Good to be Back

Kangaroo Lake

We had a really fun time up in Door County this weekend.  Check, check Teh Flickr for some great pics from Peninsula State Park and Kangaroo Lake.

There was a lot of wine, booze, and food had by all, and we had to work it off eventually– my personal favorite was the two hour bike ride through Peninsula in the rain and cold.  Mercifully, at the the end of the ride we climbed to the top of Eagle Tower.  Long story short: ride uphill seven miles, then climb a giant tower.  Fun…

It looks like the Bay Bridge fell apart yesterday– wow, great repair job fellas.  I can only assume mass chaos in the Yay Area today so good luck on everyone’s commute!

Not much else to report. Er, what’re y’all dressing as for Halloween?

Looong Weekend

Door County Barn

We’re heading up to Door County for a long weekend to kick it with both Spacebee’s and my parents.  Everyone’s gathering for a nice fall weekend in the North Woods; if all goes well the rain will be kept to a minimum and we’ll get to… I dunno, go on a hayride or some shit.  I wouldn’t mind heading up to Warshington Island to hit the hotel for a coffee and some wine.

So all the rest of y’all have a good time yourselves this weekend– we won’t be back until Wednesday.  I say Cla and Madd call an uneasy truce and meet for tea and crumpets on Treasure Island.  Then maybe play some Battlebots or some shit; I dunno.

P-Ville

Skeet skeet skeet skeet

First of all: thanks so much to the K’s in P-Ville for having me and my hobo friends up to their fine-ass country home for the weekend.  Same as before, I had a fantastic time and I always leave wishing I lived in that magical land.

The weekend was pretty chill-

• Friday Night: hard meats (including blood sausage), cheese, smoked fish, porto (ours won 500 medals; how many has yours won?), scotch, and camo high life.
• Saturday: The Menfolk went turkey hunting.  Us womenfolk stayed behind and did the shopping and cooking.  Cookie was on point as usual, creating a wonderful meal that included two (2) chickens in a stewpot, the best root mashers ever, sqwish, Katie’s Klever Kreen Keans (Kelicious!) and an Apple Crisp that tasted like it was cooked by a hyper-intelligent Bakery Squid from Universe X.  Alas! The Menfolk did not down a turkey, so the two (2) chickens had to suffice.  We also watched the Badgers poop all over themselves versus Iowa in the Homecoming Extravadanza.
• Sunday: Two activities consumed the day– Shooting Things in the Backyard and Watching The Packers Kick Ass.  Both were fun as all goddamned hell (see above photo) and I hope to do both the next time we travel North to P-Ville.  We shot the effigy, shot our juice-bottle-cum-pigeon, shot cans, and in the grand finale Brian shot a full can of expanding foam.  A good time was had by all.

I hope your weekend was as fun as mine, but it probably wasn’t!

Straight Mappin’

Here’s a couple of interesting things I found on Google Maps today.  I was looking at it because I saw Mat Gamel was at Knapp School to do an assembly and I couldn’t remember whether the school by my old house was Knapp or Fratt (always get them mixed up).  Turns out he was at the school by the old place.  Then I saw that Google Maps had street view pictures of my old neighborhood so I dropped in on the old girl.  I think I can embed it…

View Larger Map

The preview seems to work, we’ll go with it. Extra bonus points if you can navigate from there to Scientist’s old house (unless you’re the Scientist, but maybe even then). And I’ll give $5 to anyone who can send me a link to the corner my old paper route started on (again, Scientist excluded since I lifted the route off of him.)

Let’s find another cool little intersection… here’s the high school we all went to:

View Larger Map

Fun time!

My Busted-Ass Website

I see that the few dedicated hobo-lovers that still post here are up in arms over the lack of updates.  Sorry holmes, but a melancholia has set in as my world crumbles around me.  Everything’s right-as-rain on the home front– I couldn’t love my little peanut any more than I do– but aside from that the world is falling to dust.

Brewers: ousted. Badger football: balls.  Packers: meh. My parlay cards: BAD!  My weight: high.  My bank account: low.  My ebay feedback rating: so-so.  My craigslist want ad: unanswered. My gainful employment: perhaps running out.  My stock options: worthless.

Which is not to say that I had a bad 30th birthday.  Spacebee did a wonderful job of tricking the living shit out of me.  I am so stupid, I was on the Booze Cruise and still not eating anything because I didn’t want to spoil my appetite for the non-forthcoming dinner at the Tornado Room.  The birthday tailgate was besieged by legions and legions of bees but we made the best of it.  Thirty people: one stung, which is pretty good, but the one was a small child which wasn’t so great.  He rubbed some metaphorical dirt on it and was on his way, though.  Someday I’ll actually have all the pictures I took up on Flickr, and when that happens I’ll post a link in comments.  Thanks to all who came (not you, CAL).  Props and slops.

I’m thinking of buying a years supply of food. Can’t be too careful, seeing as America’s GDP now hovers somewhere around $12.50 + gratuity.  Am I a paranoid sonuvabitch? Yes, most assuredly.  But I also worried about a housing bust a-way back in 2005, and worried about the stock market a-way back in January 2008.   Sometimes a paranoid motherfucker is right about shit.  Sometimes.

I know you all come here solely for my wit and motherfucking wisdom, so I’ll try to post more.  That is, if the mole men haven’t taken over the country yet of course.

Drenched

Let’s start off-topic and see if we can meander our way back to my original thought: this sounds like the coolest Chuck E. Cheese evar.

So I’ve had a week off for vacation, and what a week it was! Wisconsin got hit by a hojillion tornados, Lake Goddamned Delton was wiped off the map, spacebee and I were in Door County during all of this, and *SURPRISE!* the Brewers still suck balls on the road.

We were camping at Peninsula State Park and had prepared ourselves for a wet outing. In an eruption of sheer genius, Lawman offered his screen tent thing in case we had to sit around in the rain for a few hours(days). We arrived Wednesday evening and got things setup ok, played some beer pong and made dinner. Scads of June Bugs and hundreds of thousands of mosquitos drove us into our tent tent pretty early in the night. Thursday we awoke to the patter-patter of rain on the tent, and I had to run to the toilets in the pouring rain in flip-flops. The running was less about the rain and more about the sounds coming from my bowels. The rain continued more or less until the late afternoon so we didn’t get to do a whole lotta stuff we’d planned like rent bikes or go hiking. Meh.

Friday was very nice but we spent most of the prime time (daylight) looking at various houses my parents were interested in buying. As many of you know, they’ve had trouble selling their house in Racine and need somewhere to live now that they’ve both moved to Door County. In the end they decided to rent a (very nice!) farmhouse in Egg Harbor until the Racine house sells. Personally, I think it’s a great decision given the uncertainty of the market right now– they wouldn’t want to get stuck with two mortgages for the next two years. I’ve included a few pictures of the place they’re renting below. You can see more pictures at the appropriate Flickr set.

On Saturday we packed up and left the campground and stayed with my parents for a few days at the house they’re about to leave in Sturgeon Bay. We drove up the peninsula and took the ferry across to Washington Island, which was pretty kick-ass. The absolute greatest part of the trip to the island was when we had wine and appetizers at the Washington Hotel. If you are ever up on the island, I can’t recommend that place enough. Even better, they have a Coffee Room in Madison (right across Monona Bay!) that serves all the baked goods and coffees that you can get up there. On a bike ride around Lake Monona yesterday spacebee and I stopped there for a muffin and some coffee and it was a great place. Additionally, the owner of the Washington Hotel is a (co-?)owner of Death’s Door Spirits, which has a distillery here in Madison that uses Washington Island wheat to make various booze. They recently started making whisky and while up there I got 3 bottles of the un-aged first batch. It’s pretty good, come over and try it some time.

By the way, all of our camping photos can be found at my Flickr site.

One other weekend shout-out: Hot Tamales in Sturgeon Bay was some of the best Mexican food I’ve had since moving back to Wisconsin. They have great service, terrific food, and some hot hot hot salsa verde. I suggest the wet burrito or the hash brown sandwich (like an omelet, but made with goddamned delicious hash browns).

Last night I had a Brewers nervous breakdown. I yelled swear words at the TV for a minute and then turned it off in disgust. And that was BEFORE they allowed the 3 run triple. Barf.

Lastly, if you haven’t seen this YouTube of a house being washed into Lake Delton in Wisconsin Dells, it is goddamned wild.

Bowling Alone… In Texas

Shorter Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Oh yeah? Uh… well, we didn’t need your dumb old bowling congress anyways! We’ll build our own amusement park, with blackjack and hookers! In fact forget the amusement park and the blackjack! Aw, forget the whole thing.

Man, I never knew Milwaukee would act like a scorned wife when a wood-paneled station wagon smelling of stale cigarettes and old Funyons rumbled and backfired its way out of town.

On second thought, I guess it does all make sense.

First Annual Crooked Lake Ice Fishing Derby

Fun weekend up near Oxford, Wisconsin. Springer invited us up for an experimental run at an ice fishing weekend on Crooked Lake (full picture gallery here) where his family has a summer place (double-wide with all the trimmings). Lawman, wwhazz, and I hit it up for ice fishing, drankin, and gambling. Upon arrival we got right to baiting and fishing. Thirty minutes in lawman had already hauled in a bass (though it would prove to be the first and last fish caught that day.)

Catch of the Day

The saddest thing you’ve ever seen is a bootless whazzmaster in sneakers navigating the 4 inches of slush on top of the foot of ice. I held out against the cold for about 2-3 hours, and then as the temperatures fell in the afternoon I had to retire to the trailer for heat and food. It probably went from high 20s to 20 below from 3:00p to 8:00p. On a mid-afternoon jaunt into town for bloody marys we stopped at the local TruValue hardware store where I procured heavy duty boots and new wool socks, and wwhazz brokered a deal for 3/8″ slingshot ammo. I had the horsradishest-bloody mary of all time, which perked me up since I was still hungover from a Friday Night Intuit Essen Haus Extravadanza.

We returned from town ready to cook dinner and watch the Badgers drop one to Purdue at home. As our 15 pounds of purchased perch burbled away in the turkey deep-fryer manned by two stout fellows, wwhazz, lawman, springer, and I took turns shooting beer cans with the wristrocket and BB gun.

Outdoor Cookin’

Beer Can Bingo

Throughout the evening I backed the house in a rousing game of blackjack. I am nothing if not efficient in my dealing; HOLLLARIT Joe’s Casino, got any openings? As we drifted on to sleep well past midnight the wind howled and temperatures dipped even further south. Morning saw us bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and eating a Magmuffin at Maggie May’s Cafe. It was goddamned delicious, and I recommend it without hesitation or reserve.

Thanks for the weekend Springer; I will take you up on a summer getaway back to Crooked Lake for more fishing, booze, campfires, firearms, and bloody marys. And Foxtails.

Pabst Farms Totally Kicks Ass!

I think I’ll keep following up on this as long as the Journal-Sentinel continues reporting on it. I realize that the majority readership of this blog doesn’t necessarily care about an enormous commercial development in Oconomowoc, but I think it sums up nicely the poor decisions going into a lot of real estate development in Wisconsin. I’m starting to tire of good farmland continually being concreted over so that yet another Best Buy, Wal*Mart, Target, Kohl’s, or Pic’N'Sav can go up. I am irritated that in order to build mixed-use communities, America finds the need to build a set of condos and then open up a mega-mall next to them.

So I should really separate my irritability over the entire Pabst Farms concept with my utter disdain for the idea of a gigantic upscale mall that is a short drive from other, existing huge malls yet built for people to flock to from all over southeastern Wisconsin. I don’t suspect any of this would outrage you, dear reader, because frankly I’m the sort of weirdo that only gets really mad about weird stuff like this. So, I invite you to share your reactions even while I guess most of them will amount to, “Calm down.”

On with the show.

Remember when I said:

I’m sure there will be all sorts of backpedaling and reassurances by the Must-Replace-Farmland-With-Malls-At-All-Costs folks that those assholes and their Hummers will have a Chili’s to go to on Wednesday nights in Oconomowoc.

Yeah, it was yesterday. Well, the JS already has a reassuring article about how totally kick-ass Pabst Farms is, even if those jerks from General Growth Properties totally were jerks and canceled their plans for a 1.5 million sq. ft. shopping mall!

At 1,600 acres, Pabst Farms is bigger than Shorewood. Most in the news this week have been 184 of those acres, where General Growth Properties planned, then backed away from, a 1.5 million-square-foot retail complex including a mall, multiscreen cinema and two hotels.

See? JERKS! We’ve got 1,416 acres of awesomeness even without your Jerk Faces!

In the coming days, I think I’ll post on how the continuing housing crash (another place where the cheerleaders won’t stop cheering, even after the game is over and the star quarterback wrapped his Ford F150 around a lightpole on the way home from a party) likely spells doom for the 1,200 planned residences.

Pabst Farms Harvest

Schadenfreude is powerful shit. For example, I am delighted by others’ housing misfortunes but not so much that I hope my friends are affected. Example two: that goddamned Pabst Farms shit in Waukesha. When last we saw this monstrosity, the developers were attempting to cajole the city of Oconomowoc into giving them ever more liquor licenses. Apparently, swamping an area with booze is terrible when it’s an urban area where you can walk there and back, but delightful when you have shitheads driving their Hummers in from Brookfield to get swamped at the local Cheesecake Factory.

Ahem.

Well then, it appears that the Housing Crash is starting to take fools like these down with it:

So-called big box stores, such as a Target and Kohl’s Department Store, could replace a regional shopping mall planned for Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, commercial real-estate industry observers said Thursday.

That’s because western Waukesha County might not have enough residents to attract the types of retailers needed to create a large mall.

Those comments came after the Journal Sentinel reported Thursday that the developers of Pabst Farms are seeking another company to build a large upscale mall at I-94 and Highway 67 in Oconomowoc. Peter Bell, president of Pabst Farms Development Inc., said Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc., one of the country’s largest mall operators, might be bowing out of the high-profile project.

So, when we last left these geniuses, their Million Dollar Idea was to build an EVEN BIGGER mall in the middle of a cornfield in goddamned Oconomowoc. You know Oconomowoc, right? About 10 miles east of the huge Outlet Mall in Johnson Creek? Or maybe you know it as the place 30 odd miles from Mayfair Mall? The point is, the region doesn’t really need anymore Mega-Ultra-Town-Centres. Especially ones catering inexplicably to the luxury market.

Well shit on a kringle, cuz now we have the worst of all worlds. The stupid shopping center is going up, destroying arable land in the process, but it’s going to have the exact same dumbfuck bullshit that you can find on any commercialzed street in America. Ooo! It’s gonna have a Target? PROMISE? Wow, honey, pack up the kids; we’re gonna hit that Kohl’s in Oconomowoc.

I fucking hate real estate developers.

UPDATE: Looks like the developer has dumped the project all-together. I’m sure there will be all sorts of backpedaling and reassurances by the Must-Replace-Farmland-With-Malls-At-All-Costs folks that those assholes and their Hummers will have a Chili’s to go to on Wednesday nights in Oconomowoc.