Last Saturday, Mer and I slept in. Late. Since we had gotten back from the Pittsburgh airport after 1:00 am, and neither of us had slept in much or at all over break, we slept in on Saturday until about 11:00. Mer then took her time getting ready, and we headed to Akron to eat brunch at Wally Waffles. That was the first time we had been back since before the February diet; it was good to be back.

After brunch, we headed down to Aunt Mary’s old place. For about a year now, Aunt Mary has been holding on to her trundle bed (a single bed with a fold-away single bed stored underneath it) for us. Aunt Mary wanted to paint the room and clean the carpets, so we went down and took the bed apart and moved it to her old garage (I later went down on Monday with a borrowed truck and got the bed). That took about an hour. Since we were already near Canton, I drove into Canton itself, and went to Mer’s old neighborhood, to a park there that houses the McKinley Monument. It is an impressive domed structure that I had not been to since the mid-90’s. Mer is not sure she had ever been inside it. We did not stay long, but I had wanted to see the place since I had just finished a book about presidential assassinations, and McKinley was covered in the book. There is also a small and excellent museum near the monument that I have never been to, but we did not have time on Saturday to visit it.

On the way home, we swung by Nate and Rachel’s place to see if they wanted to go get ice cream at Strickland’s. They were game, so the five of us (with their son) drove our two cars over, and we ate ice cream and chatted for about 45 minutes. It was good to be mellow with the Gurnishes again – it had been awhile.

We spent a mellow evening at home. Before break, we had started watching the film version of The Kite Runner. We finished it up, and it was really well done. We have both seen a stage version of the book as well, and the film and stage version were different from each other, but both were very good. The Kite Runner was filmed in China, but I assume the landscape passes well for Afghanistan. The film also was almost entirely in Farsi (Persian) with English subtitles, so that was interesting to hear. After the film was over, we made it a fairly early evening.