Visit from my Brother

 Happy Memorial Day and a special thanks to all the veterans who have sacrificed their time with their families and their lives to keep the United States safe.  We took full use of the long weekend starting with Friday with enjoying fresh, strawberry margaritas on our front porch watching the world go by.  We caught up on our week and just enjoyed the nice warm weather.  Saturday we headed off to Lake Geneva to visit with our good friends, John and Linda.  We cooked out, since it is the un-official start of summer, and then got out on their boat for a cruise around the lake.  The weather was a little chillier than ideal since it had been raining in the morning and the clouds refused to break up.  A very relaxing day and along with the fun of catching up with each other.

Sunday my brother and sister-in-law came up from Chicago (note the lack of hair on my YOUNGER brother - I just always have to point that out when I get a chance, I may have less than I used to but I still have more than him!).  They were in Chicago to celebrate De's milestone birthday, which I'll politely leave off - but it is one of the major decades and she is four years younger than me (you can do the math), with some clothes shopping.  They took the convenient Amtrak train up and as this was their first visit we spent a fair amount of time touring the house regaling them (or boring them, but they were too polite to say so) on all of our renovations.  We then took them downtown to see Milwaukee proper and enjoyed the kite festival at Veteran's Park.  Some amazing kites were up and the stunt kite flying was very impressive.  Although, someone who trains for stunt kite flying must have a little too much time on their hands.  All too soon they had to head back to Chicago to get those last few deals.

Today, Jo headed out for a long bike run while I strapped on the running shoes to enjoy a longer run than normal.  Then Jo, to follow De's lead, went to Mayfair mall to improve her summer clothing options.  Since I spend most of my days in shorts, my clothing needs have really dropped down significantly.  In fact, I may not need to buy new clothes for another 3-4 years.  While she was gone I continued working my work through the Steven Jobs biography.  Interesting character and given his personality, thank goodness he was a genius.

Our work week was pretty standard.  I finished off my screen project and successfully installed screening material in all my new screens which are now providing great breezes into the house.  Our garden is doing nicely and we will harvest our first crop of lettuce and spinach this week - assuming the bunnies or squirrels don't get it first. 

New Window Screens

The biggest news of the week is that the entire inside of the house is finally all painted.  I had a painting crew come out this week to do the stairwell to the third floor which had a ceiling and trim that was out of reach of any ladder combination I could cobble together with my ladders.  It is nice to know the house is all redone.  While the painting contractor was here we also had the gutters on the house scraped and painted as there was some peeling going on there.  I would love to say the outside of the house looks so much better, but since we painted with the exact same color as before - there really isn't much of a change, except for a little less peeled paint.

That news aside, we did have a busy weekend.  We started Friday night off by having a small dinner party with Kathy, Jo's sister, and Linda, a friend of Kathy's who lives just two blocks away from us.  Mexican was the theme so we enjoyed an enchilada casserole and tacos while sipping margaritas.  We made both strawberry and regular margaritas and fortunately, I managed to keep my margarita consumption down to just two, so I was reasonably coherent for the evening.  Saturday morning after an early morning run, the three of us (Kathy, Jo, and yours truly) headed to City Market to enjoy their delicious cinnamon rolls, since that is what we do with Kathy here.  Afterwards we stopped by a couple of flea markets to pick up some paper back books and to enjoy the junk that people 1) collect, and 2) try to sell to someone else.  Since we walked to everything we didn't feel too bad about the breakfast treats.  Then Kathy headed off to Marquette graduation events while Jo and I caught up on some reading.  For dinner we enjoyed sausage and mushroom pizzas made on the grill. 

Sunday, Jo decided to see if she could exercise herself into the ground by going for a 90 minute bike ride, followed by lifting at the gym, and swimming for an hour.  After a lunch of homemade egg salad sandwiches on pretzel rolls - yum!!! - we biked to Bradford beach to enjoy the warm, sunny day and watch the volleyball games.  Jo finally collapsed on the couch for a short nap. 

During the week, I continued to work on finishing my window screens for the front windows.  I completed getting the frames together and then spent a couple of days getting them painted before I added to the screening material, as you can see in the photo.  I just finished putting on the screening yesterday and will post pictures of the final product later this week.  I puttered in the yard cleaning out flower beds and getting the grass to grow in the yards and not the flowers.  We also had the gutters scraped and painted.  Jo had her usual work week with a mix of stressful and really stressful days - how I don't miss that part of work.

We are still fighting the squirrels digging into our raised bed and to show our human superiority we placed chicken wire over much of the gardens.  To show us that we aren't so superior the squirrels promptly dug around anything not covered with the wire.  The battle continues.....

Hiking in Kettle Moraine

What a busy weekend.  We both needed the week to start so we could relax a bit.  Saturday we tried to exercise in every way we know how.  We started with a morning run followed by some weight lifting and then biked to a some rummage sales and grocery store.  We then tucked into a wonderful lunch (egg salad sandwiches in case you where curious) to curb the appetite we had worked up.  We are hunting paperback books at the rummage sales since we have depleted our reserves of unread paperbacks that we use when we travel.  Saturday afternoon we tackled planting the rest of our vegetables beds.  I've included our garden plan so you can check out what I'll be showing pictures of in the upcoming months (hopefully!).  Now we just need to figure out how to keep the squirrels from digging in the beds.

Saturday night, Jo continued her efforts to convert me to a vegetarian by trying out a new recipe for veggie burgers.  Very interesting to grill an all vegetable burger since it doesn't really sizzle or change much - just gets a little more brown.  All in all though, I must admit they tasted pretty good, but then slather anything in enough ketchup, mustard, and grilled mushrooms and its going be tasty.  I'm guessing these will become regulars in our summer menus.  Saturday evening we collapsed while enjoying watching a movie.  We both missed a few parts as our eyes tended to close every now and then.

Sunday dawned sunny and in the 60's which we were hoping for as we headed to Kettle Moraine State Forest to do some hiking.  We got there early and enjoyed several hours of hiking through the woods.  We walked several of the Zillmar trails along with the Crooked Lake and Forest Lake trails.  By our calculations we hiked about 10-11 miles.  While we didn't see a lot of mammal wildlife, but we certainly enjoyed the many butterflies on the trails and the wildflowers that were blooming.  After coming home, Jo hit the jacuzzi tub to soak her sore muscles.  It was a wonderful way to enjoy one of the first weekends with relatively warm and sunny weather even if we were both a little stiff on Monday.

The rest of the week consisted of some pretty intense meetings for Jo which we talked through during our hikes.  I concentrated on building four window screens for our front windows after our contractor came back with an outrageous price for four screens - but more on that next week. 

April Showers and then May Flowers

I'm somewhat delinquent this week on my posting, mostly because I don't have anything really earth shattering to write about.  Jo and I had big plans for the weekend, but the weather got in the way.  We had planned to visit Kettle Moraine Park and hike on Saturday, but we woke up to pouring rain.  While it stopped after a few hours, the thought of trudging through the resulting mud and being dripped on by trees didn't seem to enticing.  So instead we headed over to a local garden center and picked up our summer flowers for the pots in the front of our house.  This certainly has brightened things up and makes it feel like warm weather might actually make an appearance.

Sunday morning we had brunch ith Adam and Sarah at the Comet Cafe in Milwaukee.  Since it wasn't too far from the house and the rain forecast was predicted to start in the late afternoon, we hopped on our bikes.  This helped assuage any guilt from eating plates of eggs and pancakes.  We had a wonderful time catching up with them but just before we were finishing the skies opened up - so much for weather forecasts.  We then had a lovely ride home in the rain.  It wasn't too bad except when it would start to rain really hard and then the rain actually hurt a bit as you ran into it.  After drying off, we had to rethink the rest of our day since we had planned to spend the remaining part of Sunday in the garden planting all the rest of our vegetables.  What a weekend.

The rain on the weekend simply mirrored most of last week as we have been getting rain almost every day or so.  The one upside is that our grass is growing rapidly and needs to be cut every five days to keep it below waist height.  But it is beautifully green and dense.  The rest of my week consisted of finishing up the trellis' for our raised beds and doing a few landscaping chores around the rain.  Jo's was fairly quiet at work although she had a few evening events she needed to attend.  Throw in our usual mix of running and exercising and that is our week.

We are hoping tonight to finally get around to finishing our planting.  To start the season's garden photos - you can see we already have some pea plants just popping up to help fuel our dreams of buckets of fresh peas in the near future (more likely a single meal of peas, but we are always optimistic!).  The garlic and shallots are also starting to grow.