Gone Walkabout

Firstly, we had an excellent weekend in Fort Wayne. Buca was delicious. The Johnny Appleseed Festival was awesome, as always. Church at Redeemer was church at Redeemer, and therefore difficult to beat, this side of Heaven. Even if Pr. Petersen was AWOL. I got hugs from some of my very favorite people (besides my family, I would have to count Jacqui, Lori, Nancy, and the Reunings in that extremely exclusive group).

Our drive home was uneventful and we made pretty good time, despite missing an exit and ending up driving along Hwy 14 through Palatine and Barrington. I only cried sporadically...the whole way home.

It rained all night and into the morning hours, but it stopped just in time for me to make my walk to the bus stop. The rest of the day only got more beautiful by the hour. When I got to work, I discovered that Prita spent the weekend sick with whatever nasty cold I had last week. She seemed to be on the mend, though, with no runny nose and very little congestion. She and I took a long walk late in the morning, just after the sun finally broke through the clouds. I'm seriously considering writing to Google to request that their maps have some way to indicate on which routes you will be forced to push a stroller uphill. I was so warm by the time we got back to the apartment (despite it only being in the 60s, at that point), that Granny was a little alarmed and made me drink some water. She really is a nice old lady.

On toward Prita's 2:00 naptime, I was trying to wear her out by having her ride her tricycle up and down the apartment hallways. As we were heading back toward their unit, Prita started crying out for her mom and, when I turned around, there she was. She hadn't been feeling well all day and finally decided to give up and come home. I felt bad for her, facing the prospect of putting her daughter down for a nap AND stressing out over missing work AND nursing a headache and a cold. But anyway, I got to leave 4 hours early.

Practically skipping with glee, I got outside and pulled out my phone to determine what time the bus would be coming by. Turns out, the buses run much less frequently during the day and the next one was not scheduled to be along for another hour and ten minutes. Rather than go sit somewhere and wait an hour, I started walking along the bus route, keeping track of the stops and planning to stop just in time for the bus to catch up with me further down the line. Originally, I figured I'd just walk a few streets down, until I found a stop with a likely looking bench where I could sit and read. No. Instead, I ended up walking over half the length of the route between work and our apartment. When I got home, I figured I had walked just a touch under four miles. But it was a perfectly beautiful day, and I was full of energy and wearing really comfy shoes, so I didn't even notice.

Evan and I made good use of our unexpectedly free afternoon. We headed over to the DMV (which was, incidentally, on the route I took home) and Evan got his license renewed, while I replaced my IN license with a WI license. That felt oddly final and I'm afraid I pouted a little when I figured out that they weren't going to let me have my old license back. After the DMV, we did our second ever Big Grocery Trip, this time checking out Woodmans. Which was huge and overwhelming and delightfully cheap.