2005, May
It's not that nothing is happening around here;
it's just that there's no time to write!
I think we left off sometime in March. Well, there was Easter and special music at church, and that "gig" down at the Villagio where we'll be playing again, and a couple of concerts at Grace Village, the retirement community up the street. Lots of work to finish out the semester, of course.
And then school ended so things calmed down, right? Wrong!
On the Friday before commencement, we had just come home from the reception for the graduates and their families, when there was a knock on the door. Kathy was already in her bathrobe and it was kind of late. It was one of the R.A.s for summer school. There were too few students staying in the dorms to run the food service, the one dorm where they can cook was being shut down immediately for cleaning and such, and could we possibly accommodate 14 students plus the 2 R.A.s for dinner for two weeks? Of course we said, "Yes." Well, it wasn't too bad since Josh Phillips, the R.A. for the guys, said he could cook so Kathy only had to cook half the time, and then another faculty member had the students come to their house two nights. Wasn't so terrible, really. Several ladies from church and on the college staff contributed desserts, which was much appreciated. Ended up with one leftover cake; things aren't so bad....
And then we had heard Mozart's Requiem so we invited the choir from church to come over in the middle of all this and bring some desserts, and we watched the movie Amadeus one Saturday evening. Not much extra trouble, but we did have to reconfigure the "great" room since it was also serving as a dining room. Had a great time, though. Choir director brought over a projector and screen, and we ran the sound through the stereo. Not quite theater quality, but pretty good.
That last Friday evening the students had pizza in one of the dorm lounges because we weren't going to be home. You see, there was this wedding....
While all of this was going on, a friend called and her daughter's prom dress had a problem, so Kathy fixed it on the terribly complicated, multi-layered $$$ dress. And on that last Wednesday evening friend Vicky from church called about the white curtain over the baptistry Kathy was working on: "Well, there's this wedding on Saturday, and...." The sewing was finished but that Thursday morning was literally the only time that we could possibly go over and hang it, because things were busy at work. Kathy's office is to be moved and she was packing up all the office stuff for moving by June 1.
Rich, along with his partner Rick Koontz, spent a few days building a logic demonstrator board. Rich mostly did carpentry and Rick did wire-wrap construction of the circuit boards. We bolted on one of our lab power supplies and everything seems to work the first time. I'll give credit to Rick, as he was very meticulous in constructing the electronic part. You can make little mistakes in carpentry and it doesn't matter, but logic circuits just don't work unless everything is perfect. We will use this in our "101" class this fall, among other places. And Rich worked on lessons for fall on "multivibrators" which sounds like an advertisement for a massage chair. (If you really want to know, send an E-mail....)
Also while this was going on, Kathy made 2 samples of the wedding cake for our daughter's wedding in Chicago. The final version had to be baked on Wednesday evening so it could properly cool and set up for the frosting layer. Had to be refrigerator cold or the frosting would run right off, the frosting being something like a pound of butter, a pound of cream cheese and a pound of white chocolate. The inside had bittersweet chocolate fragments suspended in the white cake, and between layers there was raspberry jam she made in Toppenish before we moved, using those delicious little raspberries we grew there. Also fresh raspberries that had not been in the stores for the past 3 weeks but arrived on Thursday or so. And Kathy had been struggling with manufacturing the roses (see Website) for the cake and they finally came together about that same time. Two modest pieces of that cake would put you under the table.
We finally "escaped" on Friday after son Jonathan arrived, drove to the groom's mother's house near Chicago, and unloaded possibly the best wedding cake in existence. Kathy was definitely in Aunt Emma mode until that cake was in the fridge, and then we could start to enjoy the occasion. (For those who understand, it was the Strobel side that dominated until the cake was safe, and then the Bettenhausen side took over.) Went to a restaurant for lunch with daughter Kriss where their specialty is pies, then had dinner with the groom's extended family.
Got up next morning (Saturday) and finally got out of the house about 10:20. Young Rachel had outgrown her dress shoes and they had to stop and buy shoes on the way, so everyone was getting a bit tense. Then we all drove into Chicago to City Hall. Laura, the groom's mother, was navigator for Rich, and Kathy rode with someone else. The photographer was smart and rode with the groom since nothing would happen without him. Traffic was only semi-horrible on the way into town. Well, Laura guided Rich right to a parking place on the street (could have been a few inches longer, took 2 tries to parallel park), and they met the other two groups coming from the parking garage. Now oddly enough, several of these people had lived in the Chicago area for many years but no one actually knew where the City Hall was. We all were hurrying, and we found the place and got the marriage license in the queue at 11:42 and a half. The deadline for the day was 11:45. (Glad we didn't wait until the last minute or anything!) The judge was very cordial and stretched out the ceremony to all of five minutes. Must have been half a dozen other couples also getting hitched in that last 20 minutes, keeping two judges busy. In spite of all the confusion, I don't think Kriss has ever looked happier.
Off to the restaurant, which was on top of a 40-story building where they do billion-dollar deals every day. We're thinking that they buy and sell third-world countries or something ("I'll trade Rwanda and Zambia for Daimler-Chrysler and the Sears Tower.") Everyone found it OK, except that Laura's sense of direction failed and we went the wrong way initially. Then, after bumbling around in the one-way street grid for 15-20 minutes, we drove past the building. Only street we saw was a one-way-do-not-enter thing. Go around the block, right? Nope. Street turns into an interstate 20 feet after the do-not-enter street. Go under the Post Office, turn around, come back into town (but on a different street), get lost again, find the street, head back out and -- miss the entrance again! Where in blazes was it? This time go to second exit so we can come back on the interstate. Where it turns into a city street, there is a left-turn lane about 20 feet long. I duck into it, turn into either a tiny street or a wide alley and there is a very worried Kathy in her pink Mother-Of-The-Bride dress and Mitch, the groom's cousin, sitting out there waiting. Good thing, too, because the security of this place is very forbidding.
All garage doors are closed, gotta push a button and state your business (Eat lunch, please?) and the driver's name (fortunately the same last name as the bride), then find one elevator (very good thing Mitch was leading us at this point!) just past the first security checkpoint, go up to the main floor, go to another elevator past another security checkpoint, up 39 floors, across to another elevator that goes up exactly one more floor, and we are met by a most pleasant, smiling head waiter who ushers us down a long hallway to the banquet room where some folks were running out of stuff to talk about. They should have just made some billion-dollar deals while they were waiting. Probably just didn't think of it. When I saw the place, I knew where most of that money went that we sent to Kriss. Wasn't to pay the judge, I'm sure....
Oh, but before we got there, there were two cars that arrived together. Even after telling the squawk box that there were two cars, the garage door came down KLUNK right on the second car. It only stays open long enough for one car. I don't think it did much damage, but it was probably stressful for a couple of minutes. I'll bet that the restaurant caters to a lot of people who arrive in limousines, and the drivers know how all of this stuff works. You sure don't want to keep people out of restaurants, so I would imagine that the drivers run interference for the bigwigs.
So we had a lovely dinner, as documented in the photos, and afterwards most of us proceeded to Laura's house which she found easily, and so did the groom since he grew up there. (I keep calling him "the groom" because he's also a Jonathan, and we now have Jon and Dr. Jon in the family, but "Dr." sounds so formal. He works for a homeless clinic organization in Boston. His father's name was Richard, and his brother's name is Benjamin same as Kathy's father.) Anyway, we finally got into that cake and then the bride and groom had to leave to go back downtown for a dinner cruise on the lake and get checked into their ($$$) downtown hotel. Well, they'll only get married once. If I know Kriss at all, she will stick to Jon forever like glue.
Photos here, about a meg of files.
Got back home late Saturday evening, went through all 519 photos, turning the sideways ones right-side-up, and burned a DVD with the whole schmear on it. Now we have to mail the photos and some other items to about 3 different people. That doesn't even include the 116 photos I downloaded via FTP for 4 hours on DSL from Jon (Barnhart -- see how it goes? We may start calling them JonB and JonR for short.) And Laura, Jon's mom, is a real sweetie. Does some kind of bioscience/engineering stuff downtown. We're going to "do" lunch some Saturday when we're both in the state and not doing a "gig", then we can talk about more personal stuff. Up to now it's been all Kriss and Jon's house, Kriss and Jon's wedding, and so on, quite appropriately and we're all interested in Kriss and Jon of course, she being our favorite (and only) daughter. But I am told that life goes on even after the kids are married.
Sunday was pretty busy with a long choir practice in the afternoon and a presentation by Jay Hocking (the photographer) on their upcoming trip to France to take over for some folks coming back to the States. They will be running The Chateau Somethingorother that serves as an educational and convention center for several church groups. Afterwards, we had Bruce and Christy Barlow over so they could sample the wedding cake leftovers.
Monday we crashed. Fortunately, we recovered because on Tuesday Kathy got a phone call at work, could we pick up the "trimmings" from sawing up some logs -- cherry, oak, black walnut -- that needed to be disposed of, ASAP. So about 2:30 Kathy got off work, we borrowed the usual pickup, and went over and got 3 loads. There isn't much usable lumber, of course, but maybe enough for a cutting board and a picture frame. Whacked up the rest with the chain saw and now we have about 2 cords (total) of stuff randomly piled in the yard. It all needs splitting and stacking. Oh, and Jay Hocking (the photographer, again!) cut down a huge maple tree in his yard, and we have well over a cord of wood from that in the woodpile and maybe another half cord still in the form of a 3-foot-thick trunk which I'm sawing on every day a little bit. Probably only about 4 feet of it left in one chunk as I write and another 3 feet of it in large chunks over there. Weather is still cool enough to have a fire every second or third day, and we find that this tree burns well in spite of being green. Should do really well next winter.
We had a gig at the Caffe Villagio this past weekend, I'm arranging some more music, and don't y'all worry about us getting bored or anything. My new arrangement of Stormy Weather is what Kathy calls B(ew)itchin' Cool. Hope folks like it. Sunday evening some friends invited us along to a Mexican restaurant where they had a mariachi band and we had dinner and stayed about 3 hours and they were still going pretty strong. We had a great time talking and Kathy requested Malaguena and someone else requested La Cucaracha (The Cockroach). But y'know, our 2-hour gigs are about all us old folks can handle at one sitting even reinforced by a raspberry mocha latte. Those Mexican guys have more energy than we do. Of course, people were giving them $5.00 tips for requests, so they might still be going for all I know. These same friends had come to hear us at the Villagio on Friday night. He needs some distraction because he's worried about upcoming cataract surgery and tends to fret a lot, so I think she's taking care of keeping his mind occupied. "Old" couples our age need to take care of each other.
We're going to have a more or less regular schedule for the next few months: last weekend of each month (Fri-Sat, 7-9) at the Caffe Villagio, and one other Saturday each month at Grace Village retirement home.
Had an electrician friend come over Saturday and put a new light/heat/vent unit in the main hallway ("guest") bathroom. Well, the old stuff was all separate units. The hole in the ceiling for the light is now filled with the new unit, but there are holes in the wall from (1) the old vent (2) its switch, (3) the old heater, (4) its old thermostat. A couple of them are like 12 x 18 inches, a little hard to spackle in.
He had just started working in there, had the heater out of the wall and we heard a POP! and he hollered, "I'm OK!" His jim-dandy little circuit tester had lied to him. Well, it blew the breaker so we knew what he should have turned off. Then we figured out that there was one kind of wire going to the heater and another coming from the breaker box. Hm. Must be spliced. So he gave a yank on the wire and sure enough it came right out with a wire nut dangling from the end. Obviously the heater was a replacement for some sort of baseboard unit. We know the guy that built the house and I'm sure he wouldn't have allowed an "illegal" junction like that one. Anyway, after some more small misadventures, he went up in the attic and I held the unit from below and we got it fastened in. Everything seems to work; it even has a night light (Christmas-tree bulb size, 4 watts). Very nice. Now I have to get some sheetrock and probably just cut out a big chunk of wall and replace it. Kathy wants the cupboards and the soffitt removed and already has wallpaper and a new medicine cabinet and light bar picked out.
Had to vacuum almost the whole house after this (and before playing at the Villagio) because of the big wads of insulation from the attic and resulting dust all over the place. But the bathroom is now functioning again even though it isn't pretty. Yet.
Well, I have a conference June 1-4, we'll be out West from June 9-14, and in North Dakota around July 8-10, and then I'll be sort of "recruiting" at Brethren National Youth Conference in Ohio at the end of July, so y'all be sure to let us know if you want to stop by, make sure we'll be in the state.
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