It's the fourth dreary morning in a row in the great Hoosier state. A little rain is good (even better, if I ever get my herbs and radishes in the ground!), but I'd appreciate Mother Nature breaking it up a little bit. It's hard to spring out of bed when it's gray and dismal out.
Last Monday I did go back out after dinner and unearthed the last of the herb garden stumps. That root ball was so heavy with clay, we let it dry out a bit and I enlisted Paul's help in hauling it to the curb Wednesday evening. A call to the sanitation department left some doubt as to whether or not the city would collect my growing pile of yard waste, but Thursday morning the big truck with the big grabby arm picked all my branches, bags, and shrubbery carcasses up in one mechanical handful. Hooray! Paul mowed the lawn, and the front yard was presentable once again.
While I was out there Monday, I was tended to our bicycles when our neighbor, Ashley, came home from school. I waved and she came over and we chit-chatted about her semester... for roughly an hour, just hanging out in the driveway. I invited her in for tea and we chatted in the living room until 11pm.
She's a sweet girl, but a little wacky. Her father owns the house across the street from us, where she lives and landlords to one or two other students. Her father and her mother and step-father are all currently living in Germany. Ashley is only 20 years old, but engaged to a 33-yr-old department manager at Meinards (a local chain of home improvement stores) that she asked out when she was there shopping for cabinets. (They remodeled several rooms last summer.) She's known him for less than a year. She proposed to him. He's obsessive-compulsive. She has anxiety issues. Sounds like a sitcom. She's got some great tales of Continental life and was fun company. (She's the third person we know from the Architecture school. Perhaps one needs to be "unique" to be accepted.)
Wednesday evening, our friend Brian suggested we all go out for dinner/drinks around music rehearsal, so we went to White River Landing downtown. They serve mostly American fare, but in a very casual, fishing-themed setting. You can fill a basket with free popcorn while you're waiting for your meal. Paul and I hadn't been there in a while. We appreciate that they've always been a smoke-free restaurant. (A county-wide smoking ban in all the usual places was just voted on April 30 and goes into effect June 30.)
Thursday, St. Francis hosted a Volunteer Dinner, where all the staff members served up a delicious meal of pork BBQ to all the volunteers. It was a really nice event.
This weekend was mostly lazy, though productive. Paul wanted to finish up a project one of the students at UB needed from him to be able to do her research work, and I worked on St. Francis' new Web site.
Last night, we ventured up to Upland, IN, home of Taylor University -- which unfortunately made national headlines this week when a semi crossed the median on I-69 and crashed into a Taylor U. van, killing 5 students on their way back to campus from Ft. Wayne, where they had been setting up for a weekend event -- and Ivanhoe, touted as "the place to go for ice cream" in East Central Indiana. One of the Newman Center students, Tonia, had mentioned the place to us at the "Gala", so we made a pact to take her and her fiance up there before semester's end.
Ivanhoe is an unassuming little dinner just down the street from the university, but they were doing some brisk dinner business. There was nothing unique about their ice cream, and I was momentarily disappointed that we had driven 30 minutes for Edy's ice cream (I had expected homemade). Then Tonia handed us the menu... of 100 sundaes. I tried the Peach Melba, soft-serve vanilla with peach and raspberry sauces and shortbread cookies, and was impressed by the quality of the fruit toppings. They were certainly generous!
One note on the semantics of ice cream: When I heard "hand-dipped" I assumed that they were dipping your ice cream, DQ-style, in a hard-shell sauce of your choosing. This didn't make any sense in the context of their menu items, so I inquired to learn that "hand-dipped" simply means "hard ice cream" -- supposedly because one has to "dip" their hand into the tub to scoop it out.
It has occurred to me that I have never seen any baby squirrels. Baby ducks, baby bunnies, baby birds, but never baby squirrels. Why is that? Where do baby squirrels go? I'm certain the bushy rats are breeding. Curious.
Last Monday I did go back out after dinner and unearthed the last of the herb garden stumps. That root ball was so heavy with clay, we let it dry out a bit and I enlisted Paul's help in hauling it to the curb Wednesday evening. A call to the sanitation department left some doubt as to whether or not the city would collect my growing pile of yard waste, but Thursday morning the big truck with the big grabby arm picked all my branches, bags, and shrubbery carcasses up in one mechanical handful. Hooray! Paul mowed the lawn, and the front yard was presentable once again.
While I was out there Monday, I was tended to our bicycles when our neighbor, Ashley, came home from school. I waved and she came over and we chit-chatted about her semester... for roughly an hour, just hanging out in the driveway. I invited her in for tea and we chatted in the living room until 11pm.
She's a sweet girl, but a little wacky. Her father owns the house across the street from us, where she lives and landlords to one or two other students. Her father and her mother and step-father are all currently living in Germany. Ashley is only 20 years old, but engaged to a 33-yr-old department manager at Meinards (a local chain of home improvement stores) that she asked out when she was there shopping for cabinets. (They remodeled several rooms last summer.) She's known him for less than a year. She proposed to him. He's obsessive-compulsive. She has anxiety issues. Sounds like a sitcom. She's got some great tales of Continental life and was fun company. (She's the third person we know from the Architecture school. Perhaps one needs to be "unique" to be accepted.)
Wednesday evening, our friend Brian suggested we all go out for dinner/drinks around music rehearsal, so we went to White River Landing downtown. They serve mostly American fare, but in a very casual, fishing-themed setting. You can fill a basket with free popcorn while you're waiting for your meal. Paul and I hadn't been there in a while. We appreciate that they've always been a smoke-free restaurant. (A county-wide smoking ban in all the usual places was just voted on April 30 and goes into effect June 30.)
Thursday, St. Francis hosted a Volunteer Dinner, where all the staff members served up a delicious meal of pork BBQ to all the volunteers. It was a really nice event.
This weekend was mostly lazy, though productive. Paul wanted to finish up a project one of the students at UB needed from him to be able to do her research work, and I worked on St. Francis' new Web site.
Last night, we ventured up to Upland, IN, home of Taylor University -- which unfortunately made national headlines this week when a semi crossed the median on I-69 and crashed into a Taylor U. van, killing 5 students on their way back to campus from Ft. Wayne, where they had been setting up for a weekend event -- and Ivanhoe, touted as "the place to go for ice cream" in East Central Indiana. One of the Newman Center students, Tonia, had mentioned the place to us at the "Gala", so we made a pact to take her and her fiance up there before semester's end.
Ivanhoe is an unassuming little dinner just down the street from the university, but they were doing some brisk dinner business. There was nothing unique about their ice cream, and I was momentarily disappointed that we had driven 30 minutes for Edy's ice cream (I had expected homemade). Then Tonia handed us the menu... of 100 sundaes. I tried the Peach Melba, soft-serve vanilla with peach and raspberry sauces and shortbread cookies, and was impressed by the quality of the fruit toppings. They were certainly generous!
One note on the semantics of ice cream: When I heard "hand-dipped" I assumed that they were dipping your ice cream, DQ-style, in a hard-shell sauce of your choosing. This didn't make any sense in the context of their menu items, so I inquired to learn that "hand-dipped" simply means "hard ice cream" -- supposedly because one has to "dip" their hand into the tub to scoop it out.
It has occurred to me that I have never seen any baby squirrels. Baby ducks, baby bunnies, baby birds, but never baby squirrels. Why is that? Where do baby squirrels go? I'm certain the bushy rats are breeding. Curious.
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