We kicked off what we thought would be our final hours on US soil with Mass at St. Joe’s followed by a bonfire at the Sanders’ house. There was beer & a trampoline, but Matt tells that story best.

By about 4 a.m. on Sunday July 13, 2008, we were assembled at the airport, waiting to check our luggage & find our way to the gate. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 6 a.m. When we arrived at the gate, I was excited & surprised to see Bishop Zubik there. He and many of the seminarians were going to be on our plane too!

6 a.m. came and went. We were told that it was taking longer than expected to load our food onto the plane. Then we were told they wanted to add some more fuel. We finally boarded, probably around 8 a.m. only to wait for about an hour while they redistributed some fuel from one tank to another… and then it happened. We were asked to leave the plane. Fuel was leaking and a part was going to have to be ordered.

The flight crew went home… we knew we were in for a long wait.

Bishop Zubik had Mass with all 425 of us at about 11 a.m. & afterwards told us that it looked like we probably wouldn’t be leaving until 8 p.m. (our “last hours” became our “last day”) A talent show scheduled for 3 p.m. was announced, too. In the mean time, the Bishop & several priests heard confessions, many people napped under the chairs at the concourse, others played cards, Saw, frisbee, hacky sack… we sang & prayed, too. It was something of a “retreat before the pilgrimage” except without amazing food. The airline provided us with $20 each in meal vouchers, but it just wasn’t quite the same as the catering we’ve had at various retreats.

The talent show was a lot of fun. The majority of the participants were (no surprises!) from the St. Joe’s/St. Mary’s contingent. Skits included “Down with the Sickness,” “The Candy Store,” and “The Lawnmower.” Levi, Sarah & Rebecca played & sang “Cast Your Burdens” and an original song called “Lord You’re Movin’” and Dan did what Dan does best… he solved the Rubix cube in less than a minute. People from other groups sang songs and juggled. My favorites were probably the group from Natrona Heights who wrote a song about our delay and the Bishop & the seminarians singing in Latin.

Our delay was big news! It was covered by KDKA (if you search their video archive you can find a few interviews, too! Hat-tip to Mrs. R. for the info), WPXI, and WTAE as well as the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. You’ll notice in the stories that some of the details change depending on the reporter, but the basics are the same: A lot of ‘Burghers had to wait a LONG time before we started our journey to be with hundreds of thousands of Catholics from around the world and celebrate Mass with the Pope.

Also worth a mention: Mrs. E. found this blog that was updated periodically through the trip by someone who traveled with us but remained anonymous as “great-gramps.” GG caught a few good pictures of some of our crew hanging out at the airport and later at the Mass with all the pilgrims from the US.

author’s note: hopefully Matt will jump in with some of his thoughts & insights on the trip… look for those to start probably Thursday at the earliest. I’ll be blogging about the trip in small pieces, hopefully to make it more manageable to read and also to write about. Pictures are up on facebook but I need to go through them all again before I upload them here… after that I’ll start adding pictures to all the blog entries for the trip

Bishop Zubik gave us some *very* interesting statistics during his homily. Apparently, other than the dioceses in Australia, Pittsburgh is sending more people (roughly 600) to WYD this year than any other diocese in the WORLD! This is largely thanks to the amazing generosity of our sponsors, Youthtowne, and its founders. There are 475 in the Youthtowne group alone, then there are some other parishes that organized their own trips separately.

After Mass, the Bishop hung around & took pictures with people & autographed our booklets. He even let a few people (Matt included) from our little group hold his staff :)

We just got back because 14 of us stopped to get something to eat on the way home… for those of you familiar with the Pittsburgh area, we went to King’s and ordered an Angry Mob (12 Frownie Brownies and 12 scoops of ice cream). Wasn’t hard to eat because of how many we had in our group but it was FUN! And we have posters. I said we need to laminate one & mount it on a pole of some sort to carry around at WYD so we can easily identify where our group should be ;)

Two weeks from today, we’ll be in Sydney, Australia!!

With a little help from some new friends, we discovered that we do in fact have a YMCA 10 minutes from our house, so we finally signed up there & I’ve been going to aerobics classes for about three months now. Knowing that I need to leave the house on certain days at a certain time has helped me learn to get my housework done more efficiently.

I taught CCD again this year. This class was probably my most challenging, but we made it through and I haven’t given up. I was asked to serve on Pastoral Council so I’ll be teaching an earlier class next year but it’ll still be 5th grade. In addition, we’ve also been chaperoning Youth Group nights more regularly. It’s been great getting to know some of the teens from our parish and the community in general. It’s been especially nice having an opportunity outside of hoagie making to get to know the ones who will be joining us in Sydney.

We went on the March for Life again this year (that makes 13 trips for me). Our parish actually didn’t have a bus this year (our involvement with WYD made me reconsider wanting to organize a bus) so we went with the parish where my cousins go to school. Next year, I really do think I’ll organize a bus for our parish because I’ll have a lot less going on.

The cats continue to grow by leaps & bounds. Ratzi’s got his weight back under control but Linus is a porker. They’re cute & we think we’ll keep them :)

We didn’t acquire any new pets this year, but we did acquire some godchildren. John Jordan and Mary Elizabeth are the children of our good friends, Brian & Laura. They’re cute & we think we’ll keep them, too :)

Reviewing last year’s goals:
1. We had to pay some money out of pocket for our trip but I think we did manage to raise more than we expected to, so I’d call this goal a success.
2. I think I might have been more organized. Maybe.
3. The house is still standing, but we really haven’t done any work to improve it.
4. I absolutely failed to start scrapbooking again.
5. The photo gallery is mostly caught up.
6. The care replacement fund continues to grow slowly
7. PMI is GONE as of the end of May :)
8. DONE
9. We have some money ready to invest for retirement, we just have to actually invest it.
10. Paper’s still not done.
11. I planted a few seeds… we’ll see what happens.
12. We’re still working on the walking.
13. On hiatus.

Goals for Year 5:
1. Have fewer goals ;)
2. Get our Roth IRAs started.
3. Survive trip to Australia
4. Plan & execute a successful trip to the March For Life.
5. Continue to encourage Matt to finish his graduate paper.
6. Get back to scrapbooking. For real this time!

As such, there isn’t too much new for me to report. Work’s going well. The wheel-dresser project I mentioned last year has been successful, resulting in two new orders for the same thing. I also got to install a new motion sequence to the aluminum furnace I did right after moving in to our current house, and from feedback, the operators and the company itself love it, so much so that they want the unload car rolls fixed. Hoorah! Presently I’m working on a big project for the same company, along with other coworkers, and am learning a lot about C# as a result. I love event-driven programming so much.

Other than that, I feel like I am more busy! I somehow ended up chaperoning at Youth Group along with Amy, and it’s been fun getting to know the kids and help them grow in fellowship and spirituality. However, this has lead to me being more tired, as we get back after our bedtimes. But mostly just the endless hoagie fund raising has kept us busy. Soon World Youth Day will be upon us and hoagies will be but a thing of the past. I will watch out for night snakes (No I will not explain that).

Amy continues to be a wonderful wife, and seems content to continue to be a wonderful wife. I foresee this continuing in the future, because she is a wonderful wife. Sharing life with her helps me grow and I will always smile when I think of the wonders she brings to me.

Since I’d like to stick around longer (okay, okay, I think Amy came up with the idea), and in addition help us prepare for the rigors of low sleep and lots of walking in Australia, we got a membership at the local YMCA. As far as weight training goes, I have made more progress than I did while at the Grove City Y, but not as much on cardio. Why is running so dang hard? Totally unfair.

For my goals this year, I hope to grow in faith, grow in love, and finally develop the ability to fire lasers out of my eyes. With luck, two out of three of those will be met.

Cheers!

A few days later, I finally got time to look at it, and got so far as to remove the cutting deck from it. Having never done it before, this proved to be really hard, though in retrospect was annoyingly easy to do. Then I had to weed and it was late, so I got no further except to see that a spring that holds the tension pulley for the drive belt appeared to no longer be connected to the frame of the lawnmower. Looked like a drive belt slipped off problem at this point, and I was content the it wasn’t going to be an annoyingly expensive fix (such as a new transmission!)

On Thursday, I finally got to work on it again. Feeling around from underneath it seemed like the drive belt was indeed not resting happily in its lovely pulleys. The problem was that I couldn’t get at them… until I found that the thing the battery rests in could be removed, so that I have top access. Joy! Seemed pretty easy to put it back on, except that on the large pulley, the belt was slipped off near a spot next to the frame. Somehow, the belt managed to be squeezed through a space less than half its size! After trying futilely to work the giant into its tiny pants (okay, okay, so I’m bad at metaphors tonight), I decided that I’d just have to remove the pulley. I had this lovely socket set I got awhile back that has been woefully underused. Eyeballing the hex nut, I grabbed a socket that seemed to be about the right size and found that… I didn’t know, because there was a bar above the hex nut, just enough so that I couldn’t fit the socket on. Naturally, there was no easy (or easily visible) way to remove it. That didn’t stop me from trying to use the socket, mind you, but I didn’t put any real effort into it, as I knew it was a physical impossibility. So… pliers! Pliers like to slip. Pulleys like to… turn! I was thwarted by both my own insufficient grip and the inherent turning ability of turning parts. After about two hours from my starting point, I gave up for the night.

Which brings me to today. While returning from Amy’s parents, we followed an ambulance (sorta, it was going faster than we were, so we were lagging behind it, really). It turned down the route that leads to the main drag, and we continued on towards home, thinking little of it (except for being confused as to why a Saxonburg ambulance was heading to a Buffalo Twp accident or whatever, when the Buffalo Twp Ambulance was closer, and actually in its own parking lot. odd). After getting home, I grabbed some hardware-purchasing money and went out to get a wrench. My 19mm wrench seemed just barely too small when I’d tried it before, so I figured I’d get a 20 (or 21) and then similar sizes in in the stupid English measurement system.

Now, I take back roads to the hardware store, and the main road back, because it’s nice and happily traffic lights and right turns. As I get to the part where the back road stops at another road and then continues about 50 feet down from that point, I stop at the stop sign… and see a TON of cars coming from my left. Wut. I mean, this is a road that barely gets traffic. I see maybe 1 or 2 cars on this route when I take it. This was about 20 or more.

Finally the onslaught stops, and I turn on the the last stretch of this back road, which takes me to the main road, south of True Value. … and encounter a huge backup of cars. After about 12 minutes I finally get to turn north and am almost to the hardware store.. when there is a fire police guy waving all traffic into the Giant Eagle parking lot. The northbound lane is blocked by his truck.

So I go into the parking lot, and out its back end (where another fire guy is turning everyone south), and go across the road to True Value. Weiiiiird. I find out in hardware store that there was a n accident up north a way (suddenly the ambulance springs to mind). All southboard traffic was routed to my back road, apparently. Well, that explains it. I buy three candidate wrenches and head home. The homeward trips is much faster due to having no detoured traffic on it.

I get home… to find that all the wrenches are still too small. yay! Back out I go… only to get stuck in the traffic again (I wouldn’t be able to get there by main road anyway)… only worse! 20 minutes later, I get to the store, return all the wrenches and buy a 22mm and a 7/8″ wrench. One of those will fit, darnit!

The 22mm did fit perfectly, and using a screwdrive placed in a hole in the pully, I prop it against the bar and get the nut loosened. Belt goes on, pully goes on, all good except now I have to get the spring on the tension pulley reattached to the frame. This goes much more poorly now that the belt is actually on. I ended up using a tiny bungee cord with little metal hooks to help pull the spring into place. Hooray for innovation! I guess. So I get the belt from the engine to the drive pulley thing settled in, put the cutting deck back on, and it goes into drive. Score!

I drive the mower up to my usually cutting start point, kick the blade deck on, and… well that doesn’t sound right. …then the sound settles down a bit, so I cut down the hill… and notice smoke emitting from the side discharge, along with the usual stream of grass. Crap.

I stop it and flip up the hood, only to discover that the smoke is not from the engine. It was, in fact, coming from the vicinity of a pulley on the cutting deck. Wut. Turns out that part of the cutting deck belt discided to get sucked down between the belt by the idler pulley and another party of the deck’s body. What IS WITH belts getting shoved through places less than half their size?! Anyway. Mmmm.. burnt rubber.

After getting the cutting deck off (again@&^@$%), the neighbor shows up to see if I need help (his son saw my smoking mower and said, “Matt’s lawnmower was smoking!” apparently. Having the situation under hand (I am a pulley-removing master by this point), I thank him for stopping by, get the belt back in the right spot, reattach the deck, try it out, and find that it makes the right sound. Yay!

Then I run out to the hardware store since I broke a cotter pin that attached the deck on one side. Luckily, traffic getting there isn’t too bad, since the southbound lanes of the main road are open now. Still have to go through the Giant Eagle parking lot though. I buy a hitch pin to replace the cotter pin, since the other side of the deck uses one, and they’re easier to remove and reuse. Sometime in the 5 seconds I was in the hardware store, the fire police vanish and all lanes are open again.

So I get home, put the pin in, start up the mower, make a few passes… and the mower starts to feel like it did two weeks ago when the belt was slipping off. Crap! I stop it, kick it into neutral, look under it… and see that the drive belt appears to no longer be in one piece. So, back I go, removing the battery to get at the belt and find that it is in one piece… technically. Effectively it is attached together by a tiny shard of rubber. Either way, it is effectively broken.

Arrggh!