Downtown

Elise and I went downtown to buy Duck Soup Cinema tickets for ourselves and friends (it's Harold Lloyd! in Safety Last!!).  We also bought our Christmas show tickets.  Christmas is early, often, and expensive this year.  We have tickets to see Paula Poundstone this Saturday here in town, and that was going to be the family gift.  Then Albin found out that Blue Man Group is coming here in January, and he was really excited to see it again.  (He and Karl got into a show when they took a trip to Boston a few years ago.)  He doesn't get overly excited about things too often, so we try to pay attention.  And of course, Elise and I haven't seen it yet, either.  So now we have tickets to that, too.  To celebrate spending oodles of money (ha ha), I took Elise out to lunch.  She made a drink out of all the soft drink choices, as usual, and it was really pretty good.  Her pasta was delicious, too--and she almost ate all of it.

We happened to be downtown today because we were on the eastside earlier, learning about the local homeschoolers 4H group.  Elise is excited to join, and I think she will have a marvelous time.  Look forward to the pictures and posts of all the fabulous activities she will be doing this year.  (I might even get Albin to join one or two activities.)

Family Camp

We have just returned from our annual trip to Phantom Lake family camp.  Each year we look at the dated flags all campers sign to figure out how long we've been attending.  It turns out that this was our seventh year.  This was also the first year the weather hasn't been 80s and sunny all weekend.  It was hot on Friday, rained all day Saturday, and was sunny and rather cool Sunday and Monday.  It made the waterfront activities sparsely attended, but honestly it was nice to have some cool weather mixed in this time.  People played indoor games (like floor hockey and bean bag toss) instead of outdoor things, and it all worked out.

I brought Albin home on Sunday morning, as he had a church event scheduled that night he didn't want to miss.  I made it back to Phantom in time to see Karl and Elise jump in the water for Chuck Tuna, the swim across the lake.  We all had a good weekend.  This afternoon, we took a trolley ride to East Troy and had ice cream sundaes before driving home.  (The ice cream parlor had a juke box with fabulous old songs--like Snoopy and the Red Baron.)

And why, you may ask, are there no pictures to go along with our glowing and oh-so-descriptive weekend?  Our camera did not make the trip with us.  I am sure it is in the house...somewhere...and I did buy a disposable one for the weekend, so we wouldn't miss out on all we did.  However, if it can take days for me to slip the card out of the camera, put it in the computer, and download a few recent photos, do you even want to guess how long it will take to finish the film, send it in for development, scan the pictures in, and then download it?  Yeah, don't wait up for that.