Mer and I cheated the work week yesterday (Tuesday) by heading down to New Baltimore to Ken and Janet’s house. They had invited us down for a light supper and to introduce us the the tile-based game Settlers of Catan. I had seen Settlers played before at school, but I had never played it myself. The game is based on gathering resources (like wood and stone) and using those resources to build roads and towns and cities. There is some luck involved (resources come up based party on dice rolls), but there is a ton of strategy involved. I loved it. Mer seemed confused at first, but she may have been putting us on, because she did pretty well. Ken won (as he almost always seems to on our game nights), and I came in second, but it was a pretty close game all evening.

I started Saturday off with a 17.5-mile run with Nate and his friend Ben, and my boss Jim joined us partway along. It was a beautiful morning, and I was able to finish the last two miles quite strongly.

For the social part of the day, Mer and I headed up to the west side of Cleveland, right up to the lake, where we hiked the Edgewater Park Trail. The trail is a good little trail in that it starts on bluffs overlooking the lake and city, and takes you down to the beach, and then out to a pier and breakwater. I was a bit amazed in that the day was pretty nearly perfect, with lots of sun and around eighty degrees, but the beach was not crowded. There was still a good number of people around, but it was far from packed.

There seemed to be a festival or competition going on – there was a PA system, and tents set up all over a field near the beach, and lots of people wandering around in matching t-shirts. I stopped and asked a friendly group of people, and they said it was the Cleveland Corporate Challenge. It seems there is a competition every summer involving a wide range of activities, and this particular Saturday seemed focused on tug-of-war and things of that nature. They certainly had a good turnout.

Mer and I wandered the pier and out on the breakwater as far as we could before the path disappeared. It was a fun place to watch people and boats, and we did not rush along. We then took the rest of the path back to the car, and headed home.

I had planned on going to see our friends’ band, Bethesda, give a concert at a coffeehouse, but I had some stomach issues, probably from dehydration from the run in the morning or the walk in the afternoon. So, we stayed home, and I wanted to see if there was a movie I could rent from Amazon.com. It had a recommendation of the animated version of Batman: Year One, which was based on a comic book I had loved back in the early nineties. That made for my plans for the evening. Based on renting that, I also saw a recommendation for the animated version of the comic book Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, so we watched that as well. Mer was a good soul and humored me, and it was much fun to see those stories “come to life” in an animated film. I’m sad to have missed Bethesda, but it was a nice substitute.

On Friday, Mer and I headed down to North Canton for a dinner date with Aunt Mary. Since it was Hall of Fame Weekend in Canton itself, we decided to stay north of the city, and so we went to Menches, which claims to have invented the ice cream cone, and has excellent burgers (and it offers fifty different ones on the menu). I think Mer and Aunt Mary were shocked when I passed on dessert, but then assumed all was well when I suggested we go to the North Canton branch of Handel’s ice cream, which was only a mile away. We ate well.

After supper, we went back to Aunt Mary’s, where we watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! While the shows were on, I installed Aunt Mary’s new printer/copier and tried to get her laptop to run a little faster. It could still use some work, but that means another dinner date!

On Wednesday, we had a dinner invitation at the house of our colleague Lesa and her husband Jay, along with their daughter. It was a lovely evening, cool but with sun, and we spent the time before dinner out on their back deck. Lesa even brought the supper table out on to the porch so we could dine al fresco. Supper was excellent, and afterwards Lesa and Jay broke out three different kinds of ice cream, along with the peanut butter bars I had brought. It was certainly good living.

After supper, the five of us played Apples to Apples, a game in which players submit a card in their hands in an attempt to get a judge to agree that it is a good match for a subject card (like “New York”). It is a well-designed game, with people getting good fun out of some of the lengths to which people go to try to match things up. I eventually won the game by getting to seven cards first, so that was a bonus to a fun evening.