There's an imaginative title. This past weekend, we kept pretty busy. On Saturday, we picked up the PJs and headed to Guthrie which is a town I've wanted to visit for quite awhile. It seemed a bit off its game – perhaps because it was a holiday weekend but I figured a tourist town might have all the stores open on the Saturday of a holiday weekend but not so. We passed several that were closed. Still, the little town is picturesque and the tour trolleys were operating so we got the driving tour with narration to tell us what we were looking at. I like that the town is a mix of restored buildings with museums in them and normal businesses.
The most interesting business is the Double Stop Fiddle Shop which does indeed sell fiddles but you'd be hard pressed to get anyone to help you buy one because of the bluegrass jam circle going on most of the time on the shop floor. It's a fun free concert though – and if you really like it you can go upstairs to the music hall in the evening and pay $10 for a more formal concert. But these guys were pretty good; apparently the shop owner and three others.
It ended up unfortunately hot but we're pretty much used to that by now so we had fun. We stopped at the Territorial Museum which is pretty much a museum for the Oklahoma land run. I chatted for some time with the single employee who was there that day; a recent history graduate who was working her dream job of sifting through old documents for clues to the past. She had to man the front door, the cash register, and the gift shop but since we were the only ones in the building, she managed just fine. In fact when I found her on the way out, she was back in the office area restoring an old spinning wheel.
We drove home and made it in time to watch the OSU game on TV until it got boring during the first quarter and then switched to watching the Arkansas game online. A coworker texted me that she had spotted Erin at the OSU game.
The next day (Sunday), Erin drove home and we then all drove on to Ft. Smith to spend the day with Evan. Cassie had driven down from Fayetteville and we all piled into the truck and drove down to Magazine Mountain State Park. The lodge there is beautiful and we had lunch in their restaurant and then walked outside along the ridge for awhile. We also went to the visitor's center whose best feature is the large room full of bay windows and rocking chairs that look out onto a large number of bird feeders and wildflowers. It was a good day.
Monday (Labor Day) found us finishing up Erin's laundry and prepping her to go back to school. That always involves a trip to Wal-Mart to stock up. She left early (as always) and we slowly got back to our lives. I guess it's time to start scraping another sector of ceiling popcorn.
Evan has collected several paychecks now and seems happy at his job. He seems to have made some acquaintances at work that he hangs out with regularly after work and so seems to not be bored. There are some nice bike trails near his apartment so he rides regularly. We finally bought him a graduation present: a GoPro camera so he's been busy with that along with his first large purchase of his career: a new laptop. He seems to be getting his adult life and career off to a good start.
As a parent, that's the answer to almost every hope and prayer we ever had for him. Only one remains: that he meet the right girl. That may be happening too; he has spent several weekends up in Fayetteville visiting Cassie and she has visited him a few times too.