Saturday, as you may have noticed, was Valentine’s Day. In addition, it was “my” day where I could plan anything that I wanted to do. So, what does the master of schmooze and romance do on our national day of love? Hang out with lots of students! And it was much fun, too.

To start the student-intensive day, we headed to a birthday celebration for Zach (a.k.a. “Moops”), which was being held nearby. Moops is a Royal Fool, and so I have known him for a couple of years. His mom is also a music teacher at CVCA, and so I have known her for about 5 years. Mer pointed out that it is pretty neat that we feel comfortable hanging out with either the parents or the students. Anyway, I digress.

We first struck out for Hudson to get Moops a birthday present. It seemed natural to guess what he might like – a teenaged male could not dislike food! So, we headed to the nearest Panera and picked up a gift card. We were waited on by a CVCA student, so we got an additional student appearance in on the day.

Supplied with our gift, we headed to Kendall Hills park where the party was being held. It was supposed to be a sledding (“sliding,” in Maine) party, but the two-plus feet of snow we had two weeks ago is now gone. So, it turned into an eat-and-hike party.

It was a surprise party, so Moops was not there when we arrived. There was a warm and roaring fire in a large barrel to keep us warm, so the waiting was not a problem. There were several students that Mer and I knew, and Moops’s parents and grandparents were there, so we had a good time waiting for the birthday boy.

He showed up with his girlfriend, who was the one to dream up an excuse to come to a park on a lightly snowing day (I think she told him they were meeting her sister and then going to lunch). Moops seemed quite surprised. Food suddenly appeared in the form of chips and pizza. We ate and talked, and then we each got a cupcake with a candle on it to blow out. I guess Moops is so old he needs help with his candles! It was a fun and tasty twist on a cake.

We then took a hike of about a mile around the park. When I say “we,” I mean the students took off ahead while we cleaned things up a bit, and then we (Moops’s parents and Mer and I) followed at a distance. The snow was not heavy and was not accumulating; it just made things pretty. We tromped around for about a mile or so and made a loop back to the fire. We talked for a few minutes more, but then Mer and I had to leave for part two of the evening. I’m glad Moops was able to host us for his birthday – food and fellowship and hiking makes for a good time.

 Friday night was the first-ever off-site, non-CVCA-venue Fools show. After the first Fools show of this year, back in December, a CVCA alum (and wife of a CVCA teacher) approached me and asked if we would mind being the entertainment for their church’s Valentine’s Day get-together. I was surprised, but quickly said I would think about it and run it past the students. They were pretty excited about the idea, and so we landed an extra show for this year.

I also now have an assistant coach. One of the Founding Fools asked if she could come back and help coach. Since the Fools group is now 10 members, I accepted the offer – it will allow me to split the group in half and get the individual students more stage time in practice. Mer and I gave the new coach, Clarice, a ride to the show. We chatted about coaching things and got to the church about 6:00, with the doors opening at 7:00 and the show starting about 7:15 or so.

Our friends had done a great job – the basement fellowship hall of the church was looking pretty classy. There was black fabric hung around with white lights draped behind them. There were about 10-12 tables in the hall covered with black tablecloths and candles. At the front of the hall there was a small stage that was in the shape of a T – a broad back portion with a small thrust stage sticking out. The stage was about six inches off of the floor and was made of bouncy plywood. There was a small office on one side of the stage that we were allowed to use as a hang-out room (a green room), as well as for an isolation chamber for the various guessing-game improv skits. Finally, and amazingly for us, there were two small red-tinted spotlights illuminating the stage. It was a nice set-up.

The various Fools showed up by 6:15 (except for one who was stuck in traffic), so we went over stage notes. People started trickling in about 6:45, and so we found a room in the upstairs of the church where we could warm up. We headed back down to the fellowship hall around 7:00, and we ensconced ourselves in the “green room” until we were given the thumbs-up at about 6:15.

The room was pretty full – probably about 60-70 people. It appears the Fools have a bit of a cult following – we did not advertise this show at all at CVCA, but there were still about 25 CVCA people in the audience, including a fair number of students. The crowd was very enthusiastic and was much fun to play to. They needed some extra prompting to give us suggestions to get scenes going, but I think that is due to not being familiar with improv shows and how they work.

The show itself went pretty well. There were only a couple of games that either lagged or went long. Since we played a total of 14 games, that is a pretty good percentage! We had several crowd-roaring moments, and most of the show was laugh-worthy (in a good way). Some highlights:

– a “new choice” where a basement was infested with a dinosaur
– a super-fast “interrogation” where the criminal nailed that she had stolen paper clips with Rapunzel in the White House
– a “genre rewind” where the character had a sore tooth and a crazy dentist and had to perform the scene as opera
– a “good, bad, and ugly advice” where one character was a nasally geek/nerd
– a “musical chairs” where a man forgot to get his girlfriend a diamond ring for Valentine’s Day, and settled on getting glass rings instead, and they ended up in a zoo in China
– a “political debate” that got my friend Nate on stage (since he goes to the church and works at CVCA), where we debated belly button lint and number two pencils

The show did have a half-hour intermission, so I don’t think it felt too long. We went about an hour and fifteen minutes (I think).

After the show, we headed over to the house of one of the Fools – she lived only a few blocks away and invited us back for pizza. 7 of the 10 Fools could make it, and so we caravaned the short distance over. Clarice, Mer and I ate pizza and chatted with a couple of parents and grandparents upstairs while the Fools headed to the basement. After we finished eating, Mer and I and Clarice headed downstairs to see what was up. The various Fools were chatting while a couple played Halo on an X-Box. We joined in the small talk, and then I was forced to play Halo for the first time ever, happily against another Halo newbie. I lost 3-2, and it was universally agreed that we were pretty sad players. I then played another Fool at Rock’em Sock’em Robots. I lost that too, so I lost both new school and old school games. I must be getting older.

We’ll have another Fools show back home at CVCA in March. I hope it goes as well as our Friday gig.

Last Sunday was a fairly nice winter day. We had recently gotten another foot of snow, and although some of it had melted, we still had well over a foot of snow. I had called Jim on Saturday to see if he wanted to go trompin’ in the woods. He was game, but had to wait for Sunday. So, Sunday afternoon, Jim and I headed down to the Towpath in the Valley to tromp out to the beaver dam area.

I love the beaver dam walk – it is about a mile to the pond, and I had seen it in spring, summer, and fall, but I had never seen it in winter. It seemed like a good quest to wade through a foot of snow to go see a frozen pond.

I was quite surprised to find that the Towpath had a well-worn path already. It was only four days after the major storm, and the walking was not difficult at all. I guess nature nuts like the beaver pond!

It was a pretty walk, and Jim and I chatted about work and about running (of course). We did come around a corner and see another couple of people ahead on the trail, and when we got to the pond there was a dad with two little girls (who were having a great time throwing snow balls into the mushy top layer of the ice). I was fairly surprised to come across people, especially where it was only a few hours to the Super Bowl, but for much of the outing we had the trail to ourselves.

Jim decided he had to test the ice, so he climbed over the rail on the walkway and held on while he lowered more and more of his weight on to the ice. It did hold, but it had “bad idea” written all over it.

I took a bunch of pictures, and we sat on a bench for a bit and watched the ice. We then headed back to the car. As we drove off, Jim had asked me if I had ever been to the Ledges park, and I said I had. He asked if I had seen the Ice Box Cave, which I had never found, so off we went to see the cave as a bonus.

The Ledges trails were far less packed down. I like the Ledges in that it has  rock outcroppings and a pretty decent forest. I was delighted to see someone had built a snowman on a ledge.

We wound our way down the trail, and Jim guided us to the cave. It was a good-sized crack, and it went back a far amount. Sadly, it was also really dark. Once you got in about 15 feet, you could not continue for the dark. Jim said that it went back another 40 or 50 feet. Next time, I’ll need to bring a flashlight.

We went back to the car and were treated to a pretty sunset. It was a good outing, especially given the immediate couch camping I was going to do to watch the Super Bowl.

Third time is still charming (see below) – Mer and I stayed late at school on Friday for the CVCA Open House. We have two open house programs per year, and it is a chance for the school to show prospective students (and parents) what we offer. Mer (along with another teacher)  was at the school representing the English Department, and I was in the clubs/sports section for Fools and Ceili Club.

Anyway, we got out late (around 7:15), and after a quick change of clothes, we headed back to Mustard Seed Market for dessert and music. As Mer noted, we had not been to Mustard Seed in years (over a decade), and now we had been three weeks in a row. Never too much of a good thing!  In this case, we were going to hear Celtic music, which turned out to be a woman who played recorder, whistles, and guitar, along with a man who played guitar and keyboards. As luck would have it, they took a break just as we arrived, and when they came back after 10 minutes or so they did several numbers that were covers of pop tunes. They finally came around to several Celtic tunes that were very good, and that made for a fun time. When you add in excellent desserts, all is well. I had some chocolate-and-TONS-of-whipped-cream French dessert that was good (although I would get it with no strawberry sauce next time), and Mer got a very light-tasting cheesecake with chocolate sauce. I also added a peanut butter shake for good measure, and it was okay, but I liked the chocolate shake I had tried last week better. Still, good music and good food – Mer said if you’d added the Irish drum she would’ve expected pizza (a reference to going out for pizza and Irish music at Martyr’s Bar in Chicago when we still lived there).

Saturday was a very puttery day. Mer got her hair done and I ran and then napped. We listened to Wait Wait.  We headed out in the afternoon to go meet Aunt Mary at her church for a church dinner. We got there about the same time, but the doors were locked and the parking lot was empty – turns out we were a week early! Still, we seized the moment and went looking for a restaurant. Restaurant waiting times continue to defy recession talk. Our first stop was Olive Garden and they had a two-hour wait for a table. We quickly moved on to Macaroni Grill and they had an hour wait. Cheeseburger in Paradise finally came through for us with a 20-minute wait. We had a good meal while getting caught up with Aunt Mary.

I wanted to take Mer to see a movie, so we skipped dessert (for the time being), and we headed over to the cheap theater to see The Tale of Despereaux. We had seen a preview for it and it looked fun. It was. I am a HUGE sucker for fantasy worlds, and the creative minds that came up with Mouseworld and Ratworld were really something. The story was simple and clean and engaging, and it played into my predisposition to believe that people (or mice) can do these huge things. The characters were well drawn, both literally and metaphorically. I really loved this film. Mer was very taken with Ratworld and how creepy it was, and we both liked the mouse teacher who was trying to teach the young mice how to behave like mice.

After the movie, we made a detour to get ice cream at Handel’s. Just because it was freezing cold with a nippy breeze was no reason not to get ice cream!

So, another pleasant weekend in the Riordan household. And we may have a church dinner to go to next weekend!

Yesterday was my (38th) birthday, and it was also a Mer-in-charge date day, so she planned a nice day for me. We slept in (or at least as much as we could given having cats that want attention and walk on you to get it), and so we got up around 8:00. Mer announced we were going out to breakfast, and so we went out into a fairly solid (but fairly short-lived) snowstorm to go a few miles to the Hamburger Junction.

The Hamburger Junction is a mom-and-pop restaurant that is in a small mall plaza that we go by when we go get groceries or go to the bank (or go to get ice cream!). On their sign they offer “Vegas-style breakfast” and I had been mentioning how I wanted to try it “someday.” Well, Mer made sure someday was yesterday. For those who have been, the Hamburger Junction is fairly reminiscent of Sammy’s Restaurant in Michigan – it had a small counter area and some tables and booths and looked as if it could seat about 60 if packed out. They had a quite large breakfast menu, and offered many things in combination. As such, Mer was able to get a granola French toast, strawberry crepe, and silver-dollar pancake sampler, while I was able to get French toast, scrambled eggs, home fries, and bacon and sausage for mine (along with a pretty decent cup of hot chocolate). It is a good find.

We ran a few errands after breakfast and then spent a mellow late morning/early afternoon (I puttered and napped while Meredith exercised on the treadmill). Mer then told me we were going to a fancy restaurant and so I should get ready to go out, including wearing my spiffy double-breasted suit.

Once again, Mer has been an attentive listener. There is a nearby restaurant that I have been wanting to try but have not made it to because it is expensive. Only about two miles from our house in an oddly un-swank area is Russo’s Restaurant, a (naturally) Cajun/Italian place that is fairly upscale (at least for the Riordan household). I was able to get a very good gumbo and homemade pasta in the same meal, and you don’t get that everywhere! The service was quite good, but we felt very unhurried (the meal took almost two hours). The food was very fresh tasting, and my dessert (peanut butter pie) was drool-worthy. Mer took her chance on a not unpleasant but not really authentic gelato.

After we left the restaurant we went to Hudson. We had tickets to go to Actors’ Summit theater to see four short Chekhov plays, but we got there about an hour early. Since we had some time, I parked the car at the theater and announced we could window shop in the shopping district about a half mile away. Did I mention the temperature was in the low teens with a breeze? I have a very patient (and cold) wife.

We stopped by a high-end grocery store first, and while this may not seem like an exciting choice, the bakery was excellent and has made my list of special-treat locations. All of the cookies, cakes, breads, and pastries  looked quite wonderful. We spent a good 15 minutes ooohing and ahhhing in the store. We then made brief excursions into a couple of clothing stores before heading (quite briskly in all senses of the word) back to the theater.

As I mentioned, we saw four short plays about love by Chekhov, as follows:

“The Cat” – a play about a Russian tomcat telling how hard he had to work for his brief encounters with female felines. This was a world premier for an English-language version of this play, so that was fun. This was probably the most natural sounding (least sounding like a translation) of the plays.

“The Retired Officer, or the Dimwit”: – a play about a retired officer who was looking for a wife who was plain in looks, not rich, and not too smart. One of our favorite actresses played a wonderfully grotesque matchmaker who described a dimwitted woman in great detail only to have her rejected. It was probably the funniest of the four plays. This was also an English-language premier.

“The Proposal” – a play about a man calling on his neighbor to ask for the neighbor’s daughter in marriage. The father agrees and the daughter comes down and the protagonist and his possible wife get into a long argument about a disputed piece of land. After a tremendous blow-up, the matter is cleared up when the daughter finds out a proposal of marriage may be at stake, and she calls the young man back to try again, only to get into an argument about who has the better hunting dog. This one had some brilliant physical comedy as the young man complained about more and more stress-related physical ailments, but was the play that sounded most as if in translation (the father of the woman kept using terms of endearment for the young man, such as “beloved” and “darling” and others that may have made sense in Russia in 1900 but sounded odd to us).

“The Bear” – a play about a woman who had been mourning for her dead husband for seven months when a rude man calls on her to collect some money that her late husband owed. The two fight verbally and then the man challenges the woman to a duel. When she accepts and she revels in the idea of shooting him, he falls madly in love with her, and he convinces her to love him back. This play had some wonderful lines and lots of elevated feeling, but still had odd moments of dialogue that may have been the result of translation.

Mer and I discussed the plays afterward, and we decided the plays could have used some tightening up. For example, after the long argument scene in “The Proposal,” where the couple argues for probably ten minutes about the piece of land, the young man is encouraged to come back and try again to woo the girl. They sit side by side and have a pleasant conversation that turns to hunting and to hunting dogs. The young woman comments that her dog is much better than the young man’s dog. If this had been an improv show, I would have yelled “Scene!” At this point the audience knows what is going to happen, and the implied forthcoming argument is wonderfully funny. In the play, however, Chekhov decides to show us the argument about the dogs in full, and it is almost identical to the argument about the land. It has the same gags, the same pacing, and even the father shows up to join in as he did in the first dispute. Even if you did decide to show both arguments, they both felt longer than they needed to be. The same reasons for both positions were repeated several times, and it made the scenes drag a bit. It is probably how real life arguments work (lots of repetition), but felt odd on stage.

The language sometimes felt very odd, and it was not clear if it was Chekhov himself or the effect of translation. A good example occurred several times in “The Bear.” The rude man who wants his money tells the audience several times, “I am so angry!” It felt a little odd, but talking directly to an audience can feel that way. What really stuck out was when he was in the middle of a sentence to the widow, and he suddenly proclaimed (as an aside), “I am so angry!” and then picked right back up where his sentence left off. We could see the man was angry – it was odd for him to stop his thought to tell us he was angry. Also, the porter for the widow exclaimed at one point as he ran off stage, “What has brought this disaster upon us?” That just felt artificial to both me and to Mer, and we have seen and studied a fair amount of theater. Again, it may have sounded fine in Russian, or it may have been normal 120 years ago. I’m just not sure.

Happily, the plays were still very entertaining. There was also a girl scout troop at the theater (to earn theater badges), so the actors answered questions after the play. I love talk-backs because I get to see how theater works and how individual shows and characters are moulded. One thing that was pointed out was something we had noticed and thought was very funny – a picture of the dead husband from “The Bear” was a photograph of the theater’s artistic director, Neil. That was a nice touch.

Food, sleep, theater – a good birthday for me.

End of a busy work week? Tired? Ha! All the more reason to go out! Last night after we got home, Mer and I trundled across the Valley (there is NO good way to get to west Akron from our house) to go to the Mustard Seed Market. Not only did we want a decent dinner that was all-natural and that we did not have to cook, but the musical entertainment of the evening was a woman singing songs of the 30’s and 40’s.

We had about a 20 minute wait for a table, but since the music was already flowing, it was just fine to wait. The woman singing had a good voice and she had a nice stage persona. She was backed by a keyboards player (whose keyboard did a mean imitation of an upright bass) and a drum player. The music of the 30’s and 40’s is infectious – lots of jazz and swing rhythms, and fun lyrics that sometimes hint at racy without being tasteless. I literally spent the entire hour-plus swaying back and forth in my chair (Mer and I have a theory that most untrained white people can dance from the waist-up only, so we need to be seated to have any chance at all). The music made me smile – it was wonderful.

The Mustard Seed did alright by us on the food front as well. I got a pretty good shake and a burger (that was a tad over-done, so I need to get medium-well next time) and Mer got a really good looking pasta primavera with broccoli, red peppers, and cauliflower (bleh). We picked up a package of chocolate chip cookies on the way out for dessert, so it was a highly successful evening.

In the on-going birthday irony, this was the sonnet I read to Meredith on the eve of my birthday (it was the next one in line) – Sonnet 65:

Since Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (observed) birthday, Mer and I had the day off. With all that time, Mer naturally graded and I tidied the house (which badly needed it). However, in the early afternoon, I decided I needed a break, and so I went and took a tromp in CVCA’s woods.

Most of ye olde woods trail has been cut down to make way for more athletic fields, and that is fine (we need the space). Happily, about a third to a half of the woods remains, and it does succeed in feeling fairly isolated, so I went a-trompin’ in the snow. We have roughly a foot on the ground, and so it was a decently challenging walk. I was somewhat (but not entirely) surprised that at least one person (and maybe as many as three) had already been out on the trail, but not in the previous few days (the footprints were visible, but filled in with fresh snow).

It was a quiet and pretty jaunt, and I was gone less than an hour, so the house cleaning effort did not get set back too much.

Needless to say, some members of the Riordan household had no interest in going out in the snow.

Today is Meredith’s 36th birthday. Happy birthday, love!

Since Saturday is our date day, I asked Meredith to trade days with me so that I could have the planning for yesterday and she could have the planning for next Saturday for my birthday. She agreed, so I put together a nice little day for Meredith, at least as best as I could afford.

It all started with sleeping in. We slept until about 8:00, when we both woke up with a little assistance from the kitties. Since it was Meredith’s birthday celebration day, I decided we would start with a romantic little destination – the nearby DMV. It turns out that our licenses would expire this year, and they would expire on our birthdays, so Mer reminded me of that fact on Friday evening. So, to get that out of the way, we got ready and headed off to the DMV around 9:15 or so. That turned out to be happily efficient, and we were on our way, new licenses in wallets, around 10:00.

We had a little extra time (the restaurant I wanted to take Mer to for brunch did not open until 11:00), so I drove us around random roads in the valley. Everything was very pretty with the snow – we have upwards of a foot in most places, and the woods were beautiful. Mer did not know that I was stalling, and so she also enjoyed trying to figure out where we were going. After 30 minutes or so of sightseeing, I got on the highway and drove us to Mustard Seed Market.

Mustard Seed Market is a natural foods grocery store that also has a cafe. I had thought I had never been, but when we were leaving the place I saw a (former) movie theater and remembered that I had been to the restaurant 15 years ago with Meredith’s dad, and then went to see the movie version of Richard III. Mer also thinks we were there with her family when we went to see Much Ado About Nothing, so I may have been there twice. However, since both times were 15 years ago or more, it was essentially a first visit.

We were still early for the restaurant, and had about 20 minutes to wait, so we used the time to wander the aisles of the grocery store. Many of the offerings looked very fine, but where they appeared to excel was their selections of bread (and maybe coffee – they had a ton of fair trade organic coffees). They must have had a dozen different types of fresh breads, all of which I like very much. I will need to keep that information stashed away for future use.

We finally wandered upstairs to the cafe, but still had a few minutes before they would seat us. We used the very nice bathrooms, and then Meredith read about the cooking classes that were offered while I read about the live music the cafe offers on weekends. Coming up in the next few weeks is a woman singing songs from the 20s and 30s, an Irish group, and some guitar players. I also need to tuck that information away.

We got a seat at a table that overlooked the store itself, and we ordered. I got an excellent breaded chicken with rice and Meredith got a ham and cheese omelet. The store offered three types of drinks that I love – hot chocolate, smoothies, and shakes. I tried the hot chocolate, and, not surprising for a natural foods store, it was pretty poor hot chocolate. Natural hot chocolates are low in sugar and sometimes in cocoa, and while this hot chocolate was not gross, it just tasted like warm milk. The food itself was excellent, and the portions were normal sized so we did not feel bloated as we left. I did swing by the bakery and picked up four chocolate cookies as we left. They were very good.

We drove home, where we proceeded to rest and semi-nap. This caused us to miss part of Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, but it dawned on me that I could stream the show from the laptop that Shannon gave me a year ago. Duh. I have a headphone jack that plugs into my stereo system that I bought for my iPod, but it works with the laptop as well. So, we happily got cozy under a blanket on the couch and laughed through the show, which included a dumb criminal story from Stow, Ohio. The man wore his burglary mask in the bank and then waited in line with the mask on. The police were called and caught him. Stow is only about a mile from our house. We made national news! Umm, yeah.

After Wait Wait, we played nerdy book games, and I gave Mer her present. I ordered her the Teaching Company’s 48-lecture course on British literature. We already have the lectures on American lit, so this was a happy find in the last catalog I recieved just before Mer’s birthday. After she opened her gift, we played the game that Mer got for Christmas in which you have to guess the book or author based on the first line of a book. Mer beat me 8-3 (ouch!) and 8-5. We then played a book game from Amazon that Mer got a few years ago in which you guess the book or author based on clues. I was winning the game with only one more book to go when I hit a space where you had to give up a book. Mer ended up winning 7-5. Sigh. So much for beating her on her birthday!

That took us to almost 5:00, when I had invited a bunch of people over to go up to the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate. Sadly, Ombudsman and his wife Karen could not make it, but Zach and Londa, Nate and Rachel, and Nate and Ami all were able to come. Weirdly, it had been Rachel’s birthday on Thursday and it was Ami’s birthday yesterday, and with my birthday next Saturday, we were celebrating four birthdays out of eight people.

We split into two cars for the drive up, with Nate and Rachel going with Zach and Londa, and Mer and I went with Dubbs (Ami) and Nate. We had a good time during the 30-minute drive, talking about school (of course) and other things. When we got there, Zach had already put our group in for a table, and while most folks were looking at an hour wait, we were told our table would be ready in 15-30 minutes. While that number turned out to be closer to 35 minutes, it looks as if big groups get a jump on the queue. As a happy bonus, we were seated at a round booth in a corner, so we were actually able to talk and hear with no problems.

We had a good time. The food was tasty, and we laughed a lot – so much so that the people in the booth next to us wanted to know what we were drinking so they could get some too (we were drinking soft drinks!) and they wished us a happy birthday. Our server had candles in the whipped cream of the cakes and cheesecakes of the birthday folks, and we had about eight servers singing “Happy Birthday” in a magnificently terrible way. It was much fun, especially where we had heard them singing “Happy Birthday” to another table and Ami absolutely did not want to be sung to. Anytime you can slightly embarrass Dubbs is a good time. Sadly, I forgot my camera and so have no photos of the evening.

So, dinner and dessert took about two hours, and then we dispersed into the evening to find a fairly heavy snow-belt snow. Ami’s car has moderately bald tires, so that made for a few exciting turns on the way to the highway, but we soon drove out of the snow belt and got home just fine.

Since Dubbs gave me her old iPod Touch a few months back, I loaded the entire works of Shakespeare on the device, and I started reading a sonnet to Mer each night as we went to bed. After weeks of doing this, on the eve of her 36th birthday, I got to read to her Sonnet 60, which is this (this made both of us laugh):

It may be nigh on the middle of January, but here at Mu-sings it is still Christmas!

Mer and had planned to do a Michigan-Chicago Christmas tour this year since we thought a Maine Christmas would be too expensive (because of tolls, gas, and two hotel nights). So, we stuck around Ohio for a few days and we planned on heading to our friend Ellen’s new house in the evening on Tuesday (the 23rd).

I worked a day Monday since Mer was planning on grading all day. My knee (which, if you remember, I injured while running on Saturday the 20th) was aching, so I wore shorts to work so as not to irritate it. I got a bunch of comments, and a few people thought the lower leg was too red to be good, but I spent the day going up and down ladders so I am sure that helped matters. I was planning on working Tuesday as well, but I had not done any shopping, plus my lower leg was really red and the area around the wound was swollen, so I took the day off and went to a quick-care doctor. After a two-plus-hour wait, I got in to see the doctor who was able to diagnose an infection before he even sat down to talk to me. I had x-rays on the knee to make sure there was no bone damage (there was not), so the doctor gave me a prescription for two antibiotics and a nurse gave me a very painful shot in the butt. That hurt for hours! After a mere three and a half hours, I went home to eat and then went out to shop for Christmas. Seeing as the doctor told me the infection was not going to clear up on its own, and I was leaving town for seven days, I was pretty happy that I had decided to go to the doctor.

Mer and I did head out around 5:00 that evening to go to Ellen’s place, which is in Hillsdale, Michigan. According to our computer directions, it was about a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Ellen’s, but it was starting to rain and the temperature was about freezing, so I was worried we would have road trouble. Happily, we had no problems with the road ourselves – I never felt the car slip, although I took it really easy, especially after we stopped for supper. There certainly was ice building on the highway, and as we approached western Ohio we saw a car off the road on its roof. We got to just a few miles from our exit when all traffic came to a halt. We then sat essentially still for 90 minutes. It turns out that just a mile or so ahead of us there was a two-car-two-truck accident, and it had shut the highway down.

Once we got past the accident, we made it to our exit, and we turned north toward Michigan. I was happy to be off the highway, but that also meant that the roads were not so well taken care of. There were two things in our favor, though – the road was just as straight as could be, and the freezing rain turned to all snow within just a few miles. It did turn out that Michigan had not bothered to salt or even plow, but we took it easy and had no real difficulty in getting to Hillsdale. By the time we had arrived, it had taken about six hours to get there.

Ellen, who is also a teacher and thus was on break, was still awake and willing to stay up for a short while longer. We moved our luggage into the house (we do not travel light), and then Ellen showed us around her very cool house. Ellen got a job teaching at Hillsdale Academy back last summer, and largely bought her house unseen via the internet. I can see why – her house is really cool. It is a pre-1900 house with high ceilings and wooden floors, and had woodwork frames around all doors and archways. The back door leads in to the kitchen, which then leads through two rooms that are still evolving identities. Ellen has been busy stripping wallpaper and repainting everything, so these rooms are still in process. The last room on the ground floor at the front of the house is Ellen’s living room, which is cozy and wonderfully sans television. There are stairs that wind up from the living room to the three bedrooms upstairs, which have happy nooks, and two of them (not Ellen’s room) have huge closets. There is a large bathroom with a claw-footed tub upstairs, and a very small but fully functional shower bathroom downstairs. Her house is wonderful and evoked more than a little coveting on my end.

After the tour we talked a little and I hit up Ellen for some food since my medication was supposed to be taken with food. She was kind enough to share some goodies someone had given her, and Mer and I liberally (or, in Hillsdale, conservatively) helped ourselves to the snack plate. We chatted for awhile, and then headed gratefully off to bed sometime just before midnight.

The next morning, there was about six inches of snow on the ground. I took it upon myself to shovel the walk and to break open the end of the driveway, which I was able to do. This sounds magnanimous, but Ellen paid dearly for it by having to listen to my 10-minute rant on the back-breaking properties of her straight-handled shovel.
 
Ellen and Meredith are both English teachers, and I like Englishy things, so our conversations and ideas of entertainment can be a bit, well, nerdy. After a yummy breakfast that Ellen made (a potato-ham hash), Mer settled down to grade papers, so I challenged Ellen to a game based on Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. It turns out that Ellen loves that book. Sigh. Still, I was ahead for some of the game, and I finished just one space away from getting to the church (the goal of the game) when Ellen staged her come-from-behind win. She then impressed us by going through every trivia card in the game and getting them all correct. Egad.

We then had a time of cultural exchange. We introduced Ellen to Slings and Arrows, which is one of our favorite  shows (about an acting company), and she introduced us to the American version of The Office, of which she had season three. We enjoyed The Office very much – it is funnier and far less painful than the British version that was the genesis of the series, and Ellen seemed to enjoy Slings and Arrows (or at least humored us). Somewhere in there, I took my first of only two naps of the trip.

Ellen whipped us up a supper of fresh bread and ham and potato slices, and thus fortified, we went to Ellen’s church for Christmas Eve service. The roads were still very slick, but the drive was short, so we got there just fine. Ellen goes to an Anglican church that is fairly small inside (it looks as if it could hold about 100 people), and had beautiful exposed wooden beams. It also has tastefully modern and artistic stations of the cross around the sanctuary. The order of service was formal, and was based largely on the 1912 version of the Book of Common Prayer. There was lots of music and prayer and Scripture reading. I had not packed any formal clothes, but Ellen had assured me jeans would be fine. The priests were very warm and greeting, but I did notice that no one else was dressing down on a high-holy day.

The only slight problem with a formal liturgical service that is essentially Catholic is there is much (and I mean much) sitting then standing then kneeling. The astute reader will remember I had an infected knee and lower leg that was not going to kneel and was not very happy about going from sitting to standing. I muddled though as best I could, and figured praying pain-free sitting was better than trying to block out pain kneeling.

We went home after the service and chatted more and ate more. Ellen had tried making a candy earlier in the day that had not turned out correctly, and appeared to be fused to the pan. That was sad. However, that meant she had a pot of chocolate on the stove that we used as a dipping sauce for EL Fudge cookies. Very tasty. Since this is two weeks later, my recollection may be faulty and this may have been an afternoon treat, but they were still satisfying.

Christmas day arrived, and for the first time ever in my life I did not open anything. That was fine – the company, hot chocolate, and food were all agreeable. We had talked about going to Mom’s place on Christmas Day, but my (turns out faulty) memory thought they were not going to be there until the 26th, and Ellen was not able to get away because of an upcoming conference in Chicago, so we decided to hang out at Ellen’s for another day.

The big outing, on Christmas Day, over Christmas break, will surprise no one. Deep in every student’s being, the suspicion has always been there. Yes, on Christmas Day, what do two teachers and a school staff member do? They go to tour Ellen’s school. Hillsdale Academy is small – it is a K-12 school, and is self-contained on two floors of one building. It sounds as if the school has about 400 students total with another 200 on a waiting list. The school is on the campus of Hillsdale College, and the suspicion is that it was founded as a place for faculty kids to go. Still, it is a very pretty building. Ellen’s classroom was very spacious and had one wall of windows. If the school has a knock against it in my book, it is the lack of classroom technology. The rooms do not have audiovisual systems, and the entire school could have been outfitted with them for about $40,000. Portable projector carts are available, and Ellen told us she uses one quite often. Still, it is far easier to use equipment that is available all the time and has zero set-up requirements. All in all, though, the school facilities look very nice.

We took a small look at the college itself. Ellen had to return a video to the library (which was shockingly closed on Christmas day), so we got to see the college from the road to the library and one quad of the college on the very treacherous icy walk to the library. Ellen dropped her video in the return slot, and we beat a slow retreat back to the car.

We spent the rest of the day on Christmas puttering. Ellen made another attempt at her candy (a resounding success this time!). I hooked up three more speakers to Ellen’s surround-sound stereo. Mer graded. We all played a Shakespeare quotation game (I think Mer won). We watched videos. There was hot chocolate and more food and large-scale consumption of the chocolate and buttery brittle candy that Ellen made. It was quite a pleasant day.

Mer and I planned on leaving early the next morning, but we awoke to the sounds of ice pellets hitting our window. There was ice all over everything, and the driveway was hazardous, and the roads looked only marginally better. We decided to delay our egress and we kept an eye on the weather. If things improved, we figured we could leave in the afternoon. This gave us good opportunity to finish off Ellen’s homemade candy and to watch more videos. By early afternoon, I figured we would give the roads a try, so I chiseled my way into the car and loaded it up. We said goodbye to Ellen and headed out around 2:30 or so. Staying with Ellen was much fun, and we hope to get back to her (cute) place soon.

The roads were not great, but they were passable. We were able to get on a major highway (I-94) after about 45 minutes, and the highway was in okay shape. I think the additional several hours we waited were helpful – it let the salt crews have time to work. Mom later told us that I-80 had been shut down in Indiana in the morning, and that I-94 (which they can see from the house) was crawling during the morning.

We got to Mom and Marc’s place in the early evening. It was then that I discovered that they had gotten back from visiting my sister on Christmas Day, and so they had wondered where we were. Ooops. That was unfortunate. Mom and Marc interrupted their fiercely-fought Scrabble game, and we sat by the gas fire and talked for much of the evening. Mom and Marc gave us a wonderful calendar of pictures of sunsets that they had taken over Lake Michigan, from the beach that is only a brief walk from their house.

I love being at Mom and Marc’s house. It is peaceful and quiet, and Mer and I sleep like rocks there. We had a great night’s sleep, and then Mom made us French toast with real maple syrup. We had promised Shannon and Jolene that we would be in Chicago that day (Saturday the 27th), so we knew we had to head out. That worked out okay since Mom and Marc were also leaving to go to see Marc’s family. So, we all left mid-afternoon. Mer asked if we could go down to the beach, so we did. It was windy, and so cold, but the edge of the lake was piled up with ice cliffs, which were pretty. We wandered sown the beach to where a stream comes out of the woods and empties into the lake. Because of all of the freezing rain and melting snow, the stream was very full. Because of the ice on the edge of the lake, the stream was having a hard time emptying into the lake, and so it was spread out over a wide area of the beach. It was neat, but cold, so we made an efficient tour of the area.

The trip to Chicago was uneventful, and we made it to Shannon and Jo’s by early evening. We were both amazed at the number of new high-rises that are under construction in downtown Chicago, including the amazing doubling-in-height of the existing Blue Cross and Blue Shield building. The skyline is going to change dramatically from even just five years ago.

Shannon and Jo welcomed us, and informed us we would be going out later in the evening. We had a mini gift exchange (in that our gifts for Shannon and Jo had not arrived in the mail):  they gave us a movie DVD, and they gave me season four of Doctor Who, and Mer got a really great game about identifying books by their first lines. Shannon and I went and bought four pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for the next night (although I found out that Mer had a sample of hers that same evening). We hung out until about 6:00, when James arrived, and we piled into Jo’s car to go have a large and tasty meal at the Essence of India restaurant. After the leisurely meal, Shannon and Jo took us to a theater I had never been to in order to see Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol.

I have to confess that I do not like the standard story of the Christmas Carol. I think it has been overdone, and it seems as if every TV show ever made does some variation on the tale. So, I was very skeptical going in to this play. Very quickly, my skepticism disappeared. It was a one-man show (the one man also happened to be the author), and it retold the Christmas Carol story from the perspective of the newly dead Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s partner. The different take and the enthusiasm and skill that the actor had were enough to breathe new life into (what for me was) a now-bland tale. Having Marley try to change Scrooge from his ways using methods that tied into the original story (ghosts and pseudo time travel and so on) was much fun. It was a good evening.

The next morning was relatively nice, so we decided to walk the two or so miles to Andersonville to go to Ann Sather’s restaurant. Mer and I love Ann Sather’s for brunch food. The meals are reasonable (usually about $8), and you get a ton of food, including two cinnamon rolls which are drool-worthy. Add in the option to get muffins with the breakfast (in this case a chocolate chip muffin), and all is yum. The walk back was into the wind, and thus was a bit brisker. I like the walk, though – it is through a bunch of residential neighborhoods and one decent-sized park.

Back at the apartment, we broke into Mer’s new book game, and it really goes without saying that the literary genius of Shannon and Mu won the first game. (Never mind that Mer and Jo won the next game the next day, and since then my record against Mer is on the order of 1-15, although I am usually competitive, usually losing eight books to five). We puttered around, and then Shannon and Jo took us to Molly’s Cupcakes, where we had some gourmet cupcakes (and a cookie). We went back home and finished the evening by watching some early (second Doctor) Doctor Who episodes that were quite well written and eating Jo’s lasagna and our Ben and Jerry’s.

Mer and I left dark and early the next morning. We got on the road a little after seven, successfully beating the Chicago traffic. We headed back to Mom and Marc’s house. We took the early start of the day as an opportunity to stop and eat breakfast at the gut-expanding Sammie’s Restaurant. What Ann Sather’s is to cinnamon rolls, Sammie’s is to breakfast egg creations. Lots of food for very little money. Happily full, we drove the last mile to the house where we promptly napped for two hours.

We spent the day puttering. We played Mer’s new game, we read, we had our own gift exchange (Mer got me a couple of DVDs and some brownie mix and an Italian book), we ate too much, we went back down to the beach to see the ice cliffs, and we settled down in the evening to watch my DVDs – Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. One of the great reasons we like to get away for breaks is to get away from the ever-present to-do list. The Monday we spent at Mom and Marc’s house was a perfect realization of that principle. 

We did head back to Ohio the next day (Tuesday the 30th) – we had a former student throwing a holiday party that evening, but we did make one more stop at Sammie’s for breakfast. One last tank-up before the new year caught up with us.

Oh – and I forgot my razor, so I had about ten days’ growth of “beard” by the end of our vacation.  

Last Saturday was our usually scheduled “date day” where one of us is in charge. Last Saturday was Mer’s turn, and she decided to start it in style (at least for us). She trundled us off to have a brunch at Bob Evans’s.  We hope someday post-house that we will be able to have brunch out most Saturdays. We both love hearty breakfasts. In the meantime, we occasionally cheat on our budget and go our for an unauthorized meal. It was a good way to start the day – good food and hot chocolate and good company.

We then ran a few errands and I spent some early Christmas cash on an iPod Touch charger so I would not have to keep my computer on for four hours just to charge the battery. Not a super-exciting outing, but again, the company was most pleasant (although she was not going to be bothered to go into a nerd-intensive store like Radio Shack when I went to get an RCA cable so I could plug the Touch into my stereo).

We puttered around back at home, and had a good time with out usual Saturday pastime of listening to Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! Mer had more food in store, though, so after Wait Wait we headed south toward Canton. One of Mer’s old friends had rediscovered her through Facebook, and she was throwing an informal party at a local buffet restaurant. Mer wanted to go, and I am an easy sell for buffets. Our budget allows for us to be invited out by other people, so we were okay with this outing.

I had never been to this restaurant before – it is a local chain called Golden Corral. It was not cheap (about $12 per person), but I have never seen a buffet like this before. The buffet line stretched the length of the restaurant – about five separate sections. I guess Midwesterners like to eat!

I got to meet Mer’s friend, Jennifer. In the wonderfully odd world of technology, Jennifer and I were already “friends” on Facebook because of Mer. It was nice to meet her in person. She seems very nice. She has three kids, and we got to see pictures, and Mer and Jennifer generally caught up (having not seen each other in about 18 years). We were later joined by one of Jennifer’s friends, David, who had gone to CVCA through eighth grade. We spent the better part of two hours chatting and eating and eating and eating. Mer and I made sure we got our $12 worth! Since our evening was not done, we rolled out to head home around 6:00.

We were meeting Ken and Janet at our home so we could take them to Actors’ Summit theater. The theater was putting on its Christmas play, which this year was The Sanders Family Christmas. It is a sequel to the play Smoke on the Mountain. It is a play set at Christmas time in 1941, 18 days after Pearl Harbor. It is set in a small mountain church, where the Sanders Family bluegrass band has come to play for us, the congregation. It is very light-hearted, with occasional moments of seriousness (with the war background present through much of the play). There are lots and lots of bluegrass numbers performed through the play – about 20 or more total.

We had seen this play years ago with Ken and Janet at Malone College. We thought it was wonderful. It pokes gentle fun at small Southern churches without mocking them. Ken, who was raised Baptist, found himself thinking a lot of times, “Yeah, that is how it is.” They did a nice job. Rumor had it that the Malone production took a year to prepare for – one of the main characters uses sign language through much of the play (her character can’t sing well, so she signs even though no one is deaf). That must have taken some time to learn, and supposedly the actors had to learn the songs as they did not initially know how to play their instruments. The sister who signed had stolen the show in the Malone production, with lots of over-the-top moments that were great fun to watch,

Actors’ Summit’s production was excellent, but sadly, they cannot prepare for a whole year, since they turn plays over every eight weeks or so. The actors were great, and the music was very fine (including an actor playing dobro!), but they had to compromise with the sister who signed. She only signed through the first part of the first act; after that, she sang with the ensemble, and they modified the script to go from her saying she could not sing to her saying she could not sing solo. It was completely understandable, but it was too bad, since much of the fun when we first saw the show came from watching the exaggerated signing for the lyrics of the songs.

Having said that, the play was still quite funny, and the music made for  a fine evening. The song selection did a good job balancing well-known songs with ones that are not played anymore. It was also great fun to get to go out with Ken and Janet – since we don’t live near them anymore, we only get to see them outside of church a couple of times per year.

If you ever do get a chance to see The Sanders Family Christmas, I recommend it. It is not terribly deep, but it is entertaining, and not a typical Christmas-style play.