Mishaps and other haps

We just got back safely from a very fun weekend trip to visit Kyle and Maretta in the Twin Cities!

They moved into an apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul after getting married in May.  We stayed with them on Friday and Saturday nights, sleeping on an air mattress in their new dining room.  We arrived late on Friday, so just had a little while to chat before going to bed around 1 AM.

We were up by 9 or 9:30 the following morning and went out around 10 to visit a friend of Michael and Maretta’s mom, Betsy Carter, who owns Legacy Art & Gifts, just a few blocks down from Maretta and Kyle’s apartment.  Her shop wasn’t open yet, so we took a detour trip a little farther down the street to Irish on Grand, where I noted that I would be inclined to spend a large chunk of my salary if I were living within easy walking distance of it … mostly on jewelry, music, and sweaters.

Betsy was opening her shop when we walked back by, so we spent half an hour or so talking to this very friendly and entertaining lady, who had known Michael and Maretta’s mom for many years.

Then we walked back to the front of the apartment building, climbed in Kyle’s car and headed out for lunch at the Chatterbox Pub, where we had some delicious sandwiches and played the board game Sorry as we waited for and ate our food.  On the way to the Chatterbox, we drove by the gates of the beautiful campus of the College of St. Catherine, which Maretta graduated from in May.

In the afternoon, we spent time at Minnehaha State Park (just across the Mississippi River from St. Paul, in Minneapolis) and shopped at an impressive gaming/comics/anime store called Source Comics and Games.  I was drawn to the huge selection of dice and bought a set of pink & black six-sided dice as a souvenir.  I was thrilled that I limited my purchase to one set ($11) and did not spend $50 or more on dice.

Maretta and Kyle are considering adopting a kitten or two, so we stopped at the pet store they have been visiting of late with their kitten yearnings.  Oh!  There were several kittens in a variety of colors, all cute and sleepy, playful and cuddly.  It made me miss our cats and also want to take them all home with me.  I am a sucker for cats.

I pulled out my phone in the pet store to take some pictures and also checked my email and saw that one of my friends from high school had emailed me a photo of the new teacup chihuahua puppy her family recently adopted.  We were also looking at miniature breed puppies in the back of the pet store, so I was amused at the coincidence.

We headed back to Maretta and Kyle’s after severing ourselves from the pet shop.  Maretta had left a pot roast cooking all day, so we had that wonderful smell to meet us when we got back.  She and I ran out briefly to Kowalski’s Market, the terribly convenient grocery store a block away from their apartment, to pick up bread and salad.  This shop reminded me of Fresh Market, the place my sister likes to shop in Tallahassee.

We had dinner and took a nice long walk through the neighborhood down to a fabulous ice cream shop on Grand called The Grand Ole Creamery, where the waffle cones are made as you watch and the ice cream is damn good.  I think they have every place in Madison beat, except maybe the Chocolate Shoppe.   We slowly walked back to the apartment as we ate our ice cream and then spent the rest of the evening watching The Simpsons Movie and Saved! There were thoughts of playing a game, but we ran out of steam.  It was a busy Saturday!

We all went to bed a little earlier than the night before and slept really well!  This morning we slept in late and went to the Copper Dome (another favorite place of Maretta and Kyle) for waffles and pancakes.  Michael and I left around noon and made it back to Madison (to an empty house, wow!) in time to work on laundry and organizing the new dresser Michael acquired on Friday.

I think I will mosey upstairs soon and throw some pizza into the oven.  It has been a splendid and restorative weekend!

EDIT: I have added a new album with “weekend action shots” to my Picasa gallery:

I think I might be addicted to Bejeweled, one of the games on my phone.  It’s incredibly hard to stop playing once I’ve started.

Also, I was thinking about WoW today and realized that by the time Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I might be ready and excited about leveling Minni to 80.  I have a small stack of heroic badges on her.  I guess if I were playing now, I could be accumulating more, especially if we were still doing weekly Kara runs and beating our way through ZA.  I might have picked up a few gear upgrades if I had been working on it, but know what?  All of that effort would have been expended for very little once the expansion comes out, purples are outclassed by greens again, and there is new gear and new endgame material that our guild will have access to.

And Minni will have a few badges socked aside toward whatever she needs between here and there.

I think she will do fine in the very-decent epic gear she has and we’ll level to 80 and I will have fun healing people again and hanging out with guildies.

But right now … I’m not even checking websites.  Michael keeps up on all the latest rumors, features, changes, patches, and is still playing (mostly battlegrounds and he has leveled a couple of alts up to 70).  I won’t miss anything critical.  And I won’t be burned out when the expansion is released.

In other news, a handful or so of cherry tomatoes have ripened.  We have a lot of green tomatoes on the plants–  soon we should have some ripe regular-sized tomatoes.

Also, I am glad not to be renting or moving this summer, as a number of friends have done or will be doing soon.  Prices seem to be going up and I shudder to think what one of my former one-bedroom apartments on the west side would be renting for now.  We may end up renting again before we are settled in a place where we intend to stay for thirty years (i.e. pay off), but I hope it’s a short-lived experience and cheap, cheap, cheap.  There’s something to be said for equity, versus throwing money down the rent hole (as I think Alice once described it).

And I just want to note that rush hour traffic has been damn scary lately on the Beltline– it’s basically a swarm of cars going at least 60-65 with less than a car length between each car.  If you dare to slow down and allow more room, you may be aggressively tailgated.  Economy does poorly, stress levels rise, Americans drive like maniacs.  Anyone else think there’s a correlation?

Can you tell that my site is different this evening?  The new WordPress iPhone app will only work with the latest version of WordPress, so my blogging software had to be upgraded.

This means that I can blog from my phone now!

The various apps that can be downloaded (some free, some not) are one neat feature I am enjoying with the iPhone.  These programs run the gamut from games to social networking and job hunt tools, travel guides, restaurant locators, and various other useful or fun functions.  I am playing around with Twinkle, which allows me to post messages and see messages from other local (and not-so-local) users.  Loopt allows you to track (and be tracked by) those you choose– it’s exciting and a little scary how the technology is really pushing the limits on how public we can choose to be about where we are and what we are doing.  I don’t think GPS can track me down to the shower stall, but pretty close.

Anyway, I am enjoying my new phone and the on-the-go functionality it brings into my laptop-deprived life.

We slept in late today … I had some stomach pains last night that grew and abated (and grew and abated) over the course of the evening and finally stopped around 3 AM.  So there was some waking up during the night and such.  No pain today, though!  That’s good!  (Since all of the women in my family have had gall bladder surgery, I am going to keep an eye out if stomach problems recur often.)

We headed out of the house in time to grab lunch at Old Chicago and attend the iPhone workshop we’d signed up for at the Apple Store.  The workshop was fun– I learned a couple of things and mostly played with my phone and socialized a bit.  I think we just like spending time in the Apple Store now (after spending a LOT of time there last weekend).  It’s a geek place.

After finding a sale at Williams-Sonoma, we paused for ice cream (hard to resist Chocolate Shoppe) and headed downtown for Maxwell Street Days.  I almost bought several items of clothing and gear at Fontana, but ended up waffling and buying nothing!  But we did visit Tom afterwards, who was released from the hospital on Thursday and was resting up at home.

We wrapped up the day out with our weekly shopping and came home to recharge and catch up on chores.

Since a few people were wondering about our availability on weekends for the next month or so, here is what we have going on:

This weekend: At Home
– planning on going to Maxwell Street Days/ Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning (10/11?)– will probably cancel if the weather is bad
– workshop at the Apple Store from 2-3 on Saturday
– game on Sunday (12:30-5 or thereabouts)

Next weekend (July 25-27): Minneapolis/St. Paul
– We’re planning to go visit Maretta.  Not sure yet when we are leaving or when we will be back.

August 1-3: At Jack’s
– Annual weekend at Jack’s with Michael’s family on the Wisconsin River

August 8-10: I don’t think we have anything planned so far for this weekend

August 15-17:
– American Players Theatre on Saturday night.
– I’d like to get out to Irishfest in Milwaukee if possible.

August 22-24:  Aldebaran weekend
– Staying at Aldebaran farm in Spring Green
– Seeing 3 APT plays

August 29-Sept 1: (Labor Day weekend)
– Birthday party for Athena (Saturday?)
– Probably doing something for our 5th anniversary as a couple this weekend or next weekend
– There may also be other (family) things going on this weekend

… Not much of September is booked yet, but that will probably change as we move closer to it …

Friday, Sept. 26th (evening):  APT (probably will need to cancel gaming if the Friday game is running at this point)

This is as far out as we’ve planned.

The garden is beginning to look productive.

We still have a few more weekend outings planned for the summer, but this weekend we’re both at home and it has been lovely.  Yesterday morning I had to take my car into the shop for maintenance, so we dropped it off at 9 and headed over to Hilldale for the Farmers’ Market behind the mall.  We picked up a Stargazer lily at the Farmers’ Market to take to Tom, who is still in the hospital.

Then we shopped for food at Sentry (which is actually in Hilldale Mall– this has always struck me as odd and charming, but Hilldale is not your average mall).  I’ve always liked the produce selection at Sentry and they recently remodeled a chunk of the store, adding on to the bakery/deli section– it’s better than ever.  I hope that the new Whole Foods that is going in at Hilldale doesn’t drive business away from Sentry.  I wouldn’t mind having both options available for shopping.

We took food home, then visited Tom at the hospital for a few hours.  Late on Friday night he was moved out of the ICU (TLC) unit at UW Hospital and into a regular room.  He was very alert, making jokes and laughing at jokes, and it was great to see him acting like himself.  His friend Ed has been staying with him a lot– I met Ed while we were there.  It sounds like people have been visiting him pretty regularly– Tom’s piano teacher called Michael to ask if she could visit while we were running errands.  Hopefully he will be out of the hospital and back at home before too long.

After visiting Tom, we shopped for accessories for our iPhones– a sleeve for mine and a car charger.  We grabbed lunch at the mall and picked up my car.  Michael had some errands to do across town, so I picked up stakes and finished staking the tomatoes in the garden, then headed to the gym.

Later in the evening, we finally saw Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.  It wasn’t as funny as Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (and it wasn’t quite what we were expecting from the title), but many of the same actors were in the second movie and the scenes with Neil Patrick Harris were just completely awesome.

Man o man.  I think I am going to sit back and let PhysOrg blog about our morning at the Apple Store.  As of 1:24 PM this afternoon, though, we have two activated 2nd gen (3G) iPhones, which was our end goal.  So that’s what counts.  On the way, we met and had the help of several different people.  I feel like we met and got to know half of the Apple Store in Madison, as well as other eager customers who were waiting when the doors opened this morning …

So go PhysOrg!  Do it!  Blog about the experience!  Post some photos of our day, too!

I have had times when it was impossible to find shoes that I liked.  Now I can easily find shoes that I like, but when I buy new shoes, I tend to wear the same pairs a lot … usually the ones that are six or seven years old.  Therefore, I cannot justify increasing my shoe collection until I start wearing more of the newer ones that I own.

But onlineshoes.com keeps sending me emails about sales … and new shoes that they have in-stock …

Watch The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, if you haven’t.  It was our movie night selection this week and had us in stitches.  I am very eager to see Trail of the Screaming Forehead … which is apparently out according to IMDB … and potentially on DVD?

In other news, our friend Tom had to have emergency surgery this evening.  Michael is staying at the hospital to update his family (they are out-of-state) and friends.  Not sure when he will be home tonight/early tomorrow and I’m worried about Tom.  Going to try to sleep soon.