Busy weekend in our hometown

Last night Michaela attended her first junior high dance. They held it at the Nativity gym. Here's a group of sixth-grade friends.

Today Jamie & I went in the woods with some of the VonOepens and collected firewood. Phil and I went back out for a second load when Kelly took Jamie and Matthew trick-or-treating to the Brown St. businesses. I brought the beer, and Phil brought the brats, hot dogs, and cooker.

The wood's just about all oak & maple.

Summerish October Weekend

We arrived Friday night under the M.

Saturday saw us arise, and have a puppy party.

Dan and I went to Wally World to get our pheasant stamps. And when the season started at noon, we proceeded to scare the daylights out of the dozen or so birds on his 27 acres. We kicked up a few cocks, got a few shots, and a lot of thorn scrapes. Needless to say, we ate turkey for dinner.

The kids played on the trampoline, a lot.

Dave, Scott and I went to Potosi to pick up a playpen from Scott's parents.

We found a few geocaches. Dave placed one near the new Potosi Beer convention center. The old brewery, in the background, is being remodeled into the museum.

Sunday was the induction of 32 Knights into the 2nd and 3rd Degree. Afterwards there was a social hour and banquet. John Baxter was the honoree, and his son Dan, nephew Steve Malone, and fellow Deacon Bill Bussan gave wonderful speeches. Tyler Malone was brought into Knighthood, and the picture is of four generations of Knights: Austin Baxter, and Pat, Ron, and Tyler Malone.

We stayed until Monday, since the banquet kept us late. We left a little later than I hoped, but we followed through with the plan to take a different route than usual. One goal being to find a particular geocache at a unique natural feature, Rockbridge. State Highway 80 runs from south of Platteville to south of Marshfield. We had lunch in Richland Center, where we found out that 80 was washed out from the floods this summer. We followed the detour for a ways, and when we figured the detour wouldn't lead us back to the planned stop, Michaela (my navigator) and I took a shot with Richland County Highway I. Bingo! It was pretty cool.

Half Pop

Jamie played Pop Warner football in Mike Webster Stadium at halftime of the Hodag game tonight.

Been gettin' my geek on

I haven't blogged lately because I've been learning about my new toy. I used all my tech-time on it. Last week we got a new cell phone plan and new phones.

Shelly and I got the same model. (She tried a different one, but it didn't have the features she thought it did.) It's an LG Muziq. Dave has one. The feature I fell in love with is this: FM transmitter. Load your music on the phone, maybe up to 400 songs with a 2 Gig card, tune a nearby radio to an empty, static station, tune the phone to the same station, and your music plays there. It also has camera, internet, calendar; all the stuff my old phone had. And you can use it to make a phone call, like I did today when I called Tony & Danny.

Don't worry, you haven't missed too much of my life. Some golf, firewood cutting, beer-drinking, geocaching, kid's sports, warm weather, wet weather.

I'm back on because I just solved my last major phone-riddle, getting the pictures in full-quality to my PC. Here's a few:

They were shooting wedding pictures when we golfed Northwood last weekend.

Loki and I were heading out to pick up oak tops with the VonOepens. Jamie & Kayla were with them.

Then Rick called and said he had cut down a birch tree that I could have, and he had it half-split, too.

October Swim

The kids and I placed another geocache out by Oneida-Hancock, then we picked-up Molly VonOepen and went for a quick dip at Washburn Lake.

Hikers

Jamie & Loki and I put about 2 1/2 miles on our legs today. Geocaching/hunting.


By the by, it was near 80 degrees out today.

Cachin' Pulaski

We went to Green Bay this past weekend for Dave's birthday. On Saturday, Dave and I went geocaching around Pulaski, a nice pastoral town. Excellent Philly steak sandwich at the Trail's End Bar.

Dave found his 500th geocache. And yesterday he reached 100 consecutive days finding at least one cache.

Nicky surprised Dave with the gift of a dog, Cooper, a Lhasa Apso. They were going to get one later in the year; Dave didn't have a heart attack. We had a gathering outside their home on a beautiful late summer evening.

We went to find a cache near the NEW Zoo on Sunday. And then we watched an historic football moment.