| 3-26-06
Hello All, Well where to begin. We have been busy, busy. Adam has been busy with his music. He is involved with the youth group at church and he plays music on Sunday mornings. The youth group is on Thursday evening. Even though Adam�s basketball season is over, he still practices whenever he can. At school he�s maintaining 4.0 gpa and he�s been researching colleges in the area. Jonathan has been one busy guy also! After his regular basketball season ended in December we started up with the local Amity Basketball Association season. I coached his team along with longtime friend and fellow coach Penny Hinchmann. We played for six straight Saturdays in a row. The boys learned a bunch, the coaches learned a bunch and we had a blast! What a great bunch of boys. We went head to head with two of the best teams in our area and overall we came out on top. After the season was over the boys heard about a weekend tournament in Mill City, which is about 50 miles away. Everyone wanted to play, so back to practice we went. We played that tournament last weekend and at long last the basketball season is over! Jon finished on Sunday with basketball and on Monday his track season began. This weekend here in town is the world famous Amity Daffodil Festival (seriously it gets quite a large turnout). One of the events that goes with the festival is the Daffodilly Hilly, which is a 5k and 8k run. Jon decided he wanted to run. So yesterday morning Jon lines up with about a hundred other runners. It was obvious that many of these runners are very serious about this! They have all the fancy stretchy shirt thingies and shorts that match, Nike shoes, warm-up pants. Well here is Jon with his t-shirt and his $20 tennies that were on sale at big-5 last week. About half of the participants were running the longer 8k, Jon decided the 5k would be good for his first time since he has never run a race longer than a 1500 meter. The race started in the street in front of the High School, Adam and I watched the start and we mosied back over to the track where the race would end. In about 16 minutes the first runner entered the stadium for the final leg of the race, obviously a seasoned runner he was making good time. As the winner circled the track and came across the finish line another runner entered the stadium and then in a few seconds Jon comes into view! Several bystanders including the High School track coach took notice that a Middle Schooler (Jon is 14 and in 8th grade) was running with the big boys. Another racer entered the stadium right behind Jon, so this made 3 runners on the track heading for home with Jon in the middle. One bystander commented, �The old guy is going to pass Jon�. Well I have had the advantage of several years of watching Jon run and although I have never seen him run this long of a race, I know he always saves something for the end. I looked over and said, �No, Jon�s going to pass that guy in front of him�. Almost on cue, on the last turn, Jon turned on the after burners and blew past the guy in front. Neither the �old guy� behind him, nor the guy he passed even tried to keep up. Down the straight Jon finished his first 5k with a second place finish in a time of 18 minutes 11 seconds, not too bad. After the race, Jon stuck around to collect prizes and I took Adam over to the Elementary School, (the main event for the festival is there) where he was volunteering his time to help out in the kitchen. All around town were friends and neighbors, volunteering and participating in different events for the festival. Cody is doing well in school, although he has been sick off and on all winter it seems and has missed a lot of school. When he is at home sick he works on lessons and is an avid reader. He goes through books as fast as Lorelei can get them from the library. He is also quite the artist! Lorelei has been a little blue; she lost a friend and a member of our church in a terrible car accident last week. She is still watching 2 little ones, Tuesday thru Thursday that leaves Monday and Friday for shopping or substitute teaching. With Jon�s track season upon us, we are not sure how we are going to handle taking the little ones to the track meets! Other news around the homestead, we have been looking far and wide for some more furniture for the house. We have purchased several solid wood cabinets of various configurations for the bathrooms and pantry storage for the kitchen. We are still on the hunt for a china hutch, Hoosier, country kitchen, sideboard something, that we can afford. We have spent many hours and driven many miles searching the past two months. The search is about over, because I am so behind in other stuff. Car maintenance, truck and boat maintenance and of course everything is beginning to bloom and grow. In animal news, the dogs are doing well, although I am still amazed that Buddy our golden retriever is still with us. He is quite old and can�t have much time left. The chickens are giving us plenty of eggs and we purchased six baby chicks and they are in the brooder growing bigger by the day. I hope to have enough eggs later in the year to sell some and at least pay for the chicken feed. We will see how that works out. All in all it�s been a good winter. We had some wet cold weather. On Jan. 1st we awoke to no power. We had a fun day, playing games as a family. When the power came back on in the evening, we were actually a little disappointed. We are well equipped to handle short power outages. We bring in the camp stove and propane heater to handle warming the house and cooking. We have enough water in the lines, if we conserve we have plenty for drinking and cooking. Lights are taken care of with kerosene lamps. We had a snowstorm in March, which was a surprise! It has been a wet winter and we are ready for some sun! It�s been in the 30�s at night and 50-60 degrees during the day for the last week or so. That�s about it for now. Glynn Jr. |