A Slight Breather

Happy New Year! Christmas break is coming to a close. Classes resume at Davidson Academy tomorrow, and on Tuesday Jenna will move back to her apartment at Trevecca. This break has flown by.

SETTLING IN
Mom seems to be settling in to her room at Morningside well. I think she's even been able to get out and enjoy some exercise in the hallways that she could not do as easily at home. She seems happy whenever we visit or call. We still need to hang a picture or two, but for the most part her room has the touches of home.

On the other side of that coin for us is cleaning out the house so we can prep it to rent. That's the hard part for me because for the first time in my life my childhood home is not looking like my childhood home anymore. This hits me in unexpected ways. The other day I cancelled Mom's phone service at the house since there is no point in paying two phone bills. When I hung up from AT&T it struck me that I'd never call that phone number again. Of course, I'll never get strange looks like I used get when giving out that number because it contained "666."

BASKETBALL
We normally visit the Jones family the week after Christmas, and in doing so, Ben has missed out on local winter tournaments with the DA basketball team. This year the team participated in the Hilton Sandestin Beach Blowout at Freeport High School in Florida so we decided to work that into our schedule. We left for Florida the day after Christmas and returned home on New Years Day.

This was a double elimination tournament with public and private high school teams from several states participating. Our boys played well, but we didn't get as far in the tournament as we would have liked. We won the first game, but lost the next two. We had reserved six nights in a condo by the beach so we took full advantage of our time away.

Now that we're back home we've already played and won two regular season games and are looking forward to nine more games before the post season begins in February.

OTHER FLORIDA FUN
The only bad part about our trip to Florida was the weather. We expected it to be too cold to enjoy getting in the water at the beach, but it rained a lot and we hardly saw the sun the whole time we were there. Still, there were several days where we could find a little time between rain showers and walk in the sand with our toes in the water.

What really made the trip fun was time with family. Of course, we took some games and streamed some movies in on TV, but that was highlighted when Jim, Dianna, and their boys drove up from Orlando. They arrived last Friday and returned home on Sunday. Unfortunately they saw the two games that DA lost, but they did get to see Ben play. While they were there we hit a couple of restaurants and enjoyed just visiting. It was too wet to do any beach time together, but we were content to play games and talk.

Another fun visit we had was Sunday when we were invited to lunch at another cousin's house, Joe and Karin. I've not mentioned Joe and his brother, Bill, much here because we don't visit as adults like we did as kids. They lived in Kokomo, Indiana, when we were growing up and we got to see each other a lot back then. Joe now lives near Destin and we had a good time eating hamburgers and spending the afternoon with he and Karin.

We also went to see Mary Poppins Returns while we were away. It is well done, a worthy sequel to the first movie. As much as I enjoyed the movie, I think the very best part for me was seeing the now 93 year old Dick Van Dyke make an appearance. We also saw Bohemian Rhapsody and now the kids are constantly singing or playing Queen songs.

The only bad part of our trip was that Nate sat down in the recliner with his phone in his pocket at the condo. He was not aware that the phone had slipped out of his pocket and fallen between the seat and arm rest to the interior of the recliner when he decided to lean back in the chair. This crushed and bent his phone. At least our phone plan includes insurance. We filed a claim and he's now up and running with a replacement and small deductible.

So that's what's been going on with us as we close our 2018 and get ready to dive into the new year.

Joe