Luke’s Notebook

This morning, Mark and I went over to Grandma and Grandpa Stock’s house in order to give them a couple of early Christmas gifts. One is a wall calendar Mark had printed, and for each month there is one of the gorgeous pictures from our western trip. There’s Custer State Park, Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, the Grand Tetons — to name a few. The calendar really looks great!

We also gave Grandpa and Grandma a photo slideshow from the trip, which has some 60 of the top photos. Mark put it together and added music to it, and it’s really good. It’s kind of strange to realize that I was actually there. I saw those mountains, visited Mount Rushmore, saw Old Faithful go off, visited the Grand Canyon, tasted the Great Salt Lake, and saw those real-life antelope and buffalo.

Anyway, Grandpa seemed to really appreciate both gifts. I actually like the idea of a calendar, too. Maybe we’ll have to get another one printed up.

Later in the morning, the four oldest and Dad went to visit our 91-year-old Great-Grandma Arndt. She has been in a nursing home for a little over a year, and just recently her health has seemed to have declined a bit. We’re not sure if this is a temporary dip, or if she’s actually starting to get worse. But we visited her, talked to her, hugged her, prayed with her and told her we love her. You could tell that she was happy to see us visit.

In the afternoon, Paul, John and I went to the downtown YMCA for another workout. While there, we ran into quite a few people! First, we met up with our friend Steve, who joined us for the session. After that, we saw Clarence, a pastor who works at the YMCA. We hadn’t seen him in a while, so we talked and gave him the new family photo.

As we were bench-pressing, we got to know a man named Matt. I had never seen him before, but we got to chat a little bit. Also while pressing, we met up with another Arndt! There’s this guy, who is probably my age, whose name is Andrew Arndt! What’s odd is I have seen him at the Y a lot of times, but I only recently discovered he’s a fellow Arndt. I think he may be our third cousin or something.

We also met up with an attorney who we know, and we saw an old friend of Paul’s, Mike Deuker. He used to play baseball with Paul back some eight or 10 years ago. They used to hang out a lot, but we haven’t seen him for nearly a decade, I would say. Anyway, we chatted for a bit. It was really surprising to see him again!

Well, in between all of the conversations, we managed to actually lift some weights. After we were finished lifting, we decided to go up to the gym and play some two-on-two basketball. We played three or four games in all. I would say we had a real good overall workout. Now I get to be off for two days before having to try to convince myself to exercise on Monday.

I’m in the middle of playing Paul in a game of Reversi (http://www.famteam.com/familyroom/games/ for more info). He’s up 12-10 at the moment. Hopefully I can pull this one out. We’ll see.