A Little Cross Country Skiing

We headed over to Madison on Friday so Jo could finally see the progress on our condo and to celebrate her sister's birthday with a little pampering - massage and pedicure.  This is the first time Jo has been to the condo in over a month and there were quite a few changes I had made that we finally were able to get her stamp of approval.  We are really happy with the newly opened up foyer/kitchen as there is much more light streaming into the area.  Of course, there is still a long way to go, but the lights are being roughed in, the new furnace is installed, and the rough plumbing is almost all done.  We have hit a few surprises, but so far have managed to find a reasonable work around.

The biggest surprise has been the fireplace for the family room.  We had been planning to use one of the new, more modern looking linear fireplaces.  As we are planning to have the TV above it, our thinking was this would allow us to get the TV as low as possible, since it sure seemed that a linear fireplace would not be as tall.  Well we were wrong.  Turns out that after multiple exchanges with the fireplace folks, we figured out that the old standard rectangular units actually are less space consuming and don't require as much vertical space - go figure.

Anyway, after Jo and Kathy's spa day on Saturday, we headed home right in the middle of a snow storm.  It took us about 30-45 minutes longer to complete the trip with a lot more stress, but we did manage to successfully get home without incident.  This snow storm gave us the opportunity to get up Sunday morning and get in some cross country skiing at Lake Park.  Unfortunately, the wind had picked up leading to drifting conditions that created some interesting skiing conditions as there were alternating low spots and snow drifts.  But we had fun getting in a little over an hour of exercise before heading home to some hot chocolate and the fun of removing all that snow from the driveway.