Ride by the River

With all of the rain lately, the Illinois River is starting to flood.  It is predicted to crest on Saturday at 25.5 feet, which will put in in the top 20 historic crests of the river here.  With the Steamboat Festival running Thursday through Saturday, the city is taking measures to contain the flooding.  Tonight, Katie and I biked around by the riverfront to look at the preparations, which include a sort of wall of sand in canvas with a triangular cross-section..  We also saw lots of fireflies along the walking and biking trail in the grassier areas away from the downtown.

Katie's Birthday Party

The stormy weather continues this week - including last Sunday, we have had over 6 inches of rain in our gauge at  our house.  Thankfully, no damage at our location so far, but we have seen tree branches down in the area and the local creeks get swollen.  Today Katie had her birthday party at Jump Start Gymnastics and had fun.  One of the presents Katie got last week was a badminton set, which gave me a challenge on a serve a couple days ago.

Bluegill Fishing and Strawberry Jam

This weekend was free fishing weekend in Illinois, so Friday evening I took Katie to Jubilee College State Park to fish for bluegill in a pond there. It is a nice little pond just teeming with life, including some loud frogs. She did a pretty good job casting and caught and released two bluegill.  On Saturday evening, Kris, Katie, and returned to the pond.  This time Katie caught three bluegills and Kris caught four.  All but one of the fish were returned; the littlest we brought home to put in our rain barrel to eat mosquito wrigglers.  It was still in there today, despite a few inches of stormy rains throughout today that seems to have washed tall the wrigglers out of the rain barrel!  Another major event this weekend was making strawberry.  Our home strawberry crop peaked last week, and I think that raccoons helped deplete them.  Yesterday, the family went to Schaer's Farm on the other side of the river to pick about 14 pounds of strawberries.  Today we made them into about 8 pints of low-sugar jam and about 10 pints of regular jam.

May Interim Ends

Whew, I guess the last few weeks have been busy:
- School ended at St. Mark's for Karen
- School ended at Peoria Christian for Kris and Katie
- I had a three-week May Interim class and summer research
- BIG NEWS:  My sister got married (congrats Tina and Chris!) in Chicago.  Katie was a flower girl and Kris sang and my brother officiated  - all did well.
- Kris and Katie stayed with my parents for a week in Wisconsin.
- Katie had a soccer camp.
- Kris started a summer job at a local restaurant.

Lots of pictures to share, so maybe I will just show a few wedding-related pictures for now.

Ending Spring Semester?

Summer seems to be sneaking into this spring a lot this year.  The weather has been warm and fireflies are going full tilt on many evenings (note the yellow dot in the dark picture).  The black raspberry blossoms are wide open now.  The spring semester at Bradley University ended with graduation on Saturday.  I grabbed a selfie with our retiring university president (Joanne Glasser) at a reception on Friday.  Not all of her policies were successful, but she did a lot for the university and was always nice to me. In some ways she reminded me of my late grandma June.  My daughters finish school this week, and Karen finishes the following week.  Classes are not quite done for me either, as I start up a three-week online May Interim class tomorrow.

Happy Mother's Day!

The spring semester is winding down at Bradley and we are into final exams.  A few days ago, Bradley hosted the High School Chemistry Contest, where high school student from an 11-county area in central Illinois got to take a test, get lunch, see the campus, and see a a chemistry demonstration show.  Kris got to go from her class, so I pulled her out of the audience to help me with a couple of demos that she was familiar with.  We had fun.  Weather has been warm and juicy.  On Friday night Katie and I saw several fireflies (and I caught one, too).  We have been getting rain, too - in fact we got about a third of an inch of rain a couple of hours ago.  Today was Mother's Day, and one of the last days in the Peoria area for some friends (the Blands).  We hung out with them during church and later at a park.

"Godspell" Weekend

Busy weekend. Kristine played a disciple in the Peoria Christian High School production of "Godspell".  It was a good show, and she did a great job!  She also had a high school choir concert today, and today was the last day of Sunday School at St. Anthony's.  My classes start their final exams this week. My parents and Karen's dad came to town this weekend.  They have also been experiencing warm, dry weather.  The weather has turned more humid this weekend, and a couple of people saw fireflies tonight.