Our first visit to see John @ IU

John is alive and well at IU. We went down last Sunday to see him. We brought down some supplies for him and went to a Turkish resturant for lunch. John also showed us the art museum at IU which looked very good and only the first floor was open that day. We'll be back to see more later.

On first arival we all checked out John's room.




Here is the turkish resturant we had lunch at.




John & Jenny meeting Mr. Wells


A few sights from the art museum.




Big as it is, the IU campus has lots of trees and green space. It's very inviting to squirrels.


And yes, John showed us around the music school.
Here is the music library.

And a little light reading in the library.

This round building is the music practice building. It's full of individual practice rooms and studios for the professors.


And for those who have test & quizes coming up, a praying mantas is nearby to assist.


John took us to a lounge in Read Hall and played for us a quiz he was working on for piano class.


John The Entertainer

John practicing for his quiz in piano class.



Jenny liked the IU campus a lot and made herself at home.
Here she is talking to Jody on the phone.


It was very good to see John again.

The Girls Sing @ Saturday Mass

Jenny & Jody sang at the Saturday night Mass.


Jenny & Jody Singing @ Mass 9/16/06

Dog Walk

This morning we walked with fellow "dog people", (people who love dogs and have taken a class with Judy) at the reservoir. It was very foggy and I'm amazed at some of the pictures Bob was able to get. Remember, you can "click" on a picture to make it bigger to view.

Joey & Hank


Kip



Milk Weed (a good one to click on to enlarge)


Look at how much life is here!



The group



Here I'm greeting Joey with open arms.


Boomer and Kip play bowing.


Towards the end of the walk we met another dog named Ralph. He's a labordoodle! The dogs were so excited to add a new dog to the pack and everyone wanted to run & swim with him.








Bear


The following is the last mad dash the dogs did before we leashed them up to take them to the parking lot. Bob squatted down to take this sequence which was a brave move as the dogs were bearing straight down on him. It was unnerving enough for me that I stood behind him so it the dogs hit us, Bob would be my protector.











At home both Joey & Boomer got baths and are now snoozing in the screened in porch, no doubt dreaming about their fun morning at the reservoir.

Not your typical Fort Wayne sunrise

On Monday morning I had dropped Jenny off at school and was driving back home going east down St. Joe Center and saw the neatest sunrise I have ever seen in Fort Wayne. The sun was already up, but it was a cloudy day except where the sun had poked through. I got on the phone and called Bob who was still at home and told him to grab the camera and run outside and see if he could take a picture of it. Within about 3-4 minutes the sun was completely covered up with clouds again, but here is a picture Bob got on the fly.

BD Homecoming

Jenny and her good friend Bree came over to the house yesterday to prepare for the football game.

Here's a look at the back of the spirit shirt.


Here's the front side of the girls.




Jenny


Bree

The Paper Chase

It has been said we are moving towards a "paper-less" society, but that's hard to fanthom at our house. The last week I've embarked on an ambious project of sorting through old boxes of reciepts, statements, & tax returns trying to reduce the paper load at the house. So far I've gotten our tax returns gathered together, and many of our old statments, but have a huge amount of shredding to do before I can return the new lighten load of paper to storage.
Here is the paper invasion at the house:










And we must take time to celebrate our small victories. Here is a cleaned off kitchen table!

Pirate

This is homecoming week at Bishop Dwenger and the theme is Pirates of the Caribbean. So the school uniform goes out the window this week and the kids dress as pirates. Here is Jenny's version.


I've been impressed how well Jenny is able to get herself up in the morning this year for school. She even has time for a sit down breakfast!

An unwanted kind of adventurous day

Tuesday turned out to be more of an adventure than I had planned. The Toyota Camery had developed an oil leak so I took it to the shop to have them look at it. They couldn't see where the leak was coming from so they sprayed degreaser on the underside of the car, put in some dye, and asked me to drive it for a few days and then come back and they'd use a black light to see where the leak was coming from. As I was driving home from the shop, the car stalled out on St. Joe Center road, right before the intersection with Reed Rd. The first thing I did was to put on the four way flashers and get out of the car to get on the side of the road. I called the shop and asked them to send a tow truck out, and called Becky who was in town to head my way to help. While awaiting the tow truck I stood at the edge of the road waving at all the approaching cars to let them know they needed to go around the Camery. All was going well until an older lady came and drove right passed me and into the rear of the car. Luckily she was driving slow and probably hit it about at 15 mph. I couldn't believe she didn't see me and my waving. Well she finally admitted she had saw me, but thought I was out thumbing a ride and didn't pay attention to me, and didn't notice the car had it's flashers on and was stopped. Luckily the Camery can take a hit because the only damage is some scuff marks on the rubber bumper. Her car's bumper did well but the front grill got smashed in. So after the police report was done and the tow truck took it away, Becky and I headed for home. The shop called later in the afternoon and said they had gotten the degreaser spray on the cap and the sparkplugs weren't able to connect their spark to the right place (hope I'm not getting too technical for you). They fixed it at no charge. When I was driving Jenny home from choir last night we happened to get a red light at the same intersection of St. Joe Ctr & Reed Rd, there was a car behind me, but the next thing we heard was a loud screeching sound I looked in my mirror and a pickup truck wasn't paying attention until the last moment and had to slam on his breaks and swerve to the side to avoid hitting the car behind me. I had had enough and when the light turned green I tapped my heals together three times and said "there's no place like home" 3 times, hurried home, shut the garaged door and locked all the doors in the house and stayed safely tucked in my bed until this morning. I got the car back in the shop today for them to figure out the oil leak. And they gave me an unadventerous trip home.

I took a few pictures with the cell phone.

Trip to Missouri

On Saturday we drove out to see Annette in Independence, MO. We were a little ahead of schedule so we took a 15 mile side trip to Hermann where they have 8 different wineries in the area.

A picturesque view of Hermann from Stonehill Winery


The first one we drove to was Stonehill Winery, but the crowd was so large there, we decided to drive on to the next one, which was Adam Puchta Winery. It was a nice winery to visit, a lot of people were having picnics on the grounds and they offered you as many tastes as you wanted. The dry wines weren't up to our standards and the sweet wines were interesting, but we decided not to buy any.

The vines sure looked healthy and were loaded with grapes


This place had very nice picnic grounds and room for two more at the bar.


Bob's going in to belly up to the bar.


We then drove the rest of the way to Independence and met Annette, Carol & Jerry at the Salty Iguna restaurant.



There were some interesting paintings inside the resturant.




And some interesting characters.





After dinner we all went to our hotel room to visit some more, although Carol & Jerry needed to leave soon as they are bottle feeding one of their calves.

After breakfast Sunday morning we headed for home. It was our intentions to stop and hike the bluffs near St. Louis, but the weather was iffy with off and on rain and I also had a sinus headache, so we decided to drive straight home. The boys greeted us like royalty when we got there at 9 p.m.

Winner!

I won an electric guitar from Woodwind & Brasswind. They had a contest going the weekend we got John his soprano saxophone.