there he goes again

 Liam is all moved into his apartment and off to the races for his second year at Purdue!

We were all planning to move him down together, but I had some stomach troubles at the last minute, so it ended up being a boys-only trip. They were kind enough to send pictures, though.

Liam also ended up running into his friend Logan, who goes to Purdue Fort Wayne. Their friends group has this long-running game of tag with complicated rules, and Logan drove to campus specifically to tag Liam. Liam, you're IT!

I also asked for and received a first day of school picture. Doesn't he look like the most enthusiastic college student you've ever seen?

Here's to another great year at school for our Boilermaker!

first day of school!

 My, how far we've come! Fully back around to the first day of school again. It truly does seem like yesterday when Max started kindergarten, and now here we are at the beginning of his senior year of high school. And let's not even get into baby bro Henry starting 8th grade. Time: What even is it?

Max must have been excited to go back to school, because he was awake as soon as Liam's alarm went off at 4 this morning (early shift at the factory is rough!), so he got up and talked to Liam until it was time for Liam to leave for work. I left for the pool around 5:40, and Max's light was on but Henry's was not, but by the time I got home at 7, both of them were up and dressed and ready to go. Before they took off, though, they were kind enough to indulge me in taking some pictures. (Where kind enough = I had the car keys in my pocket, so good luck leaving before I was satisfied, boys!)

P.S. Don't Mike's sunflowers look great? So cheerful, even on a foggy morning.

UPDATE: Upon returning home, Max reported that calculus 2 is "easily the greatest class of all time." Henry says he had an "overall decent" day, and that he's looking forward to STEM class. Oh, and that he's going to the dance on Friday. "Obviously."

the end of summer

I realize it's not the end of actual summer, but it is the end of summer break around here. Max and Henry start school on Wednesday, and Liam starts in two weeks. We wanted to take the boys to see Barb and Kevin one last time before all the school schedules kick in, and the planets aligned so that we could all five go on Saturday afternoon. Johnny and Erin and the kids were free too, so we had a fun little chaotic visit. Mike drove us both ways in some pretty strong rain, but we were glad we could go. 

just a typical conversation

 Max: Are you ready to retire?

Holli: Yes, but I have no retirement money, so that's a never event.

Henry: When these two bozos finish college, you'll be able to save plenty of money.

Max: What about you, bro?

Henry: I'm going to trade school. I'm going to become an elevator mechanic, obviously —

Max: Obviously.

Henry: And make my millions in New York City. Then I'm going to move to rural Pennsylvania and open a Ford dealership. I've got it all figured out.

Max: Obviously.

Where does he come up with this stuff??

reaction shot

jeffirspalooza 2023

If you know one thing about me, it's probably that I love Legos/Fiesta/blow molds. But if you know two things about me, the second thing just might be that as much as I love those things, I absolutely hate group photos and matching T-shirts. And those two components feature prominently in my family's annual summer party. If I'm honest, the matching shirts and mandatory group photo really make me consider staying home every year. But then I go, and I have fun, because catching up with all these people and hearing what everyone's been up to is really great. Maybe even worth the photo. (No, sorry, it's never worth the photo.)

This year, Mike and Henry opted to stay home (and I'm fully OUT of the business of making people go places they don't want to go — that path only leads to sadness), so it was just me, Liam, and Max representing the Fort contingent. And when I tell you that my boys represented, believe me!

The big draw for the boys was the tournament. Pairs are drawn at random, then they compete in a series of events (this year's events included finger football, cup stacking, and beer pong). At the end, the team with the most points wins the coveted ugly ceramic pig trophies. And this year's winners were Max and Kelsey! I'm so proud that the green pig is coming back home where he belongs. 

Liam and Max also entered a separate tournament for the video game Super Smash Bros. The older cousins thought they could pull a fast one by using a very old version of the game (that is, from when they were playing most, as opposed to the modern version my boys are most familiar with) to give themselves an advantage. I warned them not to underestimate Liam and Max, but they did ... to their peril. The Fort boys dominated and brought home a Mario-themed prize basket.

Anyway, it was a smaller crowd than usual, which is fine with me. I had the chance to talk to a bunch of different people, including Aunt Rita, who always tops my favorite people list. The food was delicious, and a good time was had by all.

i ride

During the week, I'm basically stuck riding on the very few roads near us that are still paved. It's boring but also not. Boring because I see the same things every day: corn, more corn, sky, that weird little graveyard in the middle of a cornfield, the geodesic dome house that marks my turnaround point most days. But also not boring because there's something really beautiful about the corn growing higher and higher, and the sky almost always shows me something interesting. And sometimes I race alongside rabbits or see deer — but let's not mention that pit bull who took against me riding on "his" road and got close enough to touch his snout to my shoe. I could do without experiencing that again.

But on the weekends it's different. I load up my bike in the van (which is super awkward but needs must) and head out for a trail. All the rails-to-trails trails (decommissioned train tracks that have been converted to bike/walking/running trails) are at least 30 minutes from home, so the weekends are when I have enough time to make those kinds of trips. This summer, I've ridden on the Nickel Plate Trail (near Rochester), the Pumpkinvine Trail (near Middlebury), the Prairie Duneland Trail (Indiana Dunes/Chesterton), and the Erie-Lackawanna Trail (Crown Point). Each one is neat in its own way. The Pumpkinvine is right in the middle of Amish country, so there are a ton of families out getting from point A to point B. The Prairie Duneland is absolutely gorgeous, with tree canopies and tunnels and bridges. And the Erie-Lackawanna, which I rode 20 miles on last weekend, is bordered by wildflowers and has a whole nature preserve connected to it. 

Most weekends I've been riding by myself, but when I'm lucky enough, Mike or the boys will join me. Either way, it's peaceful. I usually ride early in the morning before it gets too hot, and that's when all the deer and birds are most active anyway. As rediscovered hobbies go, this one's pretty great.

liam at nineteen

 

Yesterday, Liam made a mistake. It could have been a mistake with major consequences, so he was understandably upset and worked up. But he did what he needed to do to mitigate the damage, and it turned out fine in the end. It was a nice opportunity for him to remember what I think is one of the prime rules of being a good person: Everyone fucks up, and that's OK. It's what you do AFTERWARD that matters. Do you blame someone else, wallow in self-pity, or do something else destructive? Or do you take responsibility, own what you did, and set about making it right (or as right as you can)? And I am so proud of him because he consistently does the latter. 

This has been an incredible year of transition for our Liam. He's spent a full school year away at school, and now he's made the shift back home for the summer (which I remember being not so easy to do!), and soon he'll be moving into his off-campus apartment and starting his second year at Purdue. He is spending his summer working in a factory, by which I mostly mean getting an appreciation for how hard it is to work in a factory and how thankful he is that his education will be his ticket to a life spent away from the factory floor. He often sends me snapchats during the day, rating his job on a sliding scale from "this job sucks" to "this job ain't too shabby" and giving me little updates on how it's going. They never fail to make me laugh, even when I'm apologizing for not having been born into generational wealth that I can pass along to him to make his life easier.

At school, Liam has gotten way more involved in campus life than I ever was, and I'm proud of that too. He joined the Orbital Club last year, and this year he'll be a design lead for the group, which aims to build and launch a rocket. He joined the freshman honor society, and he's looking for other things that catch his interest. And he's balancing all that with challenging course loads of advanced math and engineering classes. In short, he's in his element.

He remains loyal to his lifelong group of friends, and they've gotten together regularly this summer to play D&D, have Nerf wars, and just generally goof around. He is also perfectly happy to sit around at home shooting the shit with his brothers for hours on end, all of them insulting each other, taunting each other, laughing together, and loving every minute of it. It makes my heart so happy that these fellas genuinely like each other. They are each fiercely supportive of their brothers, even if they give each other grief at every single turn.

Our Liam is fully an adult now, and he doesn't HAVE to come to us for anything. The fact that he still does tells me we've done something right with him. I can only hope that will always be the case.

Happiest of days, my boy. We love you so much, and we're so excited to be along for your ride.

a fun week

Friends, I'm finally getting back into a good groove.

After being closed for six agonizing months, the pool at my gym is finally back open, so I've been going most mornings and catching up with my dear friend Connie while we walk and exercise in the water. I've been riding my gorgeous bike, and that makes me really happy, even though there are only like three roads I can ride on because all of the paved roads around here have been replaced with gravel, and I'm not risking my neck on that. The boys are happy(ish) with their jobs and summer routines, and Mike is in his element getting the garden in and filling in the remaining spots in our never-ending front garden project.

In short, life's been pretty good.

On Tuesday, my sister Bethany, our mom, and I got to meet Great-Aunt Rita for dinner in Valparaiso, which was so nice. Aunt Rita is one of my favorite people in the world, and I love it when I have the chance to hang out with her. (I also am QUITE fond of Marlene and Bethany, for the record.) Plus, the food was amazing. I ordered the special fajitas, and it took me the entire rest of the week to finish them! The fajitas are beef, lobster tail, and bacon-wrapped shrimp. Seriously decadent.

And this weekend, for Father's Day, we had a cookout at Bethany's house, and the kids (minus Max, who got called into work ... again) got to splash around in the pool and be idolized by their younger cousins Jack, Elsie, John, and Bevie. They can claim irritation at spending time with littles all they want, but I know the truth, and that truth is that they love the littles as much as I do. (Have I mentioned that Henry is spending every Thursday this summer at my mom's house to help her watch Jack and Elsie? Come on.)

Today is actual Father's Day, and we've just been hanging out at home. Mike bought a massive beef brisket at the grocery store yesterday, and now he's experimenting with the wonders of smoking meat on the grill using wood chips. I could have worked today (I have plenty to do!), but instead I took today to organize my office, finalize vacation plans for the next few months, and just generally catch up on things I let slide when I'm deep into work mode. It has felt really good to get some of these things crossed off my list!

Update: Mike just brought the brisket in because it reached the right temperature, even though he thought it would take another hour or two before it would be done. It still has to rest for like an hour, but as he brought it in, he yelled across the house, "Oh my god, Holli, it smells so fucking good. I don't care if it's cooked or not!" I can smell it all the way in my office, and I can verify that it smells AMAZING. I can't wait to try it!  

happy 85 to kevin!

 Hot on the heels of Barb's 80th birthday, we have Kevin's 85th! Mike, Liam, Henry, and I headed to Naperville to mark the occasion with Johnny and Erin and the kids (Max had to work, so he missed out). It was a quick but fun visit, and really nice for everyone to catch up together after a pretty hectic spring. We had a perfect casual lunch and enjoyed some cake, and Kevin enjoyed having us all there to wish him the very best day.

voyageurs national park

Have you ever done something that sounded so cool in theory, then ended up being totally not what you expected, and you would never voluntarily do that thing again but you're still glad you did it in the first place?

Yeah.

Way back at the beginning of the year, when I was stuck in the absolute purgatory known as recovery from foot surgery, I did the thing I do every time I have a bad day (or a good day, or really any kind of day in between): I started planning an imaginary vacation. And since Voyageurs is the closest national park that we hadn't visited yet, I started looking there. And then I made shocking discovery, which I texted to Mike in all caps:

Holli: Mike.

Holli: MICHAEL.

(Mike was in a truck at work, and he saw me all caps his name, and he turned to his coworker and said, "Oh shit. I must be in trouble but I have no idea why.")

Holli: It has come to my attention that you can rent a HOUSEBOAT in Voyageurs National Park and spend days tooling around on the absolutely massive lakes there. [link to the houseboat place]

So at their next break, Mike looked at the link I sent him, and then he shared it with his coworkers, and then they all got very excited and in an uncharacteristic fit of spontaneous decisioning, Mike texted me to BOOK THAT HOUSEBOAT for Memorial weekend. And not being a fool, I hit book with a quickness before he could change his mind.

And now we're back home after three nights on a houseboat on Rainy Lake, having seen lots and lots of the watery parts of Voyageurs but very little of the land (to be fair, Voyageurs is 218,055 acres, and 84,000 of those acres are water; there are 500ish islands, most of which are teeny-tiny so do they even count as land?). And we have learned a few things: 

1. We stink at fishing (final score Mike + Hols 0, fish infinity). It's fun tho. There's a possibility that using poles and lures that are literally older than we are contributed to this, but all the other people we came across had no luck either, so maybe it wasn't just our failure.

2. There is no amount of bug spray and no set of screens secure enough to ward off the black flies and mosquitoes of northern Minnesota. I wear shoes literally every waking hour (I have to since I had surgery, ugh I hate it) and we wrapped up in several layers of blankets during the cold nights, and STILL I have bites between my toes. And everywhere else.

3. Driving around on a boat is great, but spending every single hour on one is maybe not our thing. The houseboat spots are on the tiny islands, so no place to hike etc. There is a bike trail that I really wanted to ride, and we even schlepped our bikes all the freaking way up to the Canadian border in anticipation, but alas, there was just no way to make it work logistically, so the bikes had to stay in the car while we were out on the boat, and there wasn't time after we docked.

4. If you're going to try to run a cpap on a marine battery using an adapter, you might want to test it before you boat out to a spot, tie up your boat, eat dinner, and watch the sun go down late. Whoops.

5. Did I mention the bugs? Seriously, I need to invest in some of those electronic bug catcher things before we go anywhere else.

Overall, it was a really interesting experience. Mike learned how to drive a houseboat and navigate nautical maps and tie up at each spot for the night! I was an adequate copilot! Also I read five entire books because there wasn't much else to do. And that was actually really nice. We have so much to do each day that it feels like we never slow down and take a breath, so having three days to just hang out together, with nowhere to go and no responsibilities, was a real luxury. And listen, I'm not saying we would never go back to Voyageurs. I think we would! It's just that instead of staying on a houseboat, we would plan a land-based vacation and maybe rent a pontoon for a day to go tooling around like we did at Pictured Rocks. I think that would be an excellent vacation.

BONUS CONTENT: While we were gone, Henry put all that aggrieved youngest child energy to use by starting to call Liam and Max "lil bro." It makes them SO MAD. Or maybe I should say "Oh no, Lil Bro is PRESSED."

happy 80 to barb!

 To celebrate Barb's milestone birthday, we all got together in the private room at Angeli's, her favorite restaurant. Erin made the arrangements and even talked them into serving her favorite dish, which had been retired from the menu. Despite some technical difficulties getting the slide show to work (I have been scanning old family photos to make a digital archive for years now, and it was finally time to put them to use!) we had an absolutely lovely evening, filled with laughter and surprises.

Barb was thrilled to have Mike and Johnny and the grandkids there (and I guess me and Erin, haha), and her brother Ken and nephew Aaron flew in from Colorado for the occasion, which was a real treat for us all. Especially for Mike, who adores Uncle Ken and loves any chance to catch up with Aaron. Anyway, the wine flowed freely, the food was delicious, and the conversations were lively. I'm so glad we were able to do this for her.

Happiest of birthdays, Barb! Here's to many more celebrations!