Family Matters . . .

It was a big family weekend in these parts.  It started a week ago Sunday, when my mom’s sister Nancy showed up at Mom & Dad’s place.  Dad and I were playing Cribbage after church, and Nancy stopped by to offer us tickets to the Dayton Dragons’ game last Friday.  I didn’t say anything at the time, but my first thought was “we’ve come full circle”.  Mom, Dad, Blake and I went to the Dragons’ game (again courtesy of Nancy) for Mom’s birthday in August 2011 – three days before the first time she went to the doctor because of the lump on her neck.

The company Nancy works for had bought the Party Deck next to the “batter’s eye” in center field – good planning, since it rained all day and didn’t look promising when we arrived.  Always nice to have a roof overhead on a rainy night . . .

We got to spend part of the rain delay visiting with some of our extended family – that lovely lady in red is my grandpa’s youngest sister Sarah, still as active as always at 88.  One advantage of the Party Deck was tables and chairs – and someone in our family always has a deck of cards handy (this time, me).  So we passed the rest of the time playing Euchre until the game finally began about 90 minutes late.  That’s Nancy dealing the cards.

And Sunday, of course, was Mother’s Day – we can always use a good excuse for brownies and homemade ice cream.  It also gave the rest of the family a chance to watch the new condo video that Ryan shot on his cell phone during the inspection a couple of weeks ago.

Mom loves nothing more than being surrounded by her grandchildren, so we often take pictures of them together.  This year, there were two additions to the picture – Ryan’s fiancee Emily and my nephew Conner’s soon-to-be-fiancee Gina (they are ring shopping and he has already asked her parents for her hand).

It was a perfect evening – until I blew a tire on the way home.  More like blew a fist-sized hole in a tire – I must have hit something.  Thankfully I was within a few hundred yards of a local convenience store owned by friends, so I pulled off and fumbled through the manual to figure out where my spare and jack were (I haven’t had to change a tire in nearly 20 years).  Changed the tire (the spare is one of those little bitty things) and headed home – and Monday discovered that truck tires are much more expensive than passenger car tires.  Mine were the originals and after 65,000 miles had worn so well that I expected to get another year or two out of them – silly me.  About $900 later, I was back on the road again Monday evening.