ice cream delights, teaching, and goodbye

Tonight I went out to the Avondale Dairy bar and enjoyed a wonderful fresh raspberry sundae with Alan Lensink, Craig, Pam, and Johnny (friends from high school--Craig is Alan's cousin living here for the summer). I tried to teach Craig and Alan how to drive a standard. I had fun, but I hope I did a good job--it's really hard to learn at first, and we stalled a lot, but Craig caught on pretty quickly! (Alan just observed for now.) I was nervous, because we were driving the Lensink's nice Jetta, not my own old car, and I didn't want anything to happen to it! I made a fool of myself right off the bat when Martin (Lensink) trusted me to drive the Jetta, and I couldn't get it into reverse! There's this tricky thing in Jettas where you have to press the stick DOWN and THEN push it into the reverse position, and I had never driven a Jetta before, so we had to go back into the house and get Martin to show me. I felt rather foolish that I couldn't even get out of the driveway on my own, yet Martin was trusting me to teach his son and nephew how to drive!

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning at 6am for Chicago for the funeral of my uncle Jerry, who was married to my mom's sister, my aunt Becky. Please keep the family in your prayers as we mourn and as we do a lot of driving.