Goodbye Pajamas

I am moving on to the next phase in my life and with that comes saying goodbye to working at home in my pajamas. As some people already know I was finally offered a job at the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, is that too long don't worry this is shorter but not even easier to say a.k.a. SEWRPC. I will start this Monday as a Transportation Engineer in the Transportation Planning Department. Now what does that mean I will be doing... some of the same like making traffic models and writing lots of reports but hopefully there are also new and exciting things that I will get to learn and work on. I do have to say that I em truly grateful that I was able to get this job during this economic time. I know that Lord has been listening to my prayers about this for some time, and some day I will figure out why everything worked out the way it did. For now I am grateful to have a full time job again, hooray!

Ice Festival

I know that I haven't posted in a while, that is mostly due to the fact that it has been so cold around here, but this last weekend the thermostat broke into the 40's!! We luckily had plans to go with some friends to Cedarburg (a quaint little tourist town to the north) to watch the ice sculpting competition and spend the day outside. We got to Cedarburg in time to watch the small town parade which included fire trucks, the town major and judge, a drum line (no band), and one or two home made floats for local businesses. The theme this year was the medieval ages. The ice sculptors started with a large ice block in the morning and were places along the sidewalk of main street. There was a prize of $500 for the winner. There was only one bad part to the record high temps here were that the ice sculptures started melting, but we still had fun and tried to get some pictures of this little event.

Here Brad is trying his hand at sculpting, it is hard to break ice with ice though.

Sir Brad once again is trying to pull the sward our of the stone.

Now that is a really big goblet.

This is King Swing

Here is a sculptor making a lion

You can see the sculptors on the sidewalk and people just walking around the festival.


Here is a kneeling knight.

This one was our favorite, the wizard with his crystal ball and a dragon on the other side.

They even had free ice skating...

No wonder they said skate at your own risk.

Farewell, oh beard

Farewell, oh beard farewell... Alas, on a hallowed Saturday night the beard was carefully removed with such precision that the dust bunnies in the room stood on end to watch. Yes, it was time. We paused at several intervals along the way, in short romantic thought of what a beard of that stature may have been. Here are the pics. Oh, and we removed enough hair from my face and head (I got a haircut too) that it filled a good sized trash bag! Wow, I did not know my beard was quite as much as it was!

Hydrogoblaphone

So I have long heard stories of Brad's grandfather that played some strange musical instruments including the conch, the garden hose and the hydrogoblaphone. This Christmas I actually got to see the real Hydrogoblaphone when we went to go visit Brad's Uncle Gary. With Brad and cousin Micha's enthusiasm to bring it up from the basement and set it up we, I was able to see the real deal. Once filled with water to the set markings we each took a try at ringing the glasses. By the end of the night we could play a couple of Christmas tunes so that they were recognizable. It was really just fun to see this thing in person. I took lots of pictures becasue I thought it was so cool to finally see, and it was a good thing that I did because there was a little accident when the hydro globaphone was emptied of it's water, only half of it survived. So here are a couple pictures of us playing with it and then some of us with Brad's cousins.