of Gettysburg, and we got to hear all about her trip (it sounded like a good one). We only got to visit for about forty-five minutes, because Aunt Mary had to get her two cats to the vet for a check-up, and we had to get back to Cardinal for our Tuesday supper with Dale and Carlene. We helped Aunt Mary get the cats into separate boxes, and then got them into her car, and we headed northward.

After we checked on Cessy and gave him his medication, we went over to Cardinal for supper. We like the Tuesday night supper tradition – we get to visit with Dale and Carlene, and we like the food at Cardinal. After supper, Mer visited with her mom while they took care of pill-sorting for the week, and Dale and I retired to the library for brandy and cigars. Actually, we just visited in the library, but we did not miss the accouterments. We usually stay for Jeopardy!, but we could not on this Tuesday, as we were meeting a former student at our house.

We had seen Ingrid a week or so ago at a graduation party for her brother. She had just graduated college and is going off to teach French in Virginia, so we wanted to see her before she heads out. Ingrid likes art, and we had been talking about the artist Caravaggio when we saw her last, so we all ate ice cream and watched the Power of Art episode on Caravaggio. I had to go to bed pretty soon after we finished watching the show, but Mer and Ingrid visited together until almost 1:00 am. We are both looking forward to hearing how Ingrid’s first year in teaching goes.

This last weekend was our busiest weekend of the summer, as it concerned graduation parties – we had four parties in two days. We started the food fun on Saturday with a grad party for Jake and Katie, two fraternal twins of a great family we know from church. It was out past church, so it took about an hour to get there, but they have a lovely home and yard, and fed us well, and Mer got to beat me in two games of ping pong.

We headed back to our area, near our home, to the Octagon shelter in the Valley. Mer’s student Talia had her party there, and we ran into our colleague Jennifer there. I did not know Talia well, but she was very gracious to me at the party, and she really loved having Mer as a teacher.

Our last party on Saturday was Abby’s party. Abby was Mer’s student for two years, and she was in my improv group at school for a year, so we both knew her. Her home was large and beautiful, with a huge enclosed porch on which Mer and I sat. We knew many of the kids at the party, and several current and former CVCA parents joined us on the porch to chat for about an hour as evening fell. It was quite relaxing.

Sadly, our evening was not done. One of our cats, Cesario (“Cessy”), had been hiding in the basement for about a week. We had thought it was because of the Fourth of July fireworks and because of the heavy thunderstorms, but we had gotten concerned that he had been down there so long. Since our normal vet was closed, we took him to the west side of Akron, to an animal hospital that was open all the time.

We got right in to see a vet (it was about 11:00 pm, so they were not too busy), and they found Cessy had a fever. They did several tests, one of which was an x-ray of his body, and discovered one of his lungs was cloudy – about a third of his right lung. They wanted to keep him for observation and more tests, to which we consented. We left Cessy at the hospital and went home, getting to bed about 2:00 am. (For those wondering, it turns out Cessy has an abscess on his lung, which we are treating with medicine; the medicine may or may not work, which may or may not make surgery the only option – time will tell.)

On Sunday, we had one grad party – a student both of us knew well – Skyler. I have known Skyler since he was in eighth grade and joined his older sister in my Irish dancing club at school. Skyler was also in the Royal Fools improv club for two years, and Mer knew him through my clubs. Skyler’s party was at his mom’s house, in their huge back yard. Skyler’s older sister, Zivana, was there, as well as George (Zivana’s boyfriend of several years). Again, there was a bunch of students we knew well, and we had a good time playing bocce with some of them. Skyler also had his land tortoise roaming in the back yard, which was cool to watch. I picked him up at one point, and he is rather heavy.

After the party, Mer and I went home where we had a mellow evening playing games. I won a literature game called Dark and Stormy, while Mer kicked my butt at a cultural-literacy game called Finish Lines. We finished the weekend that way.

Downtown Kent, Ohio, has undergone quite a transformation. The city and some developers have built a new section of downtown full of restaurants and small shops, and it has made downtown Kent quite the destination for people wanting to go out to eat. We were among those people – on Thursday, Zach and Londa invited us to go with them to Kent, and we happily went along.

They took us to a Mexican food restaurant called Fresco, where it was counter-ordered food, but the food was made to order; it was sort of an upscale Subway for Mexican food. We sat inside, since it was quite hot out, and the food was very good; the only slight downside was that the restaurant got two of our four orders incorrect. I ate mine, since it was just a matter of getting chicken instead of beef, and they quickly made Zach his correct order and let us keep his mistake for free, so they corrected things well.

After supper, Zach told me we could wander, so I happily took everyone down to Kent’s riverside park, passing a live brass band concert in a park as we went along (well done, Kent). The park is not all that new, having been built five or ten years ago, but it was new to me this spring when Nate and I ran there. The park is very pretty, with a beautiful fountain and a high river overlook, and a path along the river that is softly lit by classy streetlights. As a bonus, because of the heavy rains we had had, the river was full and running fast, and it was fun to look at it from the overlook. Mer and I struck up a conversation with a couple, the woman of which liked to canoe through Kent, and was able to tell us about how the river used to be before the construction of the park and the tearing down of a small dam.

After our walk, we headed back up to the new section of downtown, to the College Creamery, where we got ice cream and ate it in the brick alleyway outside the shop. It was cooling off, and it was a pleasant place to sit. We started to head back to the car when I mentioned to Zach that he had mentioned Insomnia Cookies, a cookie store that is open (and delivers) until 2:00 am. Zach laughed, but said he was game, so we went for a second dessert. I’m afraid Mer and I bought and ate five cookies between us – it was not a very reserved evening, but the food was excellent, as was the company.