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.
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