Yesterday (Thursday) was Mer’s and my fifteenth wedding anniversary. It has been a great time, and I am grateful to have married someone whom I love being around so much. Mer had announced that she had made plans on Thursday evening, and so she took me to Akron, to the grounds of Stan Hywet, to see the Ohio Shakespeare Festival’s production of Cymbeline.

Cymbeline is a rare play for us – a play neither of us had seen or read or really knew anything about. We both decided not to read the play’s synopsis in the playbill, to see if we could follow the play without any background in it. It was a tense first two or three minutes for me at the start of the play – I was not really following what the people on stage were saying about the main characters, who had not come on yet. Happily, once I was able to see the characters, everything snapped into place and I was able to follow the rest of the play with no real issues (Mer was fine after the opening as well, but I really expected that, since she is good with language).

In an amusing twist, the main plot boils down to a foolish and jealous husband making a really stupid love-dare bet with another man that his wife will remain true, even if the second man tries to seduce her. She resists, of course, but the husband is duped into thinking she has cheated on him. Since it is not a tragedy, all works out in the end. Quite the play for a wedding anniversary!

Happy fifteenth anniversary, Meredith! I love you!

I continued to take advantage of Mer’s no-grading summer freedom, and took her on a mini-date yesterday (Wednesday). We headed down to Canton, to the dollar theater, to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. It was a highly entertaining movie, with lots of action and several nods to old Trek fans. I was amazed at the voice of the actor who played Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch); I had heard woman were going nuts over his voice, and I can hear why. The movie was not perfect (the ending mirrored Star Trek 2 a little too much, and some of the action sequences were a bit over the top), but it was still two dollars well spent.

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.

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.