Family visits, Outdoor Dances, and Father's Day

One of the best parts about owning a house is having the room for family and friends to stop by and visit, such as my Aunt Carol, Uncle Ben, Cousin Laura, and her five kids. They were passing through Omaha last week to see my other cousin (once removed) André wed Rebecca, his fiance of a couple years. We dropped by a nearby IHOP to take advantage of their "kids eat free" night, and then reconvened at the Johnson House to play some noisy foosball afterward.

On Friday, Vivian and I spent the evening at the Eagle's Lodge with the usual cast of Jitterbug characters. We had resident swing dancers Dan and Gaby teaching some Lindy Hop this week, so we got to watch one of their classes and then danced with them both in a jam circle later on. We also had a birthday jam for our friend Lee and then went to an impromptu birthday party with her at Village Inn afterward. Nothing's quite as nice after four hours of dancing than pie and breakfast food (except maybe Jambalaya).

On Saturday, the swing dancing continued at the Papillion Days parade down 84th Street. We met up at Target for some chicken wings and a slushie before heading down to our spot in the parade route. It was a not-too-warm-yet 85 degrees outside, and we had a fairly decent crowd out to watch as we Lindy Hopped down the pavement. This parade moved much, much more quickly that others we've participated in, and we had to run half the time just to catch up with the rest of the floats. We collapsed down by Halleck Park once we were done and then faced the daunting task of getting back to our cars up at Target. We decided to try piling ten swing dancers into the back of a pickup truck and hitching a ride over to 72nd street, which would have worked fine if we hadn't gotten pulled over by the fuzz.

On Sunday we had a somewhat rainy Lindy in the Park down at the Gene Leahy Mall. Fortunately, the precipitation was down to an occasional sprinkle, which left things nice and cool as we danced, and the wet pavement even proved to be a better dancing surface than usual for a Lindy Hop. Unfortunately, the crowd was a bit thin due to be being both rainy and Father's Day, but we still had a good time dancing with everyone who braved the weather and did show up.

Vivian and I celebrated Father's Day back home with Jack and Donna, who we had over for burgers in the afternoon. The rain went from trickling to pouring off and on, and Donna had to hold an umbrella over me as I did some grilling out on the patio. We assembled some tasty burgers with all sorts of toppings for lunch, and we enjoyed them with some potato salad courtesy of Donna. Afterward, we gave Jack a copy of Nadia, a made-for-TV film about the life of Nadia Comăneci. We watched it downstairs and then had some of Vivian's delicious blueberry pie before calling it a night.