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Another week going by quickly,  well maybe because I started out on vacation.  And I have not gotten caught up at work yet.  But the good news it has gone by quickly!   Now if I can slow it down for the weekend.    Flights home were good and uneventful.   For a change!  I brought brother in law John home with me.  So he and I are batch’ing it.  The girls are in New Mexico.   Marie still gets discouraged she is not healed already, and I remind her she just had major surgery.   I think she is still doing great.  They have been out and about, and she pays for some of that the next day.  She is healing and stretching.  They did not take the staples out this week and wanted to wait until Monday,  so they go back to the doctors office then.   Otherwise things are working well!

Unfortunately it has been dry in New Mexico for several years now, and they have some fires already this spring.  So we hope they can get some rain.   There is a couple of pictures from Rio Rancho looking at the Sandia mountains.   Rio Rancho is up on a mesa,  and Albuquerque is in a bowl between the mesa and the mountains.   So from either side you can look down on the lights of the city.  Very pretty country.   And see if you can tell which picture is from home?  Actually there was someone out fishing Tuesday afternoon when I got home.  but by today there is a lot of water out there and the ice is very black.  So with some rain this weekend that should be the end of it.  There has not been much wind, and that is OK.  We don’t need it crashing into shore.

So down to Milwaukee Friday night.   Stay with Mom and do some shopping for her.   She likes that.  And then get home and try to clean up in the yard Saturday afternoon.   It should be nice and warm here.  but lots of rain on Sunday.   Enjoy your weekend.

We are in wonderful New Mexico.  The weather has been fantastic.   I am hoping the top of my head does not start peeling from the sun burn.  Very windy today but still warm.  Unfortunately some fires in New Mexico, as they have been badly in need of rain.  And the winds are fanning the fires.

The great news is Marie is home.  A little longer than we would have liked, a lot more pain than Marie would have liked.  But she has been through a lot of cutting, and has a lot of healing to do.   She is doing great.  Today was much better than yesterday.    The body is working well, and the healing is taking place.   It will take some time.  She commented this on my last post.

mtdroz says:Hi all   Finally got home from the hospital Sat. afternoon.  This surgery may have been the easiest for the surgeon but definitely not for me. It was the most painful. And what can I attribute it all to, not so much to the surgery as to dreaded GAS GAS AND MORE GAS. At least that’s what the people in the know told me. I still have a lot of incision pain. I thank you for all of your prayers all along the process. I hope this is the end of this journey for me. Hoping I can travel soon. Talk to you again soon Marie

My bad news is I head back to Wisconsin on Monday.  Looks like it had been raining and flood warnings at home.  Hope everyone is doing well and staying dry.  And I don’t have to clean any snow off the car.

Made it into the week.  At least it has not snowed yet.  But the temperatures are in the single digits at night.   That is supposed to get better by the end of the week.

Chris doesn’t have to worry about that.  We got her up at 3:30 am Monday and to the Green Bay airport by 5 am.   Her flights went well and she made it to Albuquerque just fine.  The weather is much better there!

Marie’s surgery went well   There were able to tie the intestine together with a fairly minimal surgery.  Fairly.  The surgeon still had to stitch up some muscles that are giving her a lot of pain.  Saturday she felt great,  but I think the drugs were still working well.  By Sunday the healing has started,  which brings the pain.   but each day is a little better.   She is on liquids and jello, which she is not happy about.  But they need to keep monitoring and waiting for everything to start working properly.  So just have to keep waiting for now.

I go down Thursday morning,  for a long weekend, coming home on Monday.   Hopefully we have Marie home then,  but will wait for what the doctors have to say.  I do the same flights Chris did,  so will be up early again.   I can’t wait for the warm weather though, and hope to spending that with Marie in the sunshine.

So hope you all get through the week and weekend OK.   Enjoy

So other than I get a check from a company here, is there a reason I live in Wisconsin?   Spring has started, I guess we are not to April showers yet.   But we did have some showers starting yesterday,  sleet, snow, hail.        Today has been very windy and the temp now says 23 degrees as it continues to drop.   I tried to clean the drive, since it is not going to get above freezing for the next week it won’t melt soon.  And that slush at the bottom will freeze into a real mess.    But plowing a gravel driveway with slush on it is no fun.  I set the plow up to try and not dig into it.  I spent part of the last week trying to distribute gravel that was pushed off the drive over the winter,  back on the drive.   Oh well.   Looking at the pictures can you imagine most of the snow was gone from the drive a couple of days ago?

Even the turkeys kept coming around today trying to find the gravel.  I stayed home today.  My boss said I can work from home some days, since I won’t get a raise he can let me save some gas money, which is good of him.  And today was a good day not to bother trying to drive in.  And I worked more hours today than usual!

So I just did a cleaning, and brought enough wood in for the night.  This weekend Chris and I will spend some time together, she leaves for Albuquerque Monday morning.   Marie has surgery on Friday,  we are praying for an easy successful surgery.  And she will be home and ready to travel soon.

Wow, already a weekend coming to an end!  Time to start thinking of preparing for Monday morning,  well maybe I will need a beer before then.   And will try to catch the Marquette game tonight.   So the weekend NOT over yet.  the Wisconsin team came through and lives for another weekend,  let’s hope Marquette can pull another upset.

Last week went quickly also.   Last weekend we had some fun and relaxing.   Went to a great local restaurant in Borth last Saturday night,  and then listened to some good live music.   Tuesday night was more good live music in Milwaukee.   Willy played like he was much younger than 78, and c’mon Wally he never crooned a song!   I am glad we went, there was some issues with the Riverside’s sound system, and the band did not sound like they had it all together at the start;  but it kept getting better and they worked their way into a groove.  And it was an interesting crowd.    We had started the night with a nice dinner at John Hawk’s Pub with John and Mary.   The only downer of the night was driving home at the end!

Short sleep Tuesday night I decided to skip the homebrew meeting Wednesday night.  Sounds like I missed a good one.   But Thursday I stopped at O’Marro’s to have a couple to St Patrick.   Forget that green beer stuff though,  had a great Belgian La Choeff on tap and another great beer from the Breuery in California.     Then headed home for some of Chris’s super corned beef and cabage, as after 2 they would have been way too easy to continue.

Friday night brought another fish fry at St Rapheal’s.   This was a very busy week, as per history for them.   They served until 7:30 and it took most of that time to catch up with orders.   Before the end we had run out of baked potato’s, baked Haddock, macaroni and cheese (for the kids), and cole slaw.   So it was a bigger night than the historical data would say!  Chris and I ended up stopping at Culvers on the way home to pick up a couple of fish fries!   So hopefully that continues for them through lent.

Saturday I spent some time on the computer.  We have used Outlook at home for our e-mail client and as our Outlook version has become older we have had more issues.  And we have never liked Charters web version, even though they have made improvements.  At work they are moving our Corporate e-mail to G Mail, and I am on the early adopter team to check it out.  I like what I see.  So also knowing we will move out of this house at one point and lose Charter anyway, I decided to switch my e-mail address now.   So I opened a G-mail account,  rtomb78@gmail.com .   And started work on importing my contact list and cleaning up years of contacts.   And listing as many companies that I can think of that have my e-mail address and deciding whether to unsubscribe or change the address.    There is a lot of them to think of!  But no hurry as the other account will remain active so I can go back and check for things I have missed!  And Chris will eventually change over, and I will upgrade Word Excel and not worry about Outlook.

Saturday afternoon we headed to Milwaukee.  Did some shopping for Mom, and met Skip and Claire for a nice meal.   I bought a certificate for a restaurant on a MPTV online auction earlier in the year.   Mia Famiglia on Forest Home ave.   Very good Italian,  nice place and well presented.  We all enjoyed.   We will go back.   And we all went back to Mom’s to spend some time with her.  And Skip and I got to watch the end of the Wisconsin game.     This morning a few things for Mom and she took Chris and I to brunch at her place.  After too much good food Chris and I headed home.    And now you here from me here.  The fireplace is going, taking the cold dampness out of the air.  Luckily it is not raining buckets here like it was a good part of the way home.  The water draining out of the woods is barely staying below the road the way it is!   The snow piles are continuing to get smaller.  But there were a lot of people on the ice yesterday,  so I think there will be ice on the lake for a number of weeks to come.  So I sit here with a glass of Bloody Mary Meade made by a friend of mine.  Spicy and warming.  So I won’t be overly productive the rest of the evening,  but what the heck it is the weekend.

Enjoy!

Hey,  we made it to another Saturday!   Always feels good.  Ok, I know you retiree’s lose track of the day of the week.  Congratulations Mary Koss on deciding to join that group.  I can’t wait to get there!  Guess I should spend more time deciding how I will pay for that!

It was an OK week.  No major issues at work.  We had a SOB board meeting this week, which is always a fun night.  I wish I could remember all the good beers we tried!  The weather does seem to be getting better.  Had a wet heavy snow but it did not drop to zero the next day.   The sun was out Thursday and the car even felt warm when I got in it. Today cloudy, a few snowflakes and temp is 37.  but a cold wind 37, blowing strong out of the west.

Our driveway is a mess though.   I scraped off some gravel plowing snow, and the frost is out of the upper crust so it is full of moisture.   When they did the water piping a couple of years back the trucks got a lot of dirt in our gravel, so it is rather muddy.   I really need to have an excavator come in and scrape out a number of inches and put a good gravel base down.   I can’t keep just adding gravel to the top, I want to keep a decent grade flowing away from the garage.  so another project on the horizon.

We have planned a trip to New Mexico to see Marie.   They had told her that her next surgery would not be until May, which was very disappointing.   So we were going down to give her a break.   the day after we made our reservations the doctor’s office called and said they managed to move her surgery up to March 25th, which is great!  And it works out well,  Chris is going down March 28 and I go down March 31.  Now Chris won’t come home with me though,  she will stay with Marie and see how this recovery goes.  So something to look forward to for all of us!  And hopefully it won’t be long and Marie can travel!    She also bought a new computer, a lap top.  And is getting internet access at home, rather than dial up!    I was just setting up Skype on Chris’s computer so they can talk!

Tonight we will go to church.  We won’t have to get up in the morning, since we set the clocks ahead tonight.   And  a friend is playing with his band
SNB at a bar the other side of Omro tonight and we will stop there for awhile.    Sunday I am looking forward to some relaxing and some sunshine.  It will probably be a good morning for bloody mary’s.

The week ahead we go to Milwaukee one night to see Willie Nelson with Koss’s,  I have a homebrew club meeting, and will have to decide whether to stop for a beer on St Patrick’s day.    I used to do a whole afternoon and evening out on St Patricks,  must be getting older!  And before you know it I will be welcoming another weekend!

Enjoy!

We made it through a pretty good week.  Work went well, the weather is not terrible.  Not great mind you,  I would easily take New Mexico or Florida right now.   But I need the check to keep coming in every week so Wisconsin is where we are at!  Today is supposed to be cloudy,  it is 29 degrees right now which is warmer than I expected for today.   We are supposed to continue with below normal temperatures the next week,  and the normal should be in the upper 30’s right now.  The good news  to that is if we are below the average,  we should get some above normal temps coming up,  if I remember my math class that’s what those averages are supposed to be about.  Of course you could say that they average over 50 years,   but we will think per season.   Winter is too long here.

My daughter found my camera cord that I left in Florida,  so I was able to download a few pics from my camera.   Mom’s 90th birthday and a few snow pictures.  I will put a few on the album page,  click on albums at the top of this page.  The view as slide show doesn’t seem to work, so click on a picture, then at the bottom of the picture you can click on the arrows to see the rest.

I didn’t get a lot of replies on my political rant,  I won’t subject you to more today.  Wisconsin continues to stay in the National news.  I think the short term outcome is already decided, so we may as well get it over with and can see something else on the news.  Let’s focus on the UW Wisconsin basketball team.   Much more positive.   They are playing Ohio State Sunday in what should be a good game,  and will likely meet in tournament play, which should be even a better game!

So we are heading to Milwaukee this afternoon.   We will stop by Al Miller’s tonight, and have brunch with Mom on Sunday.  And I look forward to some sunshine tomorrow!   For now I better go check my fire, and I will have to bundle up against the north wind and bring some firewood up from the wood pile.   Have a great weekend!

Almost to the end of February,  and a few weeks until Spring! Things have got to be getting better, right?  But we must have had another 4 inches of snow yesterday.  It was coming down hard and heavy when we went to church last night.  Actually light and fluffy.  So it was easy to move.  But the roads became slippery quickly.  I cleaned it up this morning and it cleaned up well.  And yesterday was a cold day in the the teens,  and today is warming up to the upper 20’s.  This week looks to be decent temperatures as well.

I am happy to have my wife back.  She got in Thursday night, and even though the first leg of her flight was behind schedule she did get into Appleton early.    So we have been getting reacquainted!   And spending some time at home.  Although we were out to church last night and then out for a bite to eat at Fratello’s.   And we ran into some friends there which was a nice conversation.

The National news continues to spotlight Wisconsin, for better or worse.  While I do believe the public unions need to  get with reality and give in to retirement and healthy pay ins as most of us have,  I still think it sucks the way our Gov has gone about it.  And it seems much more about payback to the unions that did not support him in the election.   I have never been a union member, and for most of my life have thought the unions were too strong and out of control.  But I have always acknowledged it was because of the unions that I was paid well and given good benefits,  because the companies I have worked for had to compete against the union shops.   And the recession confirmed for me that many companies’ management unchecked will let their own greed take over.  Are we in for a better world if we break the unions?  Is our life today better with lower wages, more health costs, and 50+ somethings getting their jobs cut in favor or younger employees at less cost:   rather than the careers of our fathers who put in long careers but had a relatively secure employment, pensions and health insurance in retirement?    Some how I think our children’s future is not for the better.  There was fan fare last week about 160 jobs being added in the area – tele marketing.   Some how I don’t think they replace the many paper mill jobs that have been lost to China.  It is acknowledged that our economy is driven by consumer spending; if 75% of us our left with $10 per hour jobs without benefits who will keep the economy going?  Oh well.  Enough ranting.    I do have to thank our assembly man Dick Spanbauer, one of our old neighbors.   While he wants a balanced budget  he could not go along with taking back collective bargaining from public employees and voted his heart, one of the few Republicans in the state to vote against the bill.  I have to give him credit for that.

So this week will include a ride to Milwaukee Wednesday night for a stock club meeting.  With our aging members we decided to take some months off during bad weather so they would not have to drive.  I am not sure our hiatus was long enough,  but we will start up again for March.

Other than that more fun at work.  And I think we work at church Friday night.   St Rapheal’s has fish fries for Lent and we normally put a couple of nights of work in.  They do a nice job and serve around 1000 dinners.  Food is good!

So I hope your week is good!  Enjoy life!

Thanks everyone for the kind thoughts on Mom’s birthday.  Because of the impending storm we had to change up our plans a little,  Skip and Claire and I had supper with her Saturday evening instead of Sunday brunch.  And niece Denise and friend stopped by afterward for Asti and cheese cake.  Mom was in good spirits and seemed to enjoy the evening.   I ended up leaving late Saturday night rather than wait and see what the roads would be like in the morning.    As it turned out I probably would have been OK,  as things started later in the morning.   I went to 9 am mass here and when I got home from mass ,that’s when it started snowing, and kept coming hard after that.   We had a wet heavy snow.  By early afternoon I think we had 6 inches.   And late in the evening we had more than that again,  I measured 8 inches on our walk.  So they say Oshkosh had around a foot, I disagree!  Because I cleaned up another 4 inches or so this morning. and the damn snow is still falling.  I cleaned the driveway at 4 pm thinking it was over, and it started snowing harder.   So I will hit it in the morning for my morning exercise.      I worked from home today.  All the major highways were labeled icy or snow covered and slippery.  Since I can work from home; why kill myself getting in,  I spent too many years doing that.    So hopefully by morning we are done with the snow for the week.   Although they say some light snow Wednesday night.

I had the roofs all clean and the yard and drive were all clean.  Now there is more snow than before the melt!  Chris and Marie are having better weather,  and MJ has off of school this week and is in Florida.  All days this week will hit 80 there.   I can leave this behind!   MJ helped me out today.  We had our cabinets installed in Florida.  Looks like things went well.   Everything looks like expected and I can’t wait to get there to see it.   Our friends helped out by keeping an eye on the installer.  They sent me some pictures this week of when Chris and I were down for the new year.

Streaming some music while I write.  If you like some light jazz and a mix of mellow oldies and new songs,  try http://www.theavenue91.com/en-us/default.aspx  and click on listen live.   Good stuff.  They call it a non profit, trying to benefit and feature other local non-profits.  Jazz local Janet Planet is a DJ, and Steve March Torme, and David Caldwell.  So you will hear those artists fairly often.  Which is fine by me.  Stevie Wonder to Tony Bennett to….

So I was up early this morning exercising in the snow, and will be in the morning again.  So I think tonight will really be an early night.   Saturday and Sunday I thought I would sleep late, but that didn’t work.  I am not in the mode of some of my retired friends!

So can’t we play the Super Bowl again?   For 2 weeks Green Bay news stations had all Packer news for nightly news.   Now I just hear how well our lawmakers are working together for solutions – NOT.   Just trying to punish each other and political groups.  No sign of improvement.   So I guess I can skip tonights news AND weather.

Hope you all are fine.  Staying safe and warm.  Enjoy your week, life is short with no guarantees.

Mom’s birthday is Sunday.   It will be her 90th.  She is doing well, some hearing problems but at 90 I think she is doing great.  Living on her own, in her own apartment.  She has her moments, as we all do.  She enjoys her apartment,  and some time with gossip with the girls.  So we all take these good days, because as with all of us, we don’t know what tomorrow may bring.  Sunday we will celebrate!

Our weather was unbelievable this week.  Very warm, after 42 days below freezing.   Lot’s of snow melted this week.  Our road is going underwater.  All the top frost came out of our gravel driveway, so it’s a sloppy mess.   The sturgeon fisherman are still out on the lakes,  but the holes must be growing larger.  Almost a good thing that tomorrow things start to cool back down again.  We need to slow down the thaw,  as much as I hate the cold.  And I could take a pass on the possible snow storm starting Sunday night.

Music last weekend was great.   I spent a few hours at Kodiak Jacks listening to SNB.   And on Sunday there were great musicians at the fundraiser for Jim Lundstrom.  And a pretty good turn out.  And last night my homebrew club,  the SOB’s, had our annual beer dinner at Stone Cellar Brewpub in Appleton.  They always do a tremendous job for us.  Smoked Corn Jalapeno crab cake with avocado cream, paired with a members rye beer.   Wonderful!  Very moist with a light crab flavor, and a touch of spice.  And the avocado cream was a perfect compliment to the spice.  Then a hopped up gumbo.   Nice and spicy, chicken and sausage, a good tomato base, and some nice spice.  Then the duet entree.  A stone cellar alt braised short rib.   Marinated 3 days with alt beer, and I believe some garlic.  And a morel jus,  one of the members goes morel picking every spring.  And the other half of the duet a black sesame mahi mahi with Jonah crab butter.  A wonderful light flavor.  Served with some alt of course.  And a Chocolate Stout gourmet cupcake for dessert, with a members wonderful smoked coffee stout.   What a night.

So tonight I stuck to some veggies and a Yam.  Back to my diet tonight!  I have not been sticking to it,   but it helps me cleanse some days!  More exercise would help.  I have had trouble getting up early enough to stoke the fire and get a half hour on the treadmill in the morning.  So need to get on an evening routine.  Without Chris here I seem to keep busy each night and not get to bed early.  tonight another example.  So I guess I should stop boring you and get ready for the morning!    Marie continues to improve.  Chris plans to come home next Thursday night.  They will miss each other, and Chris will head back when the next surgery is set.  Which we hope is soon so Marie can put the surgeries behind her.

Take care,  have a great weekend.