Busy weekend recap

I feel like this past weekend just flew by, way too fast!  I had a lot going on, and fortunately it was all fun stuff. :-)

Friday night we had small group Bible study at our place, since the couple who normally hosts it was on vacation.  The weather was nice enough that we were able to eat outside, and then we came in to the living room for the Bible study portion.  It was fun having everyone at our place, but then we do enjoy having people over.  Afterward, my friend Luke took Bill and I out to Archie's for some ice cream, since Dietsch's was already closed... oh well, guess we'll have to go to Dietsch's another time!

Saturday Bill had to work in the morning, so I slept in a bit and then got to work on preparations for our now-annual Big Shindig - basically, it's a time for all our friends to be invited to our house to hang out and have fun!  A couple hours before the party it started raining, but fortunately it was down to a sprinkle by the time the party got going.  It started out slow, but as more people came the party started picking up.  It was really awesome to see people we hadn't seen in a long time - one couple we hadn't seen in about 2 years even!  I think we had around 25-30 people at dinner time, and the food seemed to go well.  The frozen hamburger patties we got from Meijer were really greasy on the grill so Bill was having some issues with smoke there, but I heard they tasted good (I had a hot dog).  We ended up with a lot of desserts and a few sides, but there's nothing wrong with too much dessert, right? :-)  There was a lot of corn hole played, and in general everyone seemed to have a good time.  At 10pm when the party was "officially" over, we still had maybe half a dozen people at our house so we said we're going inside to go to bed, and they decided to leave then too.  It was a tiring day but still tons of fun.

Sunday morning was church as usual, then a quick lunch with Bill before he headed off to work the rest of the day.  Mid-afternoon I headed toward Toledo, where I met up with my dad at the Toledo Art Museum.  My job had provided each employee with 2 tickets (and $7 per person worth of Mud Hens Bucks) to the Toledo Mud Hens game in the evening, and since we knew Bill would have to work, I invited my dad.  We wanted to meet earlier to just hang out for a while, so we decided on the art museum since it's free admission - though we found out when we got there that it's $5 to park there!  Guess they have to make money somehow, eh?  We started out in their "prints of pop" exhibit, and neither of us really understood any of it so we moved on.  They also have a "monkey business" exhibit, but it was odd because monkeys weren't the main part of a lot of the artwork in it.  We wandered around most of the museum, looking at the art from all different time periods and locations and all that.  We were both amazed that they had carvings and such from as far back as 2500 B.C.!  Amazing stuff.

After the museum, we went downtown to the Spaghetti Warhouse for dinner - my choice, of course, but fortunately Daddy likes it too. :-) We got a table right away and had good service, and the food was excellent of course.  I had my usual spaghetti with meat sauce, and Daddy had spaghetti with Italian sausage.  And we finished 2 of their small loaves of bread between us.  We headed to the game a little early, since the restaurant was getting quite busy by that time!

At the game, we met up with most of my coworkers and their spouses or families.  It was entertaining to watch two of Sam's little boys (ages 3 and 4) in the row ahead of us, playing with their toys and getting food all over themselves.  My coworkers seemed to get along well with Daddy, and we had a great time at the game.  It was 92 degrees at the start of the game, and as long as we had a breeze blowing it was bearable, since our seats weren't in the sun at all.  Having a Pepsi after a few innings and then a root beer float a few innings later helped with that too. :-) The Mud Hens ended up winning the game, and afterwards a ton of kids got to run the bases (they just kept coming and coming - I was amazed at how many kids were there!!) and they did fireworks too.  I was getting on the road towards home at 10:00pm so it was a later night than I'm used to, but so far I'm relatively awake this morning.