Getting Faster

Danielle's final tournament of the softball season ended with the All Sanctioned World Series. Her team participated in this last year, too. On opening day they have a parade of teams, skills competition, and all star games. She competed in the "touch 'em all" competition again this year.

She improved her time from last year, which was her goal. Last year she finished in 11.96 seconds and was 43 out of 134 competitors. This year she finished in 11.81 seconds and was 22 out of 153 competitors. And the neat thing about that is that she's on the younger end of the age bracket this year. She beat a lot of girls that were older than her.

She worked on her speed a lot during the "off season" (is there such a thing?!), and training for track helped, but she wants to focus on that even more this winter. I think she'd like to turn a few college coaches' heads during showcases and camps over the next few years. The most important time is the time from home to 1st. At tryouts last season she was recorded under 3 seconds. When I took her out a couple weeks ago, one of her times was 2.96. At the high school and college level, anything under 3 seconds is good. Anything under 2.7 seconds is exceptional. She's at 3 seconds in jr. high. With as hard as she works, I think she has a good shot at reaching 2.7 seconds at some point in high school. Even if she doesn't, I will enjoy watching her work her hardest to be the best she can be.

Flowers at the Park

Busy as Muskrats

I was lucky enough to catch these guys working on their lodge today.

Yikes!

Tyler had his first in-car earlier this week. Thought the license plate was cute.

Softball, Semis, and Samples

Sadly we now have more weeks of summer break behind us than before us. Since I last posted, Tyler went diving with Ron's parents and had a great time. I'm still waiting to see pictures. We celebrated the 4th of July. Danielle played lots of softball.

Her tournament last weekend was near Amish country.  On Friday there was a semi truck parade just down the street from the ball fields. It was held by Transport for Christ.  Around 250 trucks gathered in town to blare their horns and rumble their engines for awhile. The noise was amazing. All the trucks were polished and shiny. A lot of Amish came to watch. After all the noise making, the trucks paraded to a nearby campground where they had a devotional. It was a peculiar sight, and unfortunately my cell phone pictures didn't accurately capture all the commotion. It was fun to watch it all.

Danielle's team was knocked out of the tournament early enough on Saturday that we had time to explore a little before making the long trek home. We checked out Lehman's Hardware, which was its own little circus of sorts. People everywhere. Samples everywhere. People everywhere grabbing samples. As Ron said, there were all kinds of "uni-tools" there. So many gadgets with only a single purpose. The only thing we purchased was a sample size cup of homemade ice cream for $1. The free sample was just a spoonful, and Danielle felt she needed just a little more to truly sample it.

 

These 3d wood carvings were in the ice cream sampling room. They were amazing.

 

When we were done there we drove through Amish country to Heini's. We enjoyed seeing the children out playing and the lines of laundry blowing in the breeze. It was pretty countryside. Heini's makes cheese. The factory part was not operating when we were there, but there was plenty of cheese to sample. I've never seen anything like it. There were long display cases of all kinds of cheese and cheese products and bowls of samples with each new item. And there was an even longer line of people waiting to sample everything.

See how the line wraps around the entire room??

The baskets were handmade by a local Amish family. The age of the person who made it was on the bottom.  They were neat to look at while we waited, but we didn't buy one. We did find a nice one made by a 5 year old.

Lots of samples

So many odd flavors of cheese.

They also had flavored cream cheeses and fudge made from cream cheese. This was rainbow sherbet fudge. It had the taste of rainbow sherbet but the texture of fudge. I wasn't a fan of any of the cheese fudges.

There were sausage and jerky samples, too.

We bought some cheese and some kettle corn to take home. We discovered that gouda is very good. We had it on some homemade burgers yesterday. It was very flavorful.

One other culinary highlight of the weekend was discovering a wonderful local bakery. It wasn't Amish but it was delicious!

Snicker brownie, chocolate cow, chocolate peanut butter buckeye, and banana split.

We had a good time. I just wish Tyler had enjoyed it all with us. He had just gotten home from his diving trip and didn't want to spend another night in a hotel. He was a fan of the cupcakes we brought home, though.