Snow in Chicago

We left for Chicago on Thursday to enjoy Northwestern Mutual's central regional meeting along with catching up with my sister, Cheryl, and our friends, John and Linda.  As per usual for the regional meeting in Chicago it had to snow and be bitterly cold.  But it was a great trip, except for both of us almost wiping out while running the path by the lake from a well disguised sheet of ice - hidden under the new snow.  While in Chicago we got to enjoy dinner with my sister at Ralph Lauren's restaurant (yes he has restaurants as well as clothes) on Thursday.  We then found time on Friday for a great lunch with Cheryl at Wolfgang Puck's eatery, at the University of Chicago overlooking the Chicago river, followed by a visit to the Dreihouse museum.

The Dreihouse museum is a restored mansion that was built in the early 1900's and is truly a spectacular place.  It is about 25,000 sq. ft and decorated with elaborate marble and woodwork.  Well worth a visit once you have run through all the standard Chicago museums.  John and Linda had recommended a visit and Cheryl had been wanting to go there for a while.  The only thing missing, I thought, was some photos or descriptions of what the surrounding neighborhood looked like when it was built and more information on the Nickerson family who built it.  Just would have been interesting to put it into context.

Saturday after the morning meetings were done, we were picked up by John and Linda and then spent a fun day catching up with all the family events and discussing everyone's vacation plans for the year.  Dinner was an adventure that ultimately culminated in take-out pizza, after 60-80 minute wait for a table at another restaurant that we just eventually gave up on, but since it was Chicago style, thick crust pizza with great company it was worth the wait.  We finished the evening with a rousing game of Scattegories in which the team of Jo and Eric emerged victorious (mostly because of Jo I might add).  Sunday morning, Linda treated everyone to a wonderful brunch with monkey bread and a frittata.  While everyone is trying to eat healthier, the monkey bread was, by far, the overwhelming hit.  Then it was time to get back downtown to catch our Amtrak train to home before the ice storm hit. 

By the time we got home, we were both exhausted and spent the afternoon catching up on our accumulated newspapers and rest.  Monday night we joined a volleyball league after almost 15 years away from the sport.  Our lack of doing any sport requiring coordination definitely showed as we were both incredibly rusty even after all those years we used to play volleyball.  It also didn't help that we are both a lot slower than the last time we played which repeatedly made us a step or two late for plays we used to make routinely.  And as is usual, we discovered muscles we hadn't been using in our other activities, so we have been incredibly sore for the last two days.  That said, it was fun to get out to play again and it seems like a great group of people that are playing.  Might make some new friends.

Brrr its Cold

You don't move to Wisconsin without a certain love and fascination with cold weather.  However, it has officially moved into frigid today.  The temperature overnight dipped below zero and we woke to a brisk -4°F this morning.  With the weather this cold we opted to suspend our outdoor running since it isn't a lot of fun to have your eyelids freeze shut - and yes, I have had that happen before.  The other upside of the really cold weather is that we are finding all the fun spots in our house where the insulation isn't as thick as you might like (for instance behind the kitchen cabinets which makes for nicely pre-chilled dishes).  The temperature shift is all that more dramatic since it was in the mid-40's on Friday and Saturday allowing us to be outside in just sweatshirts.  The warm-up did allow us to finally get rid of all the ice that had accumulated on our driveway and sidewalks from the earlier sleet storm.



Before - with Drew

Our other big event for the weekend was becoming empty nesters again.  Drew completed his student teaching and moved out - he moved a couple of blocks away to his great aunt/uncle's place (spreading the wealth among all his Milwaukee relatives).  Saturday afternoon involved gathering his clothing and stuff together and then moving into his new digs.  Fortunately, we did this on Saturday with the warm weather and not Sunday with the frigid temps.  It is nice to have our place back all to ourselves but we'll certainly miss the sport's expertise that Drew provided.  We can also finally get our guest bedroom cleaned up and ready for visitors again.  Kathy and John came over from Madison to help Drew move.  Kathy took everyone out to dinner at Sala da Pranzo.  Afterwards we enjoyed a rousing game of Sheepshead which maintained its reputation as a confusing game.  Kathy and John spent the night in our newly liberated guest room, which meant Sunday morning we headed to City Market for our cinnamon roll tradition.  Due to the temperatures the vote was to drive instead of walk, which meant the cinnamon rolls weren't a calorie neutral event as usual - but they still were tasty.  Sunday afternoon after everyone had headed home and due to the temperatures, we hibernated.  I had purchased a new computer game which kept me busy and Jo caught up on some past due reading.



After Drew

Monday for MLK day we spent the morning volunteering to help clean up at a free clinic at a local church.  Jo spent the time cleaning their kitchen while I mopped the floors.  Afterwards we treated ourselves to lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen.  Then it was home for Jo to do write a few work emails and for me to finish the first volume of the series on Stalingrad that I got for Christmas.

Quiet Week

Not too much happened last week to post about.  We enjoyed relatively nice weather for the week which melted most of the snow on the ground, at least until Sunday.  Jo was in New York until Tuesday and had a nice time and an uneventful flight getting home.  While in New York she was able to enjoy some of her favorite runs - although Central Park was a little far - and catch up with some old Pfizer friends. 

We spent Friday night eating pizza and enjoying some of our taped shows.  Then Saturday we got out for a long run to take advantage of the last day of warm temperatures.  We spent the afternoon watching the Badger/Illini basketball game in which our Illini where unsuccessful - but our Badger's were (can't lose there).  Later that evening we joined Rosalie and Tim at Ryan Braun's Graffito restaurant for dinner.  Food was excellent and I really enjoyed my Veal Marsala - although I never did figure out how they made the Marsala taste be stronger in the mushrooms than the veal.  After a delicious dessert of caramel bread pudding we headed to the Rep theater to watch Sense and Sensibility.  I thought the set design was very creative since they mimicked multiple venues and buildings on a single stage with minimal changes.  The acting and plot did a great job of capturing the book and era.  Was a great evening except for the occasional checks on the Packer's game during the intermission and at the end of the show in which we saw they weren't going to make it further in the playoffs.  It will certainly make the sports pages smaller for a couple of weeks.

Saturday night and into Sunday it sleeted so we awoke to a fresh coat of snow/ice on everything, which has made footing somewhat treacherous all week.  After doing some yoga our key activity for the day was planning several of our vacations for this year - always fun to think about escaping when it is cold and dreary outside.

The rest of the week I worked on patching and painting cracks in the walls.   With a 95 year old house you can imagine we get quite a few of these and some present some interesting repair challenges.  I'll be puttering away at these for another couple of weeks as I move through the house - amazing how many cracks have already reappeared after my painting last year.  But, the real highlight of my week was coming home and seeing a hawk/falcon sitting on our back bench enjoying a mid-day meal (I think it was some bird given all the feathers on the ground).  It just sat there quite contently while I snapped a few photos and moved into our screened in porch.

The Badgers come close

To pick up from my New Year's day post, we spent the afternoon
watching the Rose Bowl.  Even though we had our Wisconsin flag proudly flying in the front of the house, the Badger's weren't able to beat Stanford although they played a great game.  We watched up to half-time at home and then quickly drove over to the Bradley center to watch the remainder of the game.  We were there to take in the Marquette/UConn basketball game which was the opening of the Big East season.  While our Badger's disappointed, the Marquette team hung on to win a nail biter in overtime with the highlight being Marquette tying up the game during regulation play with a three pointer at the buzzer.  We were using the suite at the Bradley center with Jo hosting several of her HR team there and it was good to meet a few more of her team - although, I will admit I was a bit pre-occupied with the Rose Bowl game.

Wednesday was back to work for both of us, worse for Jo than me - I'll admit.  Jo had to remember all her work passwords and struggle through several meetings.  I just had to clean up the house from our holiday break.  This did mean the Christmas tree and decorations came down this week, which left the house looking empty and somewhat plain without all the decorations.  We managed to make it through the short week and spent Friday night planning some of our 2013 vacations and Jo getting ready for a trip to New York city for a regional meeting. 

Jo flew out Saturday morning but not before we got a nice run in and I spent the rest of the day just goofing off.  I read some in one of my new Christmas books and spent some time napping - which often comes married to my reading lately.  The evening I was, naturally for a Wisconsin resident, glued to the TV watching the Packers get through the first round of the NFL playoffs.  Today, I got out to enjoy the warmer temperatures we are experiencing after the bitter cold around New Year's for a run and then headed to the basement to work on some of the pots we threw earlier in the week.  Then it is back to my book, which is a three volume set on the battle for Stalingrad in WW2.

Happy 2013

Another year has passed and we start the new one with bright sunshine, but bitterly cold temperatures - it was 7 degrees when I woke up.  We managed to stay awake last night until the ball dropped and enjoyed our champagne toast and traditional kiss.  But with the cold temperatures and late night we decided against our outside run this morning and opted to work out in the basement on our bicycle trainer and elliptical.

We have enjoyed our home bound vacation this week trying for a nice mix of doing a little something each day with a lot of down time for reading, napping, and computer games.  I feel rested and ready for the new year and hopefully Jo is the same way.  She starts the year with a lot of travel to various regional meetings but as she always loves travel it should work out for her.  We picked up a little more snow last week and it was just enough to be able to get our cross country skis out for their first use this year.  So after shoveling out the driveway, we packed up everything and headed over to Lake Park and spent an hour getting the feel again for skiing.  It was a nice peaceful morning without too much wind or cold, just enough to give us cherry red cheeks.

We also took in the new Les Mis movie.  We decided to see it at the Mayfair mall which has a theater with stadium seating and it allowed Jo to do a little power shopping.  She scored two sets of dress boots and we picked up a few other little items that we needed.  For the movie, we thoroughly enjoyed it even if some of the actor's singing skills weren't spot on the Broadway productions that we have seen.  The staging was interesting to see especially given what you can accomplish with a movie set that isn't possible with a stage set.  We would definitely recommend it as worth seeing - plus it meets our criteria for price vs length of movie (it is listed at 157 minutes).

The pottery studio has been set up for a while and we finally got into it over this break to begin glazing the many already fired pots we have along with refreshing some of our throwing skills on our wheel.  We are both pretty rusting on the wheel and there are likely to be a lot of oops before we get pots worth keeping.  But the only way to improve is to practice so hopefully we will keep at it over the coming months.  Friday night we had our nephew and niece, Chris and Angela, over for dinner and cards.  We had a hankering for Mexican so we whipped up an enchilada dish with flank steak and coupled that with chicken tacos.  We also finished off the last of our strawberries, from our insane picking earlier this year, as frozen strawberry margitas to put us all in a festive mood.  Chris and Angela supplied home made chocolate ice cream for dessert so I was stuffed by the end.  We finished the night teaching them and playing Hasenpfeffer - a card game I learned as a kid from my Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents and is a little like Euchre.  Little hint for anyone playing cards with them in the future, take Angela as a partner - she gets all the good cards, unfortunately she was Jo's partner so you know which team won!

One of our highlights for the week was attending the Trans Siberian Orchestra show with our friends, Greg and Rhonda.  This was a new show for TSO (based on their second album) but continued the trend of high energy music with an awesome light show (at times almost a little too awesome), excellent singing, and stage production.  Afterwards we headed to Tess, a little local restaurant a few blocks from home, for a great dinner with my blue cheese chicken on mashed sweet potatoes being delicious.

For today we are goofing off as much as we can, since it is back to real life starting tomorrow.  Then later today we will be watching as much of the Rose Bowl as we can, to see how Wisconsin fairs against Stanford, before heading to the Bradley Center to see Marquette play UConn in basketball with several of Jo's HR team.