1. After breakfast at Sam's, Ed had to go to CdA for a blood draw and I had told him the week before that I'd like to ride with him. We had a little time to kill before leaving Kellogg and Ed wanted to go uptown and see how work was coming along on the street/sewer project. When we drove by the Inland Lounge, Cas's pickup was parked in front and the front door was open. Ed flipped a U-y, parked, and we piled out of his pickup and shot the breeze with Cas while he meticulously worked on preparing the Lounge for another weekend of quenching the thirst and meeting the social needs of the Greater Kellogg Metropolitan Area.
2. The Deke and had some meticulous prep work to do ourselves. The big day had arrived for the celebration of those having July birthdays in our family: Carol, Everett, and Zoe. Christy and Carol had hatched a plan to have a taco bar and I volunteered our deck as the assembly line site. The Deke and I got the table set up and I made some trips to the store and the Deke fixed the taco meat, guacamole, and did other dinner preparations. Carol and Christy also made contributions, so our taco dinner was a team effort. Next door neighbor Jane provided dessert and knocked it out of the park with Haagen Dazs ice cream, raspberries and sliced cherries, finely grated chocolate, and three liqueurs to choose from -- I poured Bailey's Salted Caramel over my vanilla ice cream topped with raspberries and the chocolate.
The party was a success. Everyone made themselves a taco or a taco salad and carried their plate through the gate over to Christy and Everett's back yard where tables and chairs were set up. It was especially good to see Christy strolling around the yard, giving her nieces a tour of the garden she created as a memorial to Mom, and spending a couple of hours outside. She's been cooped up in the house quite a bit, but as she continues to recover so well from her surgery, she is able, with the help of her cane, to get around. She even cut some flowers and put them in vases for each of the tables.
3. After dinner, dessert, some cleaning up, and an ice therapy session with Christy, the Deke and I headed uptown to join in the good times at the Inland Lounge. To our delight, Diane Trecker, three of her kids, Kelly, Jennifer, and Matt, and Kelly's husband and Matt's wife, were having a party at the Lounge's V.I.P. bar. The Deke and I joined in and had a blast. I hadn't seen Diane for a while -- my own damn fault -- and she filled me in on all her latest projects around her house, her future plans for the place, other plans she has, her travels, and how things are going with her dad. At one point, Cas took a break from the nearly unrelenting demands of providing Blue Ribbon service to his many customers and told me more about his and Tracy's trip to Los Angeles and Santa Monica to see the Pirates play the Dodgers. The Deke and I stuck around for a while after the Trecker party moved to Dirty Ernie's and yakked more with Cas, left, and we piled in the Sube and traveled the dark and vacant streets of Kellogg back home.
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