One of the surprising and wonderful things about working at a school is that sometimes the students and alumni want to hang out with me and Mer. I liked my teachers in high school, but it never would have occurred to me to hang out with them, so I am always pleasantly taken aback when students suggest a social outing.

On Saturday, Mer and I got together with three alumnae and one girl’s boyfriend. We met up at the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. Mer and I got there a bit early, and so we were able to see the opening ceremony and people-watch. We had been to a Renaissance faire last summer, and expected much the same experience. This faire had a lot more people “in garb” – in costume. I’m guessing that about seventy-five percent of the people at Great Lakes had some form of costume. Because we didn’t, I actually felt slightly out of place, which is a rare occurrence. It was fun to see so many people having a good time.

Mer and I met up with Sarah, Hayley, Katie, and her boyfriend Obie. We wandered into the grounds, which were pretty extensive. All the girls had been to this faire before, so we let them take the lead. We spent a good couple of hours doing a circuit of the grounds, visiting shops and soaking in the sights. Katie, Obie, and Sarah all took turns in the ax-throwing competition, and Sarah nailed hers – it was impressive. Sarah let on she’d had some minimal training earlier in her life at a day camp. We stopped and ate early in the afternoon. In the shops section, Sarah was singled out by a man selling fake horns as someone who was clearly going to buy a set; by the end of the day, he was right – Sarah picked up a set that glowed in the dark.

Normally, Mer and I are pretty conscious to see the shows at these things, but we chilled and enjoyed the company of the girls and Obie. We did catch the end of an escape artist show, saw a forge demonstration, and saw a really funny “pirate magician” who was really entertaining in his banter. We also saw a live combat-chess match. The girls all had to leave a bit before closing, so Mer and I went to see the escape artist do his big finale, which was to walk across a flaming balance beam. He built up to it with a comedy show involving an audience member who “predicted” what objects audience members were holding up based on subtle and not-so-subtle clues from the artist. It was fun. Mer and I wrapped up the evening by going to the closing music sing at the “pub” (which was outdoors). I really enjoyed the day, and hope to go back next summer. Mer and I were exhorted in a kind way to come in garb next time – by a Pakistani man in flowing robes. I think we might work on that.

Yesterday I took the day off so Mer and I could celebrate our anniversary together (our fifteenth anniversary was on Thursday). I decided to take Mer to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo – it was a nice day, and even if it cleared up and got too hot, there are exhibits that are inside, and the park system does a pretty good job of making sure there are shady areas around.

I had been to the zoo last January as part of my J-term class on hiking Northeast Ohio parks. Since the zoo is part of the park system, my co-leader and I decided it was a good hike for what looked as if it might be a rainy day. It cleared up, and we had a great time. When I got home, Mer had mentioned she had not been to the Cleveland Zoo in many years, so it seemed like a good destination for a mellow anniversary day.

It was still party cloudy when we got there, so I made the fateful (for Mer) decision to forgo sunscreen. Later, the clouds cleared up, and Mer ended up with mild burns on her shoulders; oddly, I got away with it, and I usually burn quickly. Even when the sun came out, we were able to manage the hot part of the day by taking it easy and seeking shade where we could.

We started the tour by briefly seeing the elephants, but then spending quite a bit of time in the Australia exhibit. There was a small aviary filled with colorful birds called Lorikeets. For a dollar, you could buy a small cup of nectar and feed the birds. I wanted Mer to try it, and she succeeded wildly. A Lorikeet climbed onto her hand and sucked down the nectar. Mer was a bit nervous having a bird holding on to her by its clawed feet, but it did not hurt her, and she was pretty pleased with the experience. That was worth the whole admission, right there.

We continued on in “Australia,” seeing koalas (they do not move much), kangaroos, dingos, and more. The Australia section is really well done, with a park-like feel and spacious habitats for the animals. There is even a fake tree you can climb into and slide down a slide shaped like a snake (we passed on that because it was mobbed). There was a small river, and a train that ran around the entire perimeter. It was probably the best part of the park, and the rest of the park was pretty good.

We headed up the hill along the “Deckwalk,” an elevated boardwalk that meanders through the trees to the upper exhibits (cats and primates). The Deckwalk had been closed in winter, so it was new to me, and it was very peaceful back in the trees. We enjoyed the primate and cat and aquatic building, and afterwards we stopped in a cafe for lunch on the deck (in the shade, though).

We made our way back down the hill to turn around and go back up it to get to the Arctic Exhibit, with wolves and polar bears and seals. It always takes me aback to see how huge polar bears are. The wolf habitat was huge and well wooded, and had good visitor vantage points.

We finished our tour by going through the savanna section of the zoo, seeing lions and giraffes and rhinos and other animals. We managed to see the entire zoo in about six hours, including lunch. It was a fine day and a good break from the work week.

We headed home, where we had supper, but then I took Mer up to Hudson to Cold Stone Creamery for ice cream. We happened to catch the last couple of songs of a steel drum band that was playing on the new square right outside Cold Stone, so we got to eat ice cream and listen to Caribbean sounds and enjoy a pretty evening.

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.