Mer and I slept in on the Friday of spring break, but we actually had weekend plans! We were going to Mom’s place in Michigan, and along the way we were going to go swoop up our friend Ellen from her home in Hillsdale.
We had good weather going to Hillsdale this time. We had been out to Hillsdale last December, and the weather had not been good. It was nice to be able to get to Ellen’s in a reasonable (3.5-4 hours) this time.
Ellen is probably our most “together” friend, at least when it comes to home decorating. She bought a house last summer, and she has spent the last year redecorating it to good effect. When we were last there, the house was in some disarray as she was painting and moving furniture and so on. No more! Ellen had painted all the rooms in the downstairs (and the bathroom and hallway upstairs). We toured her new handiwork and were impressed at how classy the place looked. Ellen had even used a stencil on her dining room wall, which is waaayyyyy off the Riordan radar.
Ellen is most hospitable, and she had decided to make a late lunch for us (we got there about 2:00). She had nice table settings out, and everything matched and looked nice. We sat down at the table (an extreme rarity for the Riordans), and had a delightful meal of good food and a healthy dose of laughter.
After lunch, we hit the highway again. It was about a 2-2.5-hour drive to Mom’s from Ellen’s. The drive itself was uneventful, but the conversation was excellent. Ellen is working on her doctorate, and she spent a good chunk of the drive trying to explain her topic to me and Meredith (upon my request! Ellen does not volunteer this information unsolicited). If I recall, her dissertation is looking at a 14th-century religious debate on a subject called nominalism. Nominalism turns out to be fairly complicated and a little hard to nail down, so I had a hard time grasping it. Ellen was looking at a Chaucer poem (not the Canterbury Tales) to show that Chaucer was against nominalism (some academics have tried to show the opposite).
Lest you think we spend all of our driving time discussing matters of academic weight, we also add real weight. Along the way we needed a bathroom break, and Ellen had mentioned a Michigan fast food restaurant called Culver’s that has excellent custard. Custard is a midwestern version of soft serve ice cream, but adds more fat. So, we carried our nominalism conversation into Culver’s and munched on ice cream. It was a most worthwhile pit stop.
We continued on to Mom’s place. Mom was spending the Easter weekend with my sister and her family, but Shannon and Jo were at Mom’s, at least through Saturday afternoon. We unloaded the car and greeted them. We grabbed some supper from a local Italian restaurant, and we spent the evening chatting and, importantly, playing a literary game.
Shannon and I took on Mer, Jo, and Ellen in a game called Dark and Stormy. It is a game where the game gives you the first line or first few lines from a work of literature, and you have to guess the title of the work or the name of the author who wrote it. Note that Mer and Ellen are professional English folks, and Jo is quite well read. But the male Riordans were undaunted! I did have an ace up my sleeve – Shannon is super well-read in science fiction, and that is one of the categories in the game, and he used to work at a Borders years ago and still can recall some of the books he helped people find. He proved most useful (including an impressive 4-5-minute sweat-it-out recall of a book that had been made into a movie). We sprang out to an early lead on some fairly easy questions, and we actually got to 7 books to 4 (you need 8 books to win). Sadly, we kept getting books along the lines of Obscure 16th-Century Topics by Unknown Authors -or- While Riordan Males Lose while the ladies kept getting Dr. Seuss books. They even got a Vonnegut book question, which is something I had been waiting for (I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school and read all of his stuff). We lost 8-7. Sigh.
Despite the loss in the game, it was still a weekend “away,” and with fun people.