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.