Is it Spring Yet?

In the midst of January it is always a fun time to begin planning what will be in the garden once the temperatures start to climb.  Last week was planning and ordering time.  And with the wonders of modern logistics the new seeds showed up just three days later.  Always exciting to begin thinking of the growing season will bring especially as I add a few new bean varieties to try this year.  Beans have always been very, very good to me, so I'm hopeful for a bumper crop of dried beans in 2018.  But then who knows what the weather gods have in mind.

After the all the excitement of the seed shipment anything else this week was just going to pale by comparison.  So we went low key and ha a wonderful weekend at home just being bums.  We took several walks to enjoy the unseasonable warm temperatures and when we weren't walking we filled the time with catching up on some needed sleep, a backlog of newspapers and books to read, eating too much food, a few cocktails to relax some more, and just enjoying not having to be working.

Nothing too exciting, but a really relaxing weekend for us.

Chicago Visit

Jo is in the swing of attending regional meetings and I joined her for the central regional in Chicago.  This was my first visit back to Chicago since my sister's passing and it was a strange visit for me.  It was one year ago that we found out about my sister's cancer and it was really weird being in Chicago and not having dinner with her or traipsing out to another museum (we were working our way through every museum in or near downtown Chicago).  Fortunately, Jo was there and helped keep my thoughts on other happier things.

We also spent the weekend with our friends, John and Linda.  We hit two museums, the Museum of Broadcast Communications and the Illinois Holocaust Museum.  Both excellent museums but with pretty close to polar opposite focuses.  First up was the Broadcast Museum.  After a great lunch of deep dish, Chicago style pizza - yum, yum, and yum - we toured the museum's exhibit on Saturday Night Live.  Was really interesting since it was something Jo and I grew up with during our college and later years.  The exhibit did a good job of showing exactly what goes into making a live show happen once a week along with convincing me that I was glad to have gone into a different career.  That evening we finally got to meet their new grandchild who was just ever so happy to bounce around in Jo's arms.

Saturday after a delicious breakfast of cereal and monkey bread - ok, the monkey bread was delicious, the cereal was just to ease my guilt in eating something so sweet - we headed over to the Illinois Holocaust Museum.  Very, very well done museum and did a excellent job of showing this tragic time in human history.  I would highly recommend it for anyone.  While it is in Skokie and not downtown Chicago, it is worth the extra time to get there.

Later, after we enjoyed a pasta dinner, we settled in for some serious card playing.  Well not really serious, but we did try.  Then it was Sunday and after brunch it was time to head home.  It was great to catch up with John and Linda, check in on all their kids doings, and enjoy some balmy winter weather.  We came home to rain and decided to simply spend the evening catching up on some reading and watching the NFL games - go Eagles (flashing back to our years in Philadelphia).

Finally a Little Snow

We had a busy weekend as Kathy and John were visiting.  The original reason was to celebrate Kathy's milestone birthday but the celebration got added to when Kathy and John became first time grandparents.  So there were lots of trips back and forth to the hospital in between which we squeezed some birthday celebrations.  We played a couple of rousing games of dominos, which turns out is a lot more fun than I would have imagined.  But that could possibly due to my limited imagination at this point in my life.  It also could have been the alcohol, because much like Yatzee, we found that alcohol really improves the games enjoyment.  Anyway, we capped off the birthday celebrations with Sunday brunch at Lake Park Bistro where the sun was out, the lake was beautifully blue, and the birthday girl welcomed another decade.

Then on Monday came some snow.  We have had a fairly low snow winter so far.  Just a couple of light snowfalls of an inch or so, but nothing I would even consider breaking out the snowblower for.  Monday into Tuesday brought a one-two punch with a snowstorm moving through the area and then due to its rotation, lake effect snow.  So we landed up with somewhere around 6-8 inches.  Enough to finally break out the cross country ski gear and get a few miles in gliding through the snow - well we mostly just walk on skis, but in our minds we are gliding.  It was nice to get out and enjoy the winter a bit instead of just bearing with the cold.

A Winter Ice Wonderland

Or maybe it should be an icy winter wonderland, either way, with the very cold weather we have been having Lake Michigan has created beautiful ice sculptures using the trees that line the lake shore.  The water has been splashing up and then freezing on the trunk and limbs and with the extended cold the ice has built multiple icicle displays that have become a major destination for snapping photos.  We took a walk on Friday afternoon to join the crowd in capturing them before they melted.  One fun item, Jo submitted the photo to the left to our local newspaper (they have a photo of the day on the back page of the main section) and it actually made it into the paper today.  She can now claim to be a published photographer!

We spent a quiet weekend at home, for once.  We did some cooking, exercising, reading, and getting our fill of playoff football - no Green Bay Packers this year, but plenty of other games to enjoy.  We decided to brave the cold, a bit, and headed downtown to see the Pabst mansion.  This is the house that the owner of Pabst built in the late 1880's on Grand Avenue which at the time was the place to live in Milwaukee (Grand Avenue is now named Wisconsin and is probably a bit less grand than it was in the 1880's). We learned a lot about Pabst, most notably is that he didn't actually start the brewery that became associated with his name.  It was Jacob Best who was running the Best Brewery - Frederick Pabst married into the Best family and eventually took over the brewery.  That aside, Frederick and Maria built a gorgeous 20,000 sq. ft. home that has been slowly returned to its former glory.

The only other noteworthy event for the week, was I headed over to Madison to meet with our construction team.  Most of the demolition work has been completed and we spent a couple of hours deciding on where things should go now that we can see what lies underneath - which since the sub-structure is from a 1924 hotel is pretty interesting.  We are having to make some compromises on some of desired wall and ceiling designs as there seems to be utility lines running willy-nilly all around the walls and random large blocks of foot thick concrete in the ceilings.  But we think everything we were hoping to accomplish will still be doable - but we are keeping our fingers crossed in the meantime.

The Demolition Phase

The work on the condo is ongoing and thought it might be fun to post a few photos.  The demolition portion of the work is almost complete.  The place looks sad as it is missing floors, walls, and lights.  But before too long it will start to come together in our vision - which we hope will work.  The biggest change, at least for us, is the opening up of the foyer.  We removed a low hanging ceiling and post that were blocked a lot of the light into the foyer.  Here are some before and after photos.

We also but our time capsule into the walls.  We always bury a plastic bag with various items from the year whenever we do a renovation (all four of our previous and current houses have one buried somewhere within them) along with a note from us.  Not sure if any have ever been found, but that is part of the fun.

Foyer with Post

New Foyer - Sans Post

Master Bath

Master Bath

The Not So Warm Time After Christmas

I realize that if you are going to live in Wisconsin (of for that matter any of the farther northern states) that you shouldn't complain about the winters.  But when you don't have a garden to fill blog posts with, you might as well as use the weather.  Since we got home, to say that the weather has been challenging is an understatement.  We haven't really broke ten degrees in the last ten days (ok, there were a couple of 11's and 12's, but I'm a scientist, I'm allowed to round down).  But Santa was nice by providing me new winter gear along with hand, feet, and sole warmers I should manage to make it through another winter season.

Jo took off the week between Christmas and New Years and we filled it with a couple of trips to Madison for basketball games (both wins - yeah!), watching football games (Badgers won the Orange Bowl - yeah), and general goofing off around home.  Oh, almost forgot to add - shoveling snow as we had a couple of one inch snowfalls just to keep the snow shoveling muscles in shape.  We squeezed in a trip to the Art Museum to see the latest exhibit - good exhibit showing the evolution of art from around the impressionist period up to surrealism.  I did discover, the cubism and surrealism really don't appeal to my sense of art - I guess I want people and things to look like people and things.  Not random blocks with an occasional eye thrown in.  It does make me wonder if people that did cubism needed stronger medicine to control the visions their minds were seeing.  The attached photo is looking out on the frozen bay off of Lake Michigan from the museum.

While we were in Madison we had Christmas number 2 exchanging gifts with Kathy and John.  We both received great gifts (two highly desired books and wifi extender for me, nice top for Jo).  We also got to catch up a little with our niece and nephew who were enjoying a bit of a break from their teaching jobs. 

Warm Christmas

I'm a little behind in posting since I decided to enjoy the holiday break and not spend time at the computer.  We headed off to sunny - and most importantly, warm - New Mexico to spend the Christmas break with my parents.  They called in special weather, since the weather forecast a couple of days before we came was for temperatures in the 30's.  Fortunately when we got there, the day time temps were in the 50's or 60's.  This became especially nice once you read below about what we returned to Wisconsin to face.

We had a great time in New Mexico relaxing, reading, working our way through all our favorite Mexican restaurants, and playing cards.  On the card front, for one of the first times, Mom and I were the big winners.  Usually, we draw horribly and have gone down to defeat after defeat to Jo and Dad.  But this time we came out victorious in the overall card game count.  And yes, we plan to lord it over them for the rest of the year.  No reason to be a gracious winner when you only manage to do it once every five or six years.  Who will remember how bad of winners we were by the next time we are the overall winners. 

On Christmas eve we set out the customary luminaries that folks in New Mexico use to light the way for Santa Claus (I'm sure that's not the real reason but it sounds like the best use of them to me).  And on Christmas day we exchanged gifts with Jo and I picking up some very nice clothes along with the ever fun stocking stuffers. 

But all too soon it was time to pack up to head home to very frigid temperatures.  When we left Albuquerque it was 60 degrees.  When we landed in Milwaukee it was -3.  Yes a 60 degree temperature swing in about six hours.  Needless to say, our bodies were not happy.  But the car started so that is always a good sign.