Cheerfully

I was watching a TV show last night, when across my screen marched R. Lee Ermey, playing the role of an old farmer whose son accidentally poisoned people with a bad pesticide on their farm's fruit. Mr. Ermey is better known as "Gunny" from "Mail Call" off of the History Channel, or also the "Gunny" from the movie "Full Metal Jacket". I enjoyed being able to point at the screen and say "Hey, I met that guy a couple of times, and he used Chuck's camper's bathroom, and I got to watch him do the show on the Mustang with Nathan, and stuff." In fact, here we are with Judy. :) Ah, good memories.There are still 77,000 people without power in northern Indiana thanks to the ice storm, but in our area it's clear and just fine, at least until this weekend gets here.

So, today was Kaylee's first basketball game cheerleading at half time routine for the year. This first one was for a girl's basketball game that started at 1:30, and we had to be there at noon. The girls were a little shaky on their first time out-two of the girls fell off their pyramids, but there were adults there to catch them prior to them hitting the hard gym floor, thankfully. (You laugh, but cheerleading has the highest injury rate out there of any sport.) Kaylee did well. She does a running cartwheel in the routine and she hit it nicely. Dale and Althea were at the game as well, sitting right by the floor. When Kaylee and the girls lined up, Dale spotted her and said her name until she turned around, and the look on her face was funny when she recognized who he was. She gave him a big smile. :) I took a video while Steve took some photos. The video is too big to put online as is, but you can see the photos anyway. Kaylee had a good time. :)

Steve and I were just kind of shaking our head over all the ties to the community we spotted just while we were there. First, that's the gym where his school played all their games. He was in the band, and pointed out where he sat, etc. We saw Dale there, and I also saw one of the people I used to fly around all the time for hire. But then we saw the program or whatever you call it for the game. A good portion of the advertisers in there are either friends/acquaintances of ours or have flown with either Steve while learning or myself for business. Then Steve saw that one of the girls who was a cheerleader back when he was in high school was there and is now involved in the cheerleading team there and has a daughter who is currently a cheerleader. We saw that two kids of someone I used to fly around are now halfway through highschool, one playing on the team and one a manager with the team-and when I met them they were younger than Kaylee. I used to let one of them sit up front and fly with me because she was interested and her parents didn't mind. Everywhere we looked around there were ties to people and places we knew, at just a girl's basketball game. It was a little weird, really, but not in a bad way.

When we left there, we drove on over to a small Amish store just to the north. They didn't have electricity in the store, so it was a little dark in the aisles of the building-they had gas-burning lanterns that they'd light in the aisles for night operations, but they close at 4 pm, probably because it does get dark. We got some truly home-grown foods and a few other things, and by the time we left we were starving to death, so we stopped at a little restaurant by Grissom Air Force Base. It's just a little "greasy spoon" style restaurant, but the food was really good. Kaylee had fish and cottage cheese, and that was some really good fish. Everything just tasted fresh and home-cooked, and we've decided we'll have to go back some time. :)

Tomorrow we're supposed to have a wind chill of 17 below zero, winds gusting upwards of 40 mph. Ugh. Seems like a day to stay indoors after all...