November 27, 2011

We did our usual trip to Madison for the Thanksgiving weekend to spend the time with Jo's sister.  It was nice this year to be able to drive and not have to hassle with winter weather while flying.  We both enjoyed relaxing getting in some quality reading and napping time.  Along with chowing down on a delicious turkey dinner on Thanksgiving day.  Also hit the stores on the Wednesday before to get still good sales without all the crowds.  I even went along and picked up a couple of Christmas gifts.  The other big highlight was attending the final home game for the Wisconsin Badgers this season.  This was a key game as it determined if Wisconsin would get to play Michigan State in the playoffs for the Big Ten title.   Although it was a dreary day with drizzly rain throughout the game, we all had a lot of fun since Wisconsin beat Penn State - quite handily (sorry Dad).  Then it was home to dry out, warm up, eat some of our favorite Madison pizza before getting in the car for the trip back to Milwaukee.

The only other big news to report, as mentioned before, last Tuesday we had our new clothing cabinets delivered and set up.  These are meant to help address the shortage of closet space - at least compared to what we are used to having.  These are now in my study and should allow me to keep a healthy amount of sweaters - and most importantly - turtlenecks.  We also had a gas fireplace insert installed on Tuesday.  Which as you can tell from the photo required a crane to allow them to insert the necessary piping down the chimney.  We are looking forward to enjoying that on the cold days during the oncoming winter.

Today we are taking care of a couple of overdue chores since we have been on the road for the last week and getting ourselves ready for another week.  Also, need to start decorating the house for the Christmas season.

November 25, 2011

We've been busy since the last post.  On the 13th we took in an Admirals game at the Bradley Center.  The Admirals are a farm team for the National Hockey League.  It was amazing to watch how fluently the players could skate and fortunately only one fight in the game.  It still seems that hockey would be improved by removing the fights.  The one interesting feature was instead of racing sausages, like the Milwaukee Brewers have, we had racing cheese spreads.  Only in Wisconsin. 

The week was the usual, although not much happened on the house last week.  We did get our new washer and dryer delivered so no more having to trek all the way to the basement to do the laundry.  Plus the new units hold more clothes so it is a few less loads to do each week.  Last weekend we headed to Madison to celebrate an early Thanksgiving with Jo's family.  Her sister and husband, Mary and Mike, traveled in from Omaha along with our nephew and fiance, Chris and Angela, from Milwaukee, so we enjoyed catching up with everyone.  Got to hear a lot of stories of the three sisters growing up on the farm and the interesting fact that they never seem to remember a story in the same way (which is why the game of telephone is so much fun).  We arrived back in Milwaukee on Sunday in the evening, with a few chores to do, before bedtime, to keep our place running. 

The short week this week was nice.  I'm still on hiatus from painting although I will need to start again next week.  With any bit of luck our house renovation project will be finishing next week - keep your fingers crossed.  Our new clothing cabinets for my study were delivered this week - pictures of those in the next posting.  They are a lot larger than we anticipated, but the dimensions we had selected.  I guess we didn't really appreciate how big something those dimensions would look once constructed.  Oh well, another learning to add to our book of life.

Christmas Letter

Happy Holidays from Wisconsin!

We are posting our Christmas letter for anyone that didn't receive it in the mail.  With all the moves this year, we aren't sure everyone received it.

Jet Skiing on Lake Geneva

Our New Milwaukee Home

This was a year of big changes for us as we both left Pfizer.  As you may recall, we had bought a house a number of years ago in Madison with the plans to retire back to Badger-land once we were ready to leave the corporate world.  Well...we didn't quite get to Madison - and we didn't both leave the corporate world - but we have taken steps closer to both.  We now live in Milwaukee - just an hour and 1/2 east of Madison.  Jo took a job as the head of HR at Northwestern Mutual, a financial services company, and has been spending her time learning her new industry and role.  While it's a lot smaller than Pfizer, she's enjoying leading the whole function for the first time.  Eric has spent his time transitioning into semi-retirement, meaning he has spent a little time consulting in the pharmaceutical industry but most of his time taking care of our transition to our new city and things on the home front.  This has turned out to be more than a full time job as we purchased an old home for the first time in our lives.  With every other home we have owned, we have been the first residents, so our home improvements have been adding new things to new things - e.g., finishing the basement, adding a porch or patio.  With our new-old house (new to us but almost 100 years old to the world), we have had to update some parts, remove multiple layers of wallpaper in other parts, and we have learned the pleasures and challenges of an old home with character.  Most of the time the character is charming but sometimes it can be frustrating, like when the door knob fell off of the door one day, just like it does in the movies (how cliché, right?)  Since we've moved in, Eric has been chief in charge of everything in the home and that has kept him more than busy.

Jo with our Great-Niece, Maggie

Go Badgers!

A big benefit of being back in the Midwest is the ability to reconnect with family members plus old friends.  Jo's sister, Kathy, lives in Madison so we can conveniently see her and Badger sports at the same time.  Eric's sister, Cheryl, lives in Chicago so it's an easy train ride to see her with the added benefit that Eric's parents can visit Cheryl and us each time they fly back to the Midwest.  In fact, that is their plan for Christmas this year.  We also have two nephews who currently live in the city and we've enjoyed spending time with them and their girlfriends.  Finally, we've reconnected with other friends from when we last lived in the Midwest and are genuinely enjoying our time back in the heartland. 

Visiting Trosa, Sweden

With our move, we have needed to find new places to run and a new gym for weights and other activities.  We've found lots of fun running routes given we are a block from Lake Michigan and there are many paths in the area.  Our house is in a city block with great sidewalks that give us lots of new neighborhoods to explore as well.  The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is just three blocks away, so we've joined their gym and lift weights with the college co-eds.  Talk about an interesting experience - did we ever look that young?

Fried Clams in New London, CT

Even with our move, we've had the chance to take a few nice vacations.  We celebrated our 30th anniversary with a trip to Sweden.  We met up with a former colleague of Jo's from Pfizer, which gave us a sense of Sweden from a local's viewpoint.  We've also arranged trips around a few conferences that Jo has attended - one to Phoenix in which we stayed with Chris, Dan and our great-niece Maggie, and another to Boston which we linked with a visit back to Connecticut to see our Pfizer friends.  We also fit in a trip to Omaha to visit with Jo’s sister and family and got to see our great-nephew for the first time.   

We hope you have a great holiday and a wonderful 2012!

November 13, 2011

It is official, winter has come to Wisconsin.  We had our first snowfall of the season.  It wasn't a lot and it didn't stay around, but we had snow coming down for about 2 hours this week.  There just isn't any kidding ourselves that it isn't about to get really cold and white here.  Not as bad as in some other areas of the country, say Wyoming for instance, but enough to get out the really cold weather running gear.  Speaking of our cold weather gear, one problem we both are having is all of our winter sweaters and other winter clothes are still in boxes in the attic.  We didn't unpack them when we moved in since we knew we were doing the renovation work.  We had figured all of that work would be done prior to needing our winter woolies - Oops.

We both had a nice week at our respective jobs.  Jo pulled down here usual mix of meetings, talks, and minor crisis.  I focused on finishing off another room.  This week it was our guest bedroom although I also managed to start priming our bordello red hallway.  It is now a lovely shade of pink since the white primer wasn't quite enough to hide all the red.  Jo and I also worked on reorganizing what furniture is going back into each room.  The key driver was deciding to actually use our guest bedroom, as a guest bedroom.  This meant placing our double bed in that room (instead of Jo's study).  Once that happened a whole lot of other changes just seemed to make sense.  The end result of which was a lot of change, which meant moving a lot of our furniture - fortunately, a lot of that had to be moved anyway.  We now have our two back bedrooms completely painted and are starting to set them up.  It feels really good to start to have our house back to a livable state, even if it will be another couple of weeks before everything will be done.

For the weekend,  Friday night we made pizza at home and then snuggled together to watch some TV.  Saturday morning after our morning run on a beautiful, crisp fall (or winter if you read the first paragraph) morning we hit the gym and then went out to stimulate the economy.  We purchased a flat screen TV to replace our family room 36 inch cathode ray tube TV (which weighs in at about 300 lbs!).  It felt good to finally be buying technology from 2001.  We are not what you might call early adapters - I personally blame it on my cheapness, which is genetically gifted to me from my Dad (but that is a story for another venue).  Now all we need is some help from our renovation crew to get the massive old TV out of the room.  After watching the WI Badgers win over Minnesota, we went to our Chris and Angela's (nephew and fiance) apartment for dinner.  Very tasty dinner and dessert and it was such fun to hear about all the exciting things they have been up to recently.  Oh to be in my 20's again, although it is really nice to have the financial resources of my 50's.  This afternoon we have tickets to a hockey game, the Admiral's which is a farm team for the pros.  Other than that today, it will be some reading and a few miscellaneous chores. 

November 6, 2011

Trying to be a little better this week and get my posting up on time.  Also means I don't have as much to write about since I was late last week.  Starting with the house, we are finally entering the final days of our renovation (yipee).  The majority of the electrical and plumbing work was completed this week and we had the floors refinished in two of the rooms.  One of these we had pulled up an old carpet to reveal the lovely maple floors underneath - well they were lovely once we had them sanded and coated.  This was the same room that I completed painting this week, so once the floor finish dries we are ready to finally get the furniture out of the hallway.  The only major items left is getting our washer and dryer installed on the second floor and having the new carpet installed. 

We spent Friday night and Saturday in Madison with Jo's sister.  Saturday morning we got up for a nice brisk early morning run and then headed out to do our bit for the economy.  We are looking for a new TV for our family room and also went to Target to pick up some odds and ends we needed.   Then it was back to pick up Kathy and head for a tailgate party.  We enjoyed brats and tailgate food (aka, food that is really bad for you, but you love to eat) before heading over to the Badger stadium.  We enjoyed a beautiful sunny day to watch the Badgers defeat Purdue.  Apparently, when we attend games the Badgers do really well, so no last minute hail-mary passes for a loss this week.  Also, in case you are comparing camera angles from our various Badger football game photos - we sat in the same seats as the Indiana game.  Afterwards, we picked up my favorite pizza in Madison - Rocky Roccoco's for dinner (in case you were curious, the best pizza remains Papa Del's at the Univ. of Illinois - at least for me).  We then headed home to enjoy an extra hour of sleep with the time change.

Today, we plan to laze around the house with a few small chores to do - one of which is figuring out which flat screen TV to buy from the hundreds of choices.  Then it is off to another week of work for Jo and another week of painting for me.

November 3, 2011

I'm a little behind in my posting for this week since I was too lazy on Sunday to write and this week has been busy with working on the house.  The weather has been relatively warm, at least for Wisconsin, and so far we haven't experience any snowfall.  Unlike other parts of the country, especially our last house in CT.  Jo and I are mentally preparing ourselves for the cold winter and are working on getting a gas fireplace insert installed so we can warm up quickly on those days the cold winds get the better of us.

We had several visitors this last weekend.  Friday night, John and Linda stopped by, on their way to Lake Geneva, for dinner and to see the latest in our house renovations - more on that below.  It was a fun evening as we got caught up on the latest news for all their kids.  Saturday, my Mom and sister came up from Chicago, mostly to give the merchants in Chicago a little time to restock all their shelves as my Mom had been visiting my sister for several days by that point.  But also to see us.  We toured the Impressionist exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum - really worth a visit, but it does really help to tour the exhibit with an artist who understands some of the explanations.  Also, if you do go, check out the signs by the paintings.  Whomever wrote them must have been seeing if they could use every arcane word they knew - I think they succeeded - but it did make reading all the signs fun.  After wearing out our feet, we stopped for lunch at the City Market in Shorewood, before heading home to - yes you guessed it - see the progress on our house.  Quite the theme.  Mom had gotten an IPod Touch and she wanted some games loaded, especially Angry Birds.  When she started playing, it just seemed like a great photo moment - so that's her, playing Angry Birds (ain't technology and advertising great).

Sunday was a cold and drizzly day, so after our morning exercising we tinkered around the house.  Most of the our efforts went towards getting my study painting started since the floor is being refinished in that room (in fact, it is happening as I type this, talk about noise).  The afternoon was filled with kids trick or treating, as Milwaukee decided to have Halloween on Sunday afternoon.  It was the first time in 10 years we had actually had anyone come by for candy so it was quite the treat to see all the costumes.  Fortunately, we bought entirely too much candy so there is some left over for us. 

One the home renovation front, I finished painting the kitchen last week and spent this week on my study.  We are nearing the end of the renovation (not the painting), as we finally have a functioning bathroom on the second floor.  No more having to go all the way to the third floor in the middle of the night.  The tiling is finished and our vanities were installed at the end of last week.  Just a few more items to finish up and we can finally start to declutter the house.  While we thought we had hit our maximum clutter a week ago, I was wrong.  We now have furniture in the hallway since we had to completely empty two of the bedrooms to get the floors redone. One of the upcoming weeks, I 'll devote the entire picture spread to shots of the various projects that are now done.