Is it really February

Old man winter decided to take a few weeks off and let us have some absolutely beautiful weather to get everyone out of their winter blues.  We don't usually expect to have temperatures in the mid to high 50's in February.  The truly amazing part was that we managed to have warm temperatures with sunny skies.  Usually this time of year when we get warm temperatures it is usually due to cloud cover locking in any heat.  Regardless of why it was warm, we tried to take advantage of it by talking a couple of nice long walks and getting our bikes out for a ride out to the baseball stadium.

Jo was in Phoenix for part of the week finishing up the last of her regional meetings and didn't arrive home until early Saturday morning.  So after sleeping in a bit we finished our morning exercise routine and headed out to find a place for lunch that involved a reasonably long walk.  We ended up in Shorewood eating at a new restaurant that had our favorites - hamburgers with shakes.  The weather was perfect for eating outside and afterwards to help justify the milkshakes we took the long way home.  The rest of the day was spent catching up on some chores around the house.

Sunday morning we hauled the bikes out of the garage, reinflated the very flat tires, and took to the road/bike paths for a ride out past Miller Park.  While noticeably cooler near the lake, once we were inland a bit it was a perfect temperatures for a ride.  The only hard thing will be when it suddenly decides it is time to go back to more seasonable temperatures and snow starts coming down again.  The warm spell certainly makes you start thinking spring.

The picture at the top was our "reward" for riding our bikes.  No point in exercising if you aren't going to let yourself eat back all the calories you burn.  It is a smore's bake (milk chocolate chips on the bottom, marshmellows on top and heated until nicely brown - eat with graham crackers) - YUM.

Dancing the Night Away

We decided to take advantage of Jo actually being in town for the entire weekend and headed over to Madison to check up on our homestead there.  We hadn't been able to make it to Madison for almost six weeks and we were happy to see everything still standing, no water dripping, and our puzzle still waiting for a few more pieces to be inserted.  After dropping everything off we headed out for dinner at a local brew pub to enjoy a burger and fish fry (we shared).  My brandy old fashioned and Jo's cosmo hit the spot although we had seats near the door and we both felt cold for the rest of the night.  We did try to ward off the cold with a brisk walk down State Street on a search for a meaningful dessert which we found with a hot peanut butter/chocolate chip cookie from Insomnia Cookies.

We woke to a wonderfully warm day - at least for February in Wisconsin - and headed down State St. to get some breakfast and to buy some tickets to an evening show at the Overture Center (hence the title of this post).  Afterwards we worked on a little on our condo renovation plans before walking over to the Vilas Zoo to meet Kathy for lunch and a tour of the zoo.  The Madison Zoo is a great zoo for a town the size of Madison and with free admission certainly makes it a must see stop.  That and I remain amazed at the incredible diversity of animals on this planet.  We then spent the afternoon putting in a few more pieces of the afore mentioned puzzle before grabbing a porta salad at Paisans for dinner before the show.

So about the show, we thought we were going to see a play about a Russian folk tale that roughly follows the Cinderella story line - at least as far as two ugly stepsisters, a nice and lovely girl, a mean witch.  It was titled "Baba Yaga" which I presume is the name of the folk tale.  What we had failed to notice in our reading about the "play" is that is was actually the Russian folk tale as told through modern dance.  We did enjoy the show, but mostly because it gave us time to muse about the different paths people take in life and what really excites them.  For instance, modern dancers.  But it was a good show with a lot of talented dancers (at least I thought they were, but what do I know about talent in relation to modern dancing) and it left us talking about it for the rest of the evening - so it must have been worth our time.  But thank goodness for the narrator otherwise we wouldn't have had a clue what was going on.

A Weekend of Sports

The temperatures have moved back to normal so our ten days of 40-50 degree weather is over - probably until April.  While we are above average for precipitation we are below our usual snow amounts since most of what fell in January was rain.  It would be nice to get a couple of nice snow falls so we could get in a little more cross country skiing.

We spent most of the weekend at various sports arenas around town.  Friday night we headed to the UW Panther's arena to watch our minor league hockey team, the Admirals.  Fortunately this time we didn't have a puck come wizzing by our heads and it was a great game with the home town team winning.  After the game we got to enjoy a concert by Daya - interesting what accompanies minor league sports to draw in a crowd.  Daya gave a good performance and we amazingly knew three of her songs.  I'm probably not going to rush out and buy her album but the songs we knew, we liked.

Saturday it was back downtown to watch the Milwaukee Bucks take on the Boston Celtics.  Exciting game as the Bucks managed to tie the game up with seconds to go to send the game into overtime.  They ultimately lost in overtime, but we still enjoyed the evening eating pizza and chatting with some of Jo's HR team.

The rest of the weekend was given over to a few chores and mostly just catching up on some reading and, of course, a nap.  I can't seem to read without my eyes closing anymore - it's great to get a little more sleep, but does make it hard to get to the end of a book.

Big Sky Really Lives Up to Its Name

We enjoyed a long weekend hitting the slopes in Big Sky, Montana.  A friend of Jo's from work, Beth and Scott (Beth is the work connection), had invited us to stay with them at their get-away in Big Sky.  So we scoured the calendar to find a long weekend where we could make it squeezed between Jo's early year travel and headed there last weekend.  We started out on Wednesday but hit a snag in getting out of Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Bozeman - our plane had maintenance issues coming in to Milwaukee and didn't make it until well after our connection left for Bozeman.  So after 3 hours at the airport we headed home to try it all again the following day.  We did get to enjoy an extra day at the gym and Jo decided to take the day of vacation anyway so we had a nice morning together before heading back to the airport for round two.  Fortunately, this time worked and we made into Big Sky around 11:30 at night.


We woke to beautiful, sunny skies although temperatures hovering around five to ten degrees.  Regardless, we bundled on the layers (and I'm talking layers - I started with four and landed up with five on later days) and headed out with Beth and Scott to ski a new mountain - at least for us.  We had a great day skiing and Jo and I were both amazed at how fast we remembered how to ski since it had been almost 10 years since we last hit the slope.  Big Sky is a really large ski area and there were lots of nice intermediate runs for us to wear our legs out on.  On the following days we explored the various runs on our own so Beth and Scott could tackle some of the more challenging Big Sky terrain - and there is some really challenging terrain there.  We found a few runs that Jo fell in love with since they mixed a few challenging parts with some wide open, flatter areas that she felt perfectly matched her skiing skill level.  By the end, we felt we had covered the mountain fairly well, but there wasn't anyway in three days that we could have hit just all the easy and intermediate runs - not to mention the hard and really hard areas that we avoid like the plague.

On the keeping warm front, I never managed to find a solution to my cold fingers.  Glove warmers kept my hands warm, but my fingers still froze.  So I spent most of the time on the lifts with my fingers pulled inside of my gloves while trying to manage not to have my gloves go flying off into some inhospitable terrain below the lift.  My toes were always cold in the morning, but fine in the afternoon - never figured out what happens after lunch that suddenly starts blood flowing to my feet.  I finally broke down and put in foot warmers which kept my lower digits nice and toasty.  Fortunately, Jo doesn't suffer from poor extremity circulation - yet.

Each evening after coming in from the mountain we hit the hot tub to restore some feeling to our limbs and then enjoyed a wonderful home cooked meal that Beth graciously prepared - we offered to help, really.  All to soon, it was time to pack up and head home but it felt good to spend the days flying down the slopes under crystal blue skies and breathing fresh mountain air.