I just love long weekends, don’t you? This past one was no exception, it being the Labor Day holiday and all.
Friday night we saw the Tedeschi Trucks Band in concert at the Riverside Theater downtown (side note: if you ever have the chance to see live music at either the riverside or pabst theaters in milwaukee, do! they are the most awesome, intimate venues). They were amazing!! Susan Tedeschi is an excellent bluesy/jazzy singer, and man, can she play a mean guitar, too. Her husband, Derek Trucks, is also the guitarist for the Allman Brothers. So, duh, you know he’s good. But the best part? Susan wore blue strappy stilettos on stage for the entire show! That’s my girl.
Saturday morning I got my hair trimmed and colored (sayonara grays!), then we went up to the Sheboygan County Fair that afternoon. If there’s a Hot Wisconsin Cheese stand within 100 miles you know we have to get our fix. Fortunately the rain held off for us up there, because it poured here for the better part of the day. Pushing D around in her stroller in mud and barn slop would not have been pleasant.
Sunday and Monday were a continuation of the culinary adventures that always occur on our holiday weekends, and this time we nommed on 2 rounds of surf ‘n turf. Yumola! Sunday night we had our good friends A and S over, which is always a blast. They are expecting their first baby, a boy, due in January, so I always love catching up with S and seeing how things are going. And of course D had to show off her walking and running skills, along with all her toys. Monday night was round 2 of our meaty delicacies, for just me and R. Who says you can’t enjoy this stuff just cuz?
The weather has taken a decidedly cooler turn, too. Yesterday was quite brisk in the breeze, and the nights are downright chilly. I do love Fall, but this year I’m just especially sad to see Summer go. I love being outside in the sun and warmth. Maybe we’ll get some wonderful Indian Summer days to stretch the season out just a little bit longer…
First of all, who’s sufficiently stuck to their seats? It was 83 on the temperature gauge this morning on our way up to 92 today, with about 400% humidity, and my hair is ready to curl off my head. Blech. I was hoping we were past these days for the summer, but apparently I was mistaken. Fortunately it’s only supposed to last today, so that’s not too bad. Poor air conditioning did have to come back on, though.
But to my real point… It’s one of my favorite times of year again, people – college football season!! That and college basketball, specifically UW-Madison Badgers football and basketball, are simply wonderful. I enjoy them so much more than pro. NFL I like, but NBA? Are you kidding me? No thank you very much.
The Badgers played their season opener at home in Camp Randall last night against UNLV, and blasted ’em 51-17. Go Badgers!!
Here’s a stroll down memory lane from some of our past Badger football game appearances:
This usually happens before/after a Badger game - at the Great Dane, Oct. 16, 2010It was billed as the last "Glory Daze" for our friendsWe beat #1 OSU!! I would've LOVED to have been down on that fieldYep, we taught 'em how to Bucky. And you know this!Oct. 31, 2009 vs. PurduePurdue can kiss R's butt (we won 😉 )Our brick outside Camp RandallNov. 15, 2008 vs. Minnesota - I got to go out on the field with past letter winners. Very awesomeOct. 25, 2008 vs. Illinois - Badger Fun Day, view from a suite, amazingNov. 10, 2007 vs. MichiganOct. 28, 2006 vs. IllinoisOct. 22, 2005 vs. PurdueSept. 25, 2004 vs. Penn St.Oct. 18, 2003 vs. Purdue - look how young everyone looks!
Have a great long weekend – Happy Labor Day!
p.s. and again, run stats for the week: tuesday i ran 1.86 miles in 15:21 for an 8:15 pace, and last night i ran 2.11 miles in 17:46 for an 8:24 pace. short but sweet was the theme this week, so hopefully i can get a longer one in this weekend sometime.
When we were on vacation in Canada last month, I witnessed both the brutal and wondrous sides of nature. There was a little bird’s nest above the steps leading down from our boathouse to one of the docks, and when we arrived on the island there were 4 brand new, tiny baby Phoebes in it. A few mornings later, we opened the boathouse doors to find that the whole nest had been knocked down onto the steps, and the poor little babies were splayed all over the place. Unfortunately 1 of them did not make it, but the other 3 were amazingly still showing signs of life. So my sister M found a smallish cardboard box, put on some gloves, scooped up what remained of the nest, and fashioned a new little home for the surviving babies in that box. We put a rock in one end of it to weigh it down and placed it just off to the side of where it had fallen, in the hopes that the parents would come back and be able to see that there were still some of their offspring in there. Come on, Phoebes, your babies still need you!!
We watched that box from afar that entire day, hoping and pleading with the parents to come back and feed the youngsters in there, and lo and behold, they found it! We were absolutely thrilled. They were pretty tentative at first – like what in the world happened to our home? Where are our babies? Oh wait, they’re in this box now? Is this a trap? They would perch in the tree closest to the box and just hang out for a bit, singing their little Phoebe song, and then you’d hear the babies start peeping away. Feed us! Feed us!
Unfortunately, 1 of the 3 remaining babies perished within that first day. He was the worst-off of the trio, and M finally removed him and laid him in the garden area with the other one who didn’t survive. It was pretty clear that he wouldn’t live much longer even with the parents’ feeding, so we didn’t want them to reject the entire box nest if he was still in there. So those 2 received a nice little burial on the island, yet far enough away from the box to hopefully allow the other pair to thrive.
By the end of our stay, the Phoebes appeared to be a happy little family once again, even if reduced in members. The parents made regular trips into and out of the box, and you could see them removing the babies’ poop on their trips out, too. (i had no idea birds did this, the nest cleaning, but it makes sense. why would they want to sit in their poop all day?) It was so heart-warming to see how this little pocket of nature flourished in the face of tragedy, even if it was with a little help from us humans. The box babies would huddle together and peep when the parents were near, and it was the cutest thing ever to see them in there, heads tucked against each other, sheltering one another from whatever lie outside that box. They looked good when we left, so I sure hope they continued to grow and have maybe even moved into nests of their own by now. Or at least out of the box.
Baby Phoebes in their box nest
And another wonder of nature – human babies!! I finally met one of the 2 newest additions to our group of friends last night, Baby S, one of the most adorable little boys ever! It’s so fun that our kids will now have so many “automatic” friends with whom to grow up. I can just picture it now – the kids all corralled together playing while all us parents sit around with some drinks, most likely watching a Badgers, Brewers, or Packers game.
I currently have a spider monkey climbing around my legs. Oh no wait, it’s my daughter. My mistake. And this is almost an hour after I literally crawled out of her room on my hands and knees after putting her to bed so as not to wake her back up. ‘Twas no army crawl, mind you, but it was a crawl nonetheless. Apparently I could have back flipped my way out, for that “bedtime” lasted approximately 5 minutes. Superb, here we go again, after a grand total of 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep with her last night.
But to the real point of this post, today was the Milwaukee Challenge, that urban adventure race I mentioned, and it was awesome! It ended up being me and 4 other girls, and we were team “Jolly Green Giants”. None of us had ever participated in one of these races before, so we had no idea what to expect. The description said the top teams usually finish by about the 1.5 hour mark, so personally, I was considering a sub-2 hour finish a success. Plus, they posted hints on their Facebook page at midnight last night, and all they did was confuse the hell out of us. Here’s what we had to go on going into this thing:
360 degrees of blades
“DD”
Elroy
As You Like It 2/7
Where’s his whistle?
You’re kidding right? So let me get this straight. Each of those hints is supposed to correspond to something in Milwaukee that we had to find? Um, yeah right. I think you can see why we all had a mixture of anticipation and trepidation brewing by the time we got underway. Here we were, about to start a race that was billed as “part 5k, part ‘Amazing Race'”, and our preliminary hints were utterly vague and confusing. Sweetness.
Fortunately, once we got our sheet of actual clues at the start of the race, those ridiculous hints became much more clear and appropriate. Here’s how it worked: each team captain stood in a big circle outside Rock Bottom in downtown Milwaukee, the race staff handed each captain a sealed envelope, and when the clock struck 2:00pm everyone was able to rip open their envelope, make their way back to their respective team, and it was off to the races. Literally. There were 12 clues in all, 11 of which had to be completed for a successful finish. I must admit, as soon as we started reading through everything I was kind of lost in a cloud of wtf? Each clue was its own little paragraph, and 5 people all trying to read the same list of 12 paragraphs was slightly awkward. We finally decided that we had a good enough idea of what a couple of the clues meant, headed off in that direction, and just tried to decipher the rest as we went. It was a pretty good strategy, for we were able to complete our first handful of clues in no time. A couple were definite stumpers, and a couple of us tried using our phone-a-friends (totally allowed, per the race rules), but they turned out to be pretty much worthless. Ha, sorry phone-a-friends! But we did end up figuring all the clues out on our own.
And get this… We took 5th place!! Read that again. We, the 100% inexperienced, 110% confused team, came in in 5th place!! Out of roughly 160 teams that finished (about 170 entered). BOOM! Take that, Milwaukee. The Jolly Green Giants turned out to be a force to be reckoned with, and we Jolly Green Giant-ed all over your ass! Our official time was 69:28, and we ended up doing at least a 5k’s worth of running through downtown to get to our clues. And I think that was definitely the difference for us – those extra jogs through the streets instead of the leisurely saunters some teams were doing. It was so much fun. I was so unbelievably proud of us and just simply amazed that we did so well. None of us expected anything like that, but when we ran up to the finish line and saw they were just then beginning to bring the water bottles out for the racers and the finish line sign wasn’t even hung, I think we all got a little twinge of butterflies, like, we actually might stand a chance here! And we so did. We got 5th!! Sorry, I’m still riding that high.
And what did we get for placing 5th, you may ask? A $50 bar tab to be spent at Rock Bottom. Why yes we would like to spend that right now, thank you very much. How nice of you to offer. 1st place got $200 cash, 2nd place got $100 cash, 3rd place got $50 cash, and then both 4th and 5th places got the $50 Rock Bottom tabs. We were so stoked, I can’t even tell you. All I can say is watch out Challenge Nation – next year we’re out for blood. It’s 1st place or bust, and yes, we will knock you down and run you over to get there.
Here are pictures from our day, and I’ve tried to give you some idea of which clue we were completing in each caption. Even with a heat advisory we rocked this.
Find the "DD" duck statueFind someone from a state that starts with L, M, N, O, or PForm a pyramid in front of "The Calling" statueFind a donor brick with the same name as any team member's first, middle, last name, or last name of a U.S. PresidentFind a building built before 1900 or completed and occupied in 2011Find someone in non-WI sports apparelFind an outdoor stage and work w/another team to act out a scene from an Oscar-winning movieFind the plaque dedicated to "Crazy Legs"Find the 9' abstract referee statueUnscramble an anagram to get "Public Market", then go find the clock in the middleThen take another picture there 5 minutes laterFind the firefighter statue and pretend to put out a fire5th place, baby!See, the final list even says soPutting our prize to good useOnce again, we got 5th!!
Here’s a photographic recap of the Jimmy Buffett concert at Alpine Valley last Saturday. Once again, fun was had by all and plenty of shenanigans ensued. Unfortunately I left my phone in the grass where we were tailgating when we cleaned everything up to head into the show. Fortunately the guy who was set up next to us told me our friends had it when we got back to our car at the end of the night, so I had to go get it on Sunday afternoon once Grandma headed home. It’s always something out there…
R with the fixins for Roaring Dan dark & stormies
I will play for gumbo!
The giant tiki bar was right next to us this year - awesome!
The boys
The girls
Our group
Me & some swimmers - I was apparently overserved and finding something utterly hilarious
Tomorrow is the annual Jimmy Buffett concert at Alpine Valley, and I can’t wait! I say annual, but he did skip a year in 2005 when he played down at Wrigley Field over Labor Day weekend instead. Jerk.
I was just figuring out how many Buffett shows I have now attended, and this year will be my 8th. Sweetness! I went in 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and now this year. For some reason I can’t find any pictures from 2007 or 2009, but I know we went in 2007 because I saw my Ticketmaster order. And I know we went in 2009 because it turned into a night that will live in infamy. The weather was shit, it started raining so hard we actually left the show early, I drank an entire bottle of Jeremiah Weed sweet tea vodka mixed with lemonade then transformed into a complete and utter ass, was a bitch to R, and basically ruined the night. Ugh. Note to self – don’t drink whole bottles of liquor single-handedly anymore (not that it was ever a good idea).
Each time we go now we meet up with a woman I bartended with the year after we moved back to Milwaukee and her husband, and sometimes some of their friends from their neck of the woods. They’ve been to well over 20 Buffett shows now, and holy shit, do they bring a spread! She brings table upon table of food, we always set up a tent, there’s booze out the wazoo (which was just divine last year when i was pregnant. 1,000s of drunk, hot, sweaty Jimmy Buffett fans and me sober. awesome), and often festive accessories of some sort make an appearance. We’re not the full-on Parrothead costume types, but we do like to decorate a little for the day. I know most of the people they’ve brought through the years from the bar where we worked (which she still runs), but we are definitely in agreement that when it’s just the 4 of us we have the most fun. And tomorrow it’s going to be just the 4 of us again, plus it’s her token Saturday off this whole summer (again, that bar she runs, it has a beach bar, so summer is prime time), so look out! R’s cooking up his famous gumbo and teriyaki shrimp skewers to add to all the food they’re bringing, so we are set for a great time.
Here are some pictures from our past shows. My photos from 2001 weren’t digital so I’d have to scan one of those in for you, and frankly, you know I’m just lazy. But if I get ambitious I might toss one of the oldies in when I post this year’s recap. Your fingers are crossed, I know.
Hula R & our friend we go with G, 7-10-04
Me, R, & our friend S, 6-10-06
Me & sis A, flanked by 2 of our friends' friends, 7-19-08
R & me, 6-26-10
This show is seriously one of the most fun days of the year. Everyone’s in a good mood, everyone’s just out to have as much fun as possible, and we’ve lucked out on the weather most years (knock on wood!). Right now they’re calling for mid-70s and mostly sun tomorrow, so let’s hope they’re right! I said as long as it doesn’t rain, we’ll be golden. For slopping around in the parking lots at Alpine in the rain and mud can make for a miserable day and night.
Last night I went to a Jockey Person2Person clothing party at one of my good friend’s houses, and it was awesome. I was completely unfamiliar with that line of Jockey, but the clothes are fantastic. High quality, beyond comfortable, stylish and flattering for a woman’s body, and washable/dryable without shrinking or pilling – excellent! I ordered a pair of black modal active bootcut pants and I can’t wait until they arrive. I could seriously live in those things if it was socially acceptable to never change your pants. And what could be more fun than sharing a couple bottles of wine with girlfriends while trying on a bunch of new clothes? Yeah that’s right – nothing.
(side note – if you see anything you like in the catalog in that link above, or if you’d be interested in either hosting one of those parties or becoming a rep yourself, let me know. i’ve got the hookup)
So anyway, as we were tossing around shirts, workout tanks, dresses, and other various articles of Jockey clothing, of course the conversation turned to boobs. Why wouldn’t it in a house full of topless women? Most of us there have swum together for years, so we’ve all seen each other in more stages of undress than just bared to our bras. One girl had just had hers beautifully lifted after having her babies, and can I just say they looked spectacular!! I was of course envious of her gorgeous rack, and was lamenting the current deflated state of my own micro-rack and the fact that none of my bras fit properly anymore. Then one of the other girls said, “Thank you! That’s exactly how I felt!” Sweet – I’m not crazy or the only one who thinks her post-baby boobs have turned into little tiny niddlers! (name the movie that has that description of boobs in it and i’ll give you a cookie) The universe hasn’t singled me out with this punishment, it does happen to others! We both said how now we have to have all these different sections of bras in our collection – pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, nursing, then post-nursing. Bleh. I may as well just be wearing a training bra at this point. Again – who’s got suggestions for comfy, properly-fitting bras out there?
On the flip side, here’s where the bad validation came into play. Well not bad bad like I’m now thinking harmful thoughts or anything, but it totally cemented my notion that these things really have shrunk. This past weekend as I was vomiting out everything that’s been tumbling around in my head to R, of course I landed on how I hate the current state of affairs on my chest. I’m like seriously, there wasn’t much there to start with, but now what little I had has even disappeared in recent days. He said oh yeah right, and I’m like no, really, feel. So he did, and you know what he said? “Well, maybe they are a little smaller.” See! See?! I told you. I told him I need a boob job now when we’re done having kids and he just laughed and said don’t be silly, maybe they’ll come back. What?! Why would they just decide to come back once more tiny mouths have sucked the life out of them? I might have to get the number of my friend’s doctor who did her work, see if she also specializes in miniature versions.
I’ve heard so many women say that their boobs just kept getting bigger and bigger with each successive child they had, and I was so hoping that would be the case for me too. Ha! Yeah right, SM, you should’ve known better. That’s not how your luck works.
Boobs – you didn’t think I could talk about them so much, did you?
