Well, now it’s official. We are both having wedding dreams.
I recently dreamed that it was the morning of our wedding day and I was in a panic because we still had to buy rings, obtain a license, and find an officiant– in addition to all of the “getting ready” activities of the day.
Michael dreamed that Lorne Michaels was at our wedding dinner. He informs me that Lorne was sitting next to “somebody else with ‘Michael’ in the name.”
Time keeps on moving along and Easter will be here soon, so I have started thinking about Easter candy.
I remember enjoying a lot of sickly-sweet Easter candy as a kid, particularly Cadbury creme eggs. I think they were my favorites for many years, but any kind of chocolate was always the preferred Easter candy, though I managed to consume every type in the basket pretty rapidly.
Nowadays, when it comes to chocolate I prefer the Cadbury mini-eggs. The original flavor was milk chocolate, but I also like the dark chocolate ones that have come out in recent years.
Chocolate Easter bunnies now only seem worthwhile if they are high-quality chocolate.
I am debating ordering a bunny or two from Bissinger’s, along with some marzipan eggs. I had never had marzipan prior to moving to Wisconsin, but now I sort of associate it with Easter and if I have a “marzipan craving”, it’s usually around this time of year. Did you know that Ben & Jerry’s makes an ice cream flavor called “Mission to Marzipan”?
Recently I have been craving salt water taffy and I was unable to find a moderately-sized bag of it locally, so I ordered 10 lbs. of it from Candy Warehouse. It’s assorted, pretty pastel colors– so that makes it Easter-y.
Sweet-Tart chicks, ducks, and bunnies are almost an Easter candy necessity, so a bag of those has been purchased.
Jelly beans are also a good Easter candy, but again they can’t be any old jelly beans. I like Jelly Belly and I seem to remember that Smuckers made good jelly beans.
What are other people’s favorites?
For a while I have been meaning to write about the changes I feel my blog has undergone in the past few years. I’ve been forming some thoughts around the concepts of responsibility and tact in regards to writing for public viewing on the internet.
I am glad I did not reach adulthood in recent years, when thoughts are so easily made accessible and very public by posting them online. I can imagine that I might have alienated and offended many as I sorted out my views on life in my late teens and early 20s and that the electronic trail of whining and ranting about roommates, friends, family, and significant others would have been annoying. Plus, that record can float around in cyberspace for years, if not forever.
Also, it would have been an unbalanced and unfair record of my life. Keeping a permanent record of this sort of thing serves no purpose for me. I believe in learning from the past and moving on. Time blurs unhappy memories and the good things tend to shine on into the future.
My thoughts and feelings and any problems and issues with others’ behaviors and actions should be worked out in person, or if they are truly things that should be kept private, then they shouldn’t be posted online at all.
Also, my free time is a different animal than it once was. When I blog, I want to write about happy moments or significant things that I might want to remember one day, things that capture my life in the moment. My time is not as available as it was in the past for online activities like chatting or blogging. I want to spend time on these things wisely.
I hope what I write is more tactful and that I take more personal responsibility for my words than I did in the early days of this blog and than I did sometimes when I was younger and a little more volatile. I can’t control who reads my blog and that keeps me mindful of my intent and attitude. I’d like to think it also acts as a check on ranting and whining and keeps me honest. I try to be clear and fairly respectful.
I sometimes wonder if my writing has taken on a more boring hue as I have settled into a certain life pattern the past few years. If it has, I consider the trade-off to be worthwhile. I fill my days and I don’t stay awake at night worrying or going over “to-do” lists in my head. I sleep like a log. I feel more settled than I have at any point in my adult life.
We had a very successful celebration of Pi Day on Saturday. Alice, Michael and I had lunch at the Hubbard Avenue Diner in Middleton. Michael and I included pie in our lunch. Alice had other Pi Day events to attend, so she elected to save room for pie later in the afternoon. Michael had a slice of lemon silk and I had a slice of peaches & cream. Both were excellent!
We also brought home a whole After Dinner Mint pie, so that’s residing in the refrigerator. We’ve been nibbling away at it the past two evenings.
I used to live on Hubbard Avenue, just a block down from the diner, but we don’t really get out to Middleton that often anymore. It makes me a little sad, but we do have sooo much good dessert in our lives from many sources. Middleton is a cute town, though. It has character. I wouldn’t mind living there again.
Come to think of it, the only suburb of Madison I really don’t care much for is Sun Prairie, which is sad since it has such a pretty name and it’s the hometown of Georgia O’ Keefe.
Sun Prairie does have a Pancake Cafe, however, and Carl’s Cakes (bakery) is located there now. I’m sure there are other interesting aspects of the place that I either do not know or that aren’t coming to mind swiftly. It’s unlikely we’d move to SP since that would put Michael’s commute at about an hour each way. His job is a great incentive to stick close to the west side of town.
Michael has been working on computer issues for Terry today and I have been out and about running errands and chilling out at home.
I’m sipping a cup of Yogi Tea‘s Egyptian Mint Licorice, unwinding, and waiting for Michael to return from Terry’s.
Today is the second Friday the 13th we’ve had so far this year (the first was last month). So far it has been a pretty good day for me. I finished quite a bit of work, although I have a small mountain that I am working on at the moment. However, I felt like I needed the week to be over, so I didn’t stay late.
Michael has had some sort of infection the past few days and has been home from work. He said his stomach was bothering him and his lymph nodes have been swollen and tender. I think he is better this afternoon. This is good, as it looks like we will be able to keep our dinner plans with Tom, Terry, and Jack at Samba tonight.
We canceled our date night last night and just took it easy. For me, that meant that an impromptu inspection, clean-out, and reorganization of items in the pantry. I discovered that we have a surplus of honey, molasses, and confectioner’s sugar, so … maybe I need to bake something? Shoo Fly Pie comes to mind (which I have never made, but have wanted to several times) … but I think we are going out for pie tomorrow in honor of Pi Day. So … no va.
I am looking forward to a good weekend. I think the weather here in South-Central Wisconsin might cooperate!
Also, I finally put the deposit down on our wedding cake yesterday. We have committed to a bakery!
The current 2009 line-up:
Monday nights: Family dinner and fun hanging-out time at Michael’s sister’s house.
Tuesday nights: Movie night at our place. Pizza is ordered.
Wednesday nights: A new game at our place that is being run by Russ, who works with Alice.
Thursday nights: Date Night! (Except not tonight because Michael is sick. We stayed in and made our new favorite quick & easy dinner, delicious steel-cut oats– followed by fruit smoothies)
Friday nights: A game at our house that Michael runs, alternating weeks with a board game night. (But not this week because we have dinner plans)
Saturdays: Mostly unplanned (unless we have some sort of all-weekend activity, which happens maybe 1.5 times per month). I’d like to keep Saturdays mostly unplanned. This is when weekly shopping, sleeping in, and relaxation/downtime must occur. However, a weekly household lunch is an acceptable addition to Saturday. We should try some new places from time to time, OK? Like Liliana’s.
Sundays: Mornings are usually free– again, this is golden and I don’t want to change it. Afternoons have been Guffey’s game, but now that that’s winding down we will probably have a new game at some point.
Between work and whatever upcoming weeknight activity we have, I step out to the gym for a while. Weekend mornings are also good times for the gym.
Now, if it were just easier to work in appointments and errands … well, many errands can be run on the weekend, but appointments are a little trickier.
We had pre-scheduled activities after work every night this past week, so I am finally getting around to the write-up about the weekend at Jack’s.
Jack has been a long-time friend of Michael’s family. The kids have all known him since birth and have visited him at least a couple of times a year since they were babies. He is also a long-time friend of Terry and Tom, who usually have been part of these trips. Jack lives in Millville, WI, technically I think, which is not far from the larger town of Prairie du Chien. He owns property on the banks of the Wisconsin River and spends a lot of time working on restoring the land back to its native prairie ecology and maintaining it for the benefit of future generations.
We drove out late on Thursday, laden with food and clothing. Althea and the kids, Terry, Tom, and I stopped for dinner at Culver’s in Spring Green about halfway into the drive. Once we arrived at Jack’s it was dark so we quickly unpacked and settled in for a fun weekend!
On Friday, we drove into the town of McGregor, Iowa, a stone’s throw from Prairie du Chien across the Mississippi River. The Wisconsin River and the Mississippi River intersect near Prairie du Chien. We took the bridge last weekend because the river freezes in winter, but when the river is flowing, a ferry takes cars and people across the river. McGregor is adjacent to the town of Marquette, which has a casino boat. This is a big draw for some of its visitors, but I have no idea on the status of this business during the winter since I think it has to legally operate while on the river.
The draw McGregor has for Jack and his guests are its restaurants, antique shops, and bookstores. We ate lunch at a newish, trendy restaurant and brewery in downtown McGregor called Old Man River which had a pretty awesome view of a huge, snow-covered hill last weekend. I’ll bet it’s equally pretty in summer. We had coffee at McGregor Coffee Roasters next door and we browsed in a couple of great bookstores while we were there: Papermoon Books and an antique book store– I think it was Rivertown Fine Books.
On Saturday, we spent the day at Jack’s house, a beautifully-maintained two-story Victorian farmhouse (at least I think “Victorian farmhouse” is the best way of describing it). We had french toast for breakfast (oatmeal on Friday morning and popovers on Sunday morning). Some of us hiked around Jack’s property, looking at the work he had done over the Fall to clear out underbrush, and helped with a small bit of the burning. We played with Andrew and Sylvia and celebrated Sylvie’s first birthday (which was the 11th, but the Dotzours were in Texas then so we had not yet had a Wisconsin celebration). I spent about 20 minutes in the sauna Saturday afternoon and when I stepped out into the cold again to walk back to the house, it did not feel so cold at all.
We did quite a bit of cooking (and washing up) while we were at Jack’s since one of the highlights of any given Weekend at Jack’s is homemade cooking and good eating. This year we tried pot roast and a sloppy-joe type mixture called “Teen Mix” for our dinners at Jack’s. Both turned out well. We had sandwiches, cold salads, and chicken for Saturday lunch. Fruit was abundant and people were most enthusiastic about eating it with breakfast.
Food remains were put into a compost pail, paper goods were saved for burning, cans and bottles were recycled. I enjoyed a bottle or two of New Glarus Spotted Cow, one of the Wisconsin beers I like best, on the trip and we carried along six-packs of Strongbow and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Michael and I had to leave by 10:30 or so Sunday morning to make it back to Madison by the time our friends arrived for our Sunday afternoon game/social session. We made a brief detour in Dodgeville to drive around and look at the buildings where he works. We didn’t make it down to the main part of the town, though, and I am curious to see what that looks like.
Michael seems not to mind a forty-minute commute. I have a feeling that for the long term, we will be staying on or near the west side of Madison.
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