off to buy a cow, maybe some chickens

With the fam in town (or at least my folks and MawMaw), we’ve decided to head out to the Amish country to do some sightseeing and raise our cultural awareness.  We’re all headed out to Belleville tomorrow, where we’ll drop by the Amish Auction Barn, stop at the mercantile, and sample some of the home cookin’.

Tonight was kind of low-key around the house.  My mom brought another family geneology, so we sat around reading through the family history, back to the 1800’s.  It was pretty fun!  Kim’s a big fan of old-school names–our kids are Levi, Lilly, and Sadie–so she was on the lookout for names for the new baby boy.  There were lots of interesting ones, that’s for sure.  If I was listening well, I believe that my grandmother’s great-great grandfather was a dude named Meredith.  What’s up with giving a guy a girl’s name?  Wait just a second…oh well, at least I have a family precedent, and I don’t stand alone in the family history.

I also got a little Christmas present today.  A few weeks back I pulled out my Parker 51 (PawPaw’s pen) to do some writing, and the whole thing was snapped in two.  Fortunately, the ink didn’t leak into my bag.  There’s a world-class pen restorer (Bruce Martin, Parson’s Pens) in our neck of the woods, and he was able to fix the broken instrument, and swapped out the nib for a finer point, to boot.  So I journaled with PawPaw’s Parker 51 today.

And a good time was had by all…