We headed off on our Ireland vacation on Thursday, but first I had an errand (or ear-rand) to do. Over the last few weeks, my left ear had blocked up so that I could not hear out of it. I tried to treat it myself, but that did not work. Then, I went to an urgent-care place, and they could not get the wax out, so they referred me to an ear specialist near our house. Happily, they could squeeze me in on Thursday, but not until 10:00. Since our flight left from Toronto at 7:20, I figured we had to leave no later than 11:00 to make the flight, and that was with only an extra hour or so built in for delays.

The nurse was very nice (was actually a 2003 CVCA graduate), and she used a micro-vacuum to suck the wax out of both ears. I could hear again, and got home at 10:45. Mer arrived immediately afterward from going to the bank to get some euros, and so we were off on our five-hour drive at 11:00, as planned.

Mer mentioned the car radio was acting weird – it was not keeping time and was resetting to the first track whenever the car was turned off. That reminded me that at the last oil change, the mechanic told me the battery was weak. That brought a little edge to the trip, to the point where I decided not to turn the car off at the first rest stop, and we went to the bathroom in shifts. While Mer was in the restroom, I ate some granola, as I was very hungry, having only eaten a bowl of cereal that day. After Mer got back in the car, I noticed I had some granola stuck in my teeth, but thought little of it. How wrong that was!

The rest of the drive went smoothly, with the exception of hitting construction-related traffic in the last five miles to get to the airport. It was a little tense taking twenty minutes to go a mile, but then we cleared the construction and got to the airport, where we once again had a bit of a hard time tracking down the remote economy lot. We found it on the second attempt, and got on the train to the airport itself, arriving around 4:45.

We breezed through getting our tickets, although Mer was a little nervous that her checked luggage got separated from mine, but decided not to say anything to the ticket agent. How wrong that was! Security was a bit more of a headache – about forty-five minutes to get through it and then get to the gate. That left us with about thirty minutes to grab something to eat, since we had not eaten any real food in about ten hours. I grabbed us a couple of sandwiches on hard hoagie rolls, and we ate them. I then went to the bathroom, and was trying to figure out what was stuck in my teeth. When I looked in the mirror, it turns out I did not have anything stuck in my teeth – I was missing a quarter of a tooth in a back molar. By what I can only ascribe to mercy from God, I was in no pain, but I was worried the tooth could shatter more or the filling in the tooth could let go, exposing a nerve and causing me intense pain. As such, I decided to talk little and eat nothing on the flight itself.

The flight went well, if a bit dully. I was too tired to read, although Mer plowed though two hundred pages of Oliver Twist, and my heart was not much into playing any computer games. I think I managed to get about thirty minutes of sleep. The flight arrived on time in Dublin around 7:00 am, and we were quite slow getting through customs; we did not arrive at the baggage carousel until almost 8:00. The baggage area was fairly barren, but we were among the last to get through customs, so I did not think too much on that. After a minute or so, my bag came out, so we grabbed that. We waited a couple more minutes for Mer’s bag, when the carousel stopped. The attendant said there were no more bags. Somehow, my bag made it, but Mer’s did not, on a direct flight. Sigh. The attendant was very nice, and took Mer’s information and gave her an overnight bag with some basic supplies in it. Something must have gone haywire in Toronto, because there were five people missing luggage off of our flight.

Once we took care of that, we took the bus from the airport to the train station in downtown Dublin. We sat on the upper part of a two-story bus, so we had good views of the city. I honestly did not recognize any of it – it has changed a bunch in the fourteen years since we were last there, and my memory has gotten foggier as well. We did strike up a fun conversation with a British man who was on a weekend jaunt for the “stag party” for his future son-in-law. The man had married an American woman he had met while they were in their respective navies, and we had a pleasant time learning about his family.

Once in the train station, we were fairly surprised at the cost of the tickets to Cork – over $75 each for a three-hour train ride. What is more, our credit cards did not work in the machine for some reason, so we had to find an ATM to get enough cash to pay for the tickets. The train ride was pretty and easy, and we were both glad we had done the train instead of getting a car, as we both briefly fell asleep at various points.

In Cork, we walked to a dentist office to see if they could look at my tooth, but they were closed (at 1:00 on a Friday, which was odd to me). So, we walked to the bus station for the last leg of our twenty-plus-hour journey, the bus to Kinsale, a very cute seaside town in the south of Ireland.

In Kinsale, we located two dentist offices. One told me they were done for the day (2:00 on Friday), but to come back at 9:30 Saturday morning. The other office was closed. So, here is hoping they can get something done for the tooth, even if it is pulling it.

Kinsale is a very pretty town. The layout is confusing, as it follows no grid pattern, but the town is very inviting to walk in. We checked in to our B and B, and then followed our usual jetlag-busting technique – sleep for two hours, then force ourselves to get up and get on the local schedule by eating supper and touring. I took a shower after our nap, and we went to an excellent Indian restaurant, Cobra Tandoori. That is probably the best Indian food I have ever had, helped out by my not having eaten anything in fourteen hours. I ordered soft food and chewed very carefully.

Mer and I then wandered the town a bit, checking out the waterfront, and then an Anglican church (the church predates the Anglican church, with some church on the site for fourteen hundred years). The cemetery in the church yard was picturesque and interesting.

After the church, Mer checked to see if a certain pub was having live music that night. They were not, so she turned the evening over to me. I had seen a town map with a walk out to a “ruined fort,” so that was the obvious thing to walk to. It looked to be just out of town, and the signs said 2 km (1.2 miles).

That was quite a 1.2-mile hike. The views of the town and harbor were amazing, but the hills were long and steep. As an added bonus, when we got to the fort, the interior of the fort was closed. I had assumed it would be open to the public at all times since I thought it was in ruins. It is not, and it is not. The still-intact fort was shut up, so we wandered the grounds and watched the sun starting to set (it does not set until well after 10:00, and we left the fort around 9:30).

Happily, we saw a map of the walk near the fort, and decided to try the walking path along the promisingly named Low Road. It turned out to be so. There was still one rough hill at the start, but once on the Low Road, we had an easy and very fast time of it, cutting the walking time by half and the effort by more than that. Mer, being a good sport, managed to laugh that off, especially since we’d now found an easier way to get to the fort if we want to go back during the open hours.

So, we wrapped up our first really long day. We are hoping that Mer’s luggage will find us tomorrow (Saturday) so that she does not have to go clothes shopping, and I am hoping my tooth can be dealt with so I do not have to worry about it during the vacation. That is a pretty full and eventful first day!

Here is the last of the summary version of our doings over the last ten weeks or so:

Sunday, June 1st – student grad party, then CVCA graduation at The Chapel in Green.

Monday, June 2nd – Dan and Gen (former Midd friend) and their two girls over – dinner at Aladdin’s in Hudson, then Silver Springs playground, then ice cream at Handel’s.

Tuesday, June 3rd – lunch with Mer, Dubbs, Eric, and Regina (colleagues) at Friday’s.

Wednesday, June 4th – Heather Dale house concert.

June 6th-8th – Junior High Academic Challenge Nationals in Chicago – dessert with Shannon, watched The Three Doctors, then supper with Shannon and Jo at the Red Lion. Saturday, we had two matches, then toured Millennium Park and the Mag Mile. Sunday, we had four matches (A team went 2-4 and B team went 1-5 in some close matches), then we drove to Mom and Marc’s in Michigan (arriving late, around 9:00).

Monday, June 9th – student grad party.

Tuesday, June 10th – supper with Aunt Mary at Taggart’s in Canton.

Happily, Dale got out of the hospital in early May, but then much of Mer’s free time was spent grading since the end of the school year was approaching, which left me trying to keep the house going (and not blogging). Here are the May doings:

Friday, May 2nd – Tarzan at CVCA with Mer.

Saturday, May 3rd – One Act Festival at Grove City College in Pennsylvania (saw two former students acting in the plays).

Friday, May 9th – CVCA Junior/Senior Banquet (“prom”) – prom was at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Cuyahoga Falls, and the After Party (informal fun and food) was at the Tallmadge Rec Center.

Saturday, May 10th – kite flying and food at church, then watched Her Majesty Mrs. Brown.

Monday, May 12th – Handel’s with Zach and Londa.

Friday, May 16th – Royal Fools improv show at CVCA – great crowd and funny show.

Saturday, May 17th – lunch at Quaker Steak and Lube with Steve and Jordan (and Mer), then packet pick-up for the Cleveland Marathon. Back at home, Mer and I watched Tom and Viv.

Sunday, May 18th – Cleveland Marathon with Jordan and LT (and saw other colleagues). We finished in 4:13:11 (9:39/mile).

Wednesday, May 21st – The art and portfolio show for graphic arts at CVCA, then pizza at Cici’s with some of the guys from my Connections group.

Friday, May 23rd – Dubbs over for supper after we bumped into her at Subway, watched Sense and Sensibility.

Saturday, May 24th – hiked Chagrin River Park, and then went to a graduation party for a student.

May 28th-30th – Senior Trip at Maumee Bay State Park – go-karting, Toledo Zoo, “senior share nigh,t” Cedar Point (which included lunch with the other chaperons at Famous Dave’s).

Saturday, May 31st – hiked Dix Park, then two graduation parties, then watched Ghostbusters with Mer.

April saw Dale go home from the hospital, but then return again at the end of the month with pneumonia. Here are the social outings we participated in during April:

Saturday, April 12th – went to a play version of Charlotte’s Web at the Players Guild in Canton.

Wednesday, April 16th – “Teachers’ Night Out” at Great Lakes Theater – a lecture, food and Shakespeare’s As You Like It for one very low price (I think it was $25).

Friday, April 18th – Easter Egg hunt in the dark at former students’ house (the Niehauses) with Dubbs and also some other former students and their parents.

Saturday, April 19th – two hikes – at Spencer Lake and Indian Hollow, then dessert in Oberlin. Watched cartoon Iron Giant and then ice cream at Handel’s.

Tuesday, April 22nd – colleague LT Newland over for dinner, then ice cream at Handel’s.

Wednesday, April 23rd – play version of Pride and Prejudice at Kent State, then cookies at Insomnia Cookies.

Weekend of the 26th – Mer went to a church women’s retreat, while I had Ken (our pastor) and Janet over to go to a Chinese buffet.

So, the blog is not retired! Mer’s dad, Dale, went into the hospital in late March, and he was in the hospital for six weeks over two months. He is fine and back home and doing pretty well, but it did interrupt ye olde blogging for me. Here is a quick summary of what happened during the rest of March:

Friday, March 21 – dinner with colleague Matt and his wife Lizzie at Maggiano’s up near Legacy Village.

Sunday, March 23rd – former students and adopted “daughters” Katie and Sarah came over to learn how to make whoopie pies. We found out Dale had gone into the hospital.

The rest of the month was more or less about seeing Dale in the hospital and having Mer’s mom, Carlene, stay with us for spring break.

Last Saturday was “my” day, and it was quite mellow, with a long run in the morning and then my taking a nap while Mer got groceries. We puttered around home until evening, when we headed to Cleveland; I’m glad we left early, because Cleveland has the main highway we usually take closed for construction, and the detour signs were unhelpfully spaced far apart. We did eventually get to Playhouse Square, but it was about 25 minutes later than we normally would have gotten there.

Playhouse Square is a complex of theaters, and the place was packed. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was playing in another theater, and it must have been quite the draw. We were there to see C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce as a play, and our theater was about 90% sold out. The play was being done by The Fellowship for the Performing Arts, the same group who did a great job of staging The Screwtape Letters. The Great Divorce, which is a fictional account of a bus ride from Hell to the gates of Heaven, seemed to me like a difficult book to stage, so I was looking forward to it.

The production was fantastic. Three actors played nineteen different roles, including all three at various times playing the narrator , who was portrayed as C.S. Lewis himself. Each actor made each character different with different styles of speaking, body language, and such. It was very well done. Many of the most difficult transitions in the play (like the bus ride) were done abstractly with projections and lighting. It worked well and did not seem showy to me.

The play ran about ninety minutes with no intermission, and I never got restless. Mer and I lucked into front row seats through a quirk of Ticketmaster – the service would not let people break up a grouping of three seats in the front row for some reason, but a service representative at Playhouse Square was quite happy to do so when I called in my order. Hooray for older technology! Anyway, the play paced itself well, and we had great seats. We both came away form the play quite impressed.

There was a short talk-back after the show from Max Maclean, the producer of the play. I also had a very brief chat with the guy who ran lights and projections for the show, so we got to find out a little bit about the behind the scenes. Max’s talk conveyed how difficult the process of staging was, as it sounds as if it took about two years and several test productions to get the play cut down to where it played well to audiences. Good stuff.

Last Friday was an entertainment double-header at CVCA – I had a Royal Fools improv show at 6:30, which was followed by the CVCA Talent Show at 8:00. This is the second year in a row we have teamed up with the Talent Show, and while it forces our improv show to be shorter (about an hour instead of about an hour and twenty minutes), I think it is worth it in getting to perform for the bigger crowd that comes early for the talent show; we usually play for 100-150 people, and we played to well over 200 last Friday.

I never remember shows very well afterwards – I am thinking a lot during shows about what needs to happen. I do know we did not “tank” any games we did, and the audience reaction was excellent. Allie Kirk, a CVCA alum, came back from Chicago just for the show, and she added much fun in that she can play improvisational piano, which opened up several musical games for us.

The talent show is a fundraiser for the CVCA service club, Diakonos. Every year, Diakonos students stay at CVCA during spring break, and they go out into the local community to serve at several locations around NE Ohio. The spring break crew is usually 30 or more students, so it costs some money to feed the group and for gas for transportation, and the talent show tends to be an excellent way to raise funds.

The talent was quite good this year. I believe this is the first year that the group held auditions, and it showed. While there was some variation in the quality of acts, there were no bad acts, and the competition in the top half of the field was quite tight. There were singing acts and guitar players, a couple of dance numbers, some piano players, a “Who’s on First?” reenactment, a very talented beat-boxer, a jump rope dancer, and more. Meredith was one of three judges, and she said it was quite difficult to sort out the winners.

After the talent show, which was over a little after 10:00, we headed over to Friday’s with our friend Dubbs for a light supper and dessert. It was a pretty nice way to end an evening of entertainment.

Last Thursday, Mer and I had our friend and colleague Brandon over for supper, which was a quick bite of homemade pizza. We then jumped in the car and headed up to the Hanna Theater in the Cleveland Playhouse complex in Cleveland. We were there to see the comedy/thriller Deathtrap, but we had the added bonus of being there on an evening where there was a pre-show talk with one of the five actors. Brandon is heavily involved in the (CVCA) Royal Theater, so he was eager to hear from a cast member, and both Mer and I enjoy that sort of thing, so we made a point to get there as close to 6:30 as we could to hear the talk (the show itself was at 7:30).

The talk was excellent. The actress was open and friendly, and we got front-row seats (we have never quite figured out why people avoid front seats). Mostly, the questions were asked by a member of the Hanna Theater staff, but some audience questions were asked as well. I remember we found out the Hanna teams with theaters in a couple different states, so this woman’s home theater is in Idaho, and Deathtrap will be playing there this summer. She had to try to learn a Dutch accent for her role, and she said it was quite difficult. She also said the rehearsal time was relatively short, so she tried to have her lines memorized by the time rehearsals started.

After the talk, we found our seats, and the play started at 7:30. The set was extensive and detailed. The entire play takes place in one large lodge-style room, so the set did not have to be mobile at all. The set was one large room, but had a hallway at the back, a staircase, a sliding glass door, giant barn-style doors, and lots of old weapons mounted on the walls as decor. The room serves as the writing room of a murder-thriller playwright, and he has had a multi-year drought from being able to write anything. He married rich, but still they are almost out of money when he gets a manuscript from a young playwright, and the play is excellent. The older playwright invites the younger one to come up to his house for the evening so they can edit the script, and he contemplates murdering the young man and stealing the script. What unfolds after that is an amazing series of twists and turns, with some humor sprinkled in along the way. I won’t ruin the ending, or even the middle of the first act. As I said, there were a ton of twists.

The acting was excellent, as I have come to expect from Great Lakes Theater. Our seats were quite good, although there really are no bad seats in the Hanna theater. We did not get home and to bed until about 11:00, but it was a fun evening out with a good friend, and so was quite worth getting a tad short-changed on sleep.

Saturday was Mer’s day, and she had a mellow and puttering day planned. That worked well, as I was able to go running 13 miles in the morning with one of my new running partners, LT Newland, who teaches Bible at CVCA. I am helping him to train for the Cleveland Marathon, along with another colleague, Jordan Samsonas, who teaches social studies. It has been very good to have running partners, as this winter has been snowy and very cold, which usually means I would have a hard time getting out to run; with partners, there is someone counting on you running, so I have gotten out pretty regularly this winter.

Happy, Mer slept until I was done running, around 10:00. It had been weeks since she had had a chance to sleep in, so that was a good thing. Mer went to get groceries while I took a nap, and we had a mellow day. Mer did have evening plans, though, and around 7:15 we headed down to Akron to Actors’ Summit Theater, to see their production of Bus Stop.

On the whole, I liked Bus Stop. It was really well acted, with eight actors, all of whom did a great job. My only reservation about the evening was Bus Stop was billed as a comedy, and it struck me more as a drama with some comic moments. It may just be a time issue – the play was written in 1955, and it may have aged a bit. The play explored various forms of loneliness, and that was compelling. The characters had well-defined personalities and had strong relationships on stage. I had not seen any of the actors in the play before at Actors’ Summit, but I had seen one of them at another venue. If anything had aged, it was some of the end results of the interactions, two especially. The main plot line is a cowboy wants to marry a dancing girl he loves, but she does not want to marry him. It is awfully close to a kidnapping, and she comes around in the end, but that felt a bit hollow to me. The other plot line that I felt had aged a bit was one where an older professor clearly wanted to sleep with a high school girl who was not aware of his intentions. He does not carry through with his plan after he feels some remorse, and that is well. The part that felt odd to me was that after the professor left and things were explained to the girl, she felt a little scared, but mostly seemed flattered that a man would want to sleep with her. It had been established that she was ignored by boys at school, but it still felt more than a little creepy.

Happily, those two issues aside, the fine acting carried the day and I had a good time.

Sunday was Aunt Mary’s 75th birthday, and Mer’s dad, Dale, thought we should celebrate with some style. I suggested taking Aunt Mary out to the fanciest Italian restaurant I know in the area, Gervasi’s Bistro in North Canton. It is a beautiful old barn that has been converted into a winery and restaurant, and the food is excellent. Mer, Dale, Carlene and I picked Aunt Mary up and made the short trip to the Bistro. As expected, the food was excellent and the meal was leisurely. We had a good time, and headed home for a food-induced nap (at least for me).

Saturday – regional Shakespeare competition, Ava made it to the finals and came in third. Then, home and watched Olympics.

Sunday – “An Evening with Fanny Crosby” with Dale and Carlene at Aunt Mary’s church (Janet and Aunt Zovie and Michael also were there).