Our worst fears have been realized...

Not long ago I was excited about crossing the 1700 barrier in Scrabulous rating. How modest I was.

In hindsight, I wish I hadn't googled 'pudendum'.

Wisconsin News

MSN may have the 3rd highest average ticket price but I bet it has at least the 3rd most convienient bike rack also. Madison isn't exactly an airline hub of sorts, so it's not surprising that its flights aren't cheap. But how is Cincinnati #1? Doesn't a Delta hub do anything for you? Also, Atlantic City's average is only $100. But you can only fly to Florida (and possibly beautiful central Delaware), which isn't really that useful.

Milwaukee is revealed as the most coupon clipping-est city in the country (40% of adults say they do it). Followed closely by Rochester, NY (38%). The article correlates this to unusually high readership of Sunday newspapers in these cities. Which makes sense, but why is Sunday paper readership in these cities so high to start with? That's what I want to know.

"Working"

Instead of going back to Madison yesterday with Tommy and spending time at my job today, I stayed in Milwaukee, played a marathon round of Apples to Apples outside, bought 5 types of cheeses from Metro Market, and took Kermit to Cans. Today I went to Katie's "job" instead of mine and pretended like I was responsible enough to watch a 6 year old and an 8 year old all day long. Within 10 minutes of meeting these little ankle-biters I had been labeled Mr. Green Leprechaun. Five minutes later I had the following conversation:


David: Mr. Green Leprechaun, can Tori come to the pool?
Me: You're going to have to ask Katie that. Katie's in charge.
David: No, God's in charge.
Me: (surprised) You're right. But I don't think he'll respond in time for this.
David: No, God's dead.
Tori: No he's not. He's in heaven.

Sears Bears (it doesn't rhyme)

At the start, our Sears Photo Technician seemed a little uncomfortable with 7 grown men coming in for a family portrait. She got over it. As will you. There are already plans to hang some 8x10s in the Piano Bar, maybe in the bathroom, but maybe over the bar. Where will you hang yours? If we come visit and it's not on display we will be upset. An interesting note: despite the fact that the plan was ugly sweaters, you may recognize several of the sweaters being worn from such events as Sweater Thursday '07-'08. Because, obviously, these are just part of my regular sweater rotation. And I'm OK with that.


The complete photo shoot:

Bears at Sears

We went to Sears...

(more to follow)

I've been spending some time with Calvin & Hobbes recently. Get Fuzzy has become a regular read for me, but it won't ever top the old C&H strips. There's a great compilation of all of Calvin's exploits with snowmen here.

Class Warfare on the Scrabulous Board

Darcy and I are currently playing 4 games of Scrabulous at the same time. This is both time consuming and exciting. Today I played OEUVRE. I felt this was both a prudent use of excess vowels, and a pretty classy play. Darcy followed with POON. What a tramp.

Light of My Life

Lightning has been a consistent part of my life recently. Last week Julia and I were having dinner at a place right on the Sound when it started to drizzle. This didn't seem so unreasonable, being that we were in Seattle. We had an umbrella over our table, so we stayed outside; we were the only ones to chose this course of action. The weather situation quickly deteriorated from this bucolic scene into a full fledged storm. At one point we're pretty sure a bolt of lightning hit the top of our umbrella. Here is a picture I found of the storm on Flikr:

The waitstaff assured us that lightning is really very rare in Seattle, which I guess I believed, but was still a little surprised by this map of lightning flash densities:

That's dramatic, and something I had never really considered before. How do you feel about kids growing up on the West Coast who don't see lightning?

On our flight back from MSP to MSN there were some storm delays. Once we finally got up into the sky it was like a fireworks display off our starboard bow (Do airplanes have port and starboard sides? Do they have bows and sterns?). I can remember see lightning while flying before, but this was sort of ridiculous. Also ridiculous was the pilot, who continued to turn into the storm until we were bouncing along on top(?) of it. And while we're on the topic, it has become clear that Northwest Airlines pilots are the worst landers in all of commercial aviation. Seriously. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of this storm.

My third and final lightning story. Last night Madison had a doozy of a storm. It woke me up around 4:15 AM. This was confusing because my clock said 3:01 (power outage?) and annoying because I was supposed to wake up at 5:05 anyway. Here is a picture taken last night, again from Flickr:

That's it. I don't have any other point.

Madisonians divorce their cars
Divorce can sometimes be cost-effective, especially when you are divorcing your car. Four drivers, including (pictured from left) Mike Weber, Erin Carlman, Amy Groshek and David Zaks, all of Madison, signed divorce papers Thursday, getting rid of their vehicles and signing up instead to use shared cars through Community Car, a Madison organization that's been growing by leaps and bounds during this day of high-priced gasoline. Subscribers to Community Car reserve time to use one of 17 cars located around the city, without having the expense of gasoline, insurance or car payments.

Although this little blurb in The Capital Times today may seem innocuous, the message board rants that follow it prove otherwise. Read for a good time.

The Seattle Sway

The Milwaukee Sway

The Sway comes to Milwaukee, the first of many appearances.