Holiday Fun

We are being very slow about getting our cards out this year! But we did spend some time last night taking a family holiday picture in our new home. The dogs were their usual cooperative selves. I'm pretty sure that they were watching The Madagascar Penguin's Christmas Caper during several of the shots.























We trashed the house in unpacking all of the decorations, but the tree looks great and we have new decorations for our new outside! The dogs were all tuckered out with all of the decorating and now the house looks great! Only Six More Days!

My Library

Sorry if this is a repeat from some gushing that I've done on Facebook, but I'm just so thrilled with the shelving units that Pete build for our Library. I've always wanted a room full of books and now I have one! It looks great and they don't even have their trim and stain on them yet.

With the installation of the shelves we also put in the blinds that we found (on sale) in October. They also look fabulous and for the first time since we've moved in to the house, we have a little privacy on our first floor. If you know my Peter Pantsless, you know how important privacy is in the Koenig household!

The room is coming along. Can't wait until tomorrow when we decorate for the Holidays. It's going to look Great!

I spent my fall learning more than anyone should need to know about Laurel and Hardy. But at the end of a month of rehearsing and re-writing and playing I was rewarded with 2 months of getting to watch the incomparable Gerry Neugent and Bill Thiesen play the legendary schtickmeisters. They were very good at portraying the duo, but the fun part of the run was watching them play at making each other giggle. It was good, messy fun.


Once my show was up and running, the Johnson clan got together to celebrate the family fall birthdays. Right now, that's pretty much everyone! Instead of requiring someone to host the 10 people that currently make up our family, we met in Hartford at the Mineshaft restaurant and had a nice lunch and gift exchange. It was great and little Gavin gets bigger and CUTER every time we see him!

Last of the summer fun

Way back in February, several friends from UW Oshkosh theater found each other on Facebook and decided that a summer reunion would be a blast. Since class reunions are always arranged by year of graduation, you never get to see all of the friends that you worked with before and behind you in school. This reunion was an open invitation to anyone who went to UW Oshkosh and worked in the theater in the 1980s. It was a blast.

We met Friday night for a cocktail party and tour of the Fredrick March theater then followed it up with dinner at the Challis. Saturday we had a picnic in the park that lasted from early afternoon until late night! There was baseball, volleyball, lots of drinking and a ton of remembering. We also rounded out the evening with Phony Tonys and though Pete and I headed back into town to check on the puppies, everyone else went back to the cabins where they were staying for a bon fire.

Sunday we all met for Brunch before heading back to our respective homes. It was great to see a lot of people that I haven't seen in up to 22 years and we made plans for more opportunities to meet up more regularly including another reunion next summer.

























For our last adventure into the ball park this summer, we took our friend Michael down to Beloit to experience a Snappers game. We couldn't believe that it was our first of the summer, but of course this summer had a little different priority than previous summers! We had a great time, and it was a good game.

Some family visits

First week in August we got a chance to open our new house to all of our Omaha family. But first, we took a quick trip up to Manitowoc for dinner with the whole gang and a game of mini-golf. We had a blast! Little Noelle is quite the golfer!

It was great to see how our house could handle a bunch of people, it seemed to do OK! Landon and Skylar slept in the baseball room, Val and Scott slept on the hide-a-bed and the rest of the kids dog piled on the air mattress in the pub room. We did OK!

Lake County Fielders

Besides the La Crosse Loggers, we did get a few baseball games in this summer. There is a new team a little over an hour south of here called the Lake County Fielders. What we discovered is that though they started playing, they really weren't ready. There was no park, just a field and some low budget concession stands. The ticket price was cheap, but everything else gave us a little bit of sticker shock. The team is owned in part by Kevin Costner - hence the name - and they are set to open with a park next summer. We liked the uniforms, we both got really sun burned because there was no cover in any of the stands. It was an OK game, and an OK time, but the jury is out until next summer.

Some Summer Events

So what else did we do this summer... We went to our friends Karyn and Bill's wedding at the Pabst Brewery and some of their friends thought they would appreciate a visit from the World Famous Klemments Racing Sausages at their reception. It was a blast! They came and danced for about an hour.

Pete and I took a strange weekend trip to LaCrosse, we wanted to see a LaCrosse loggers game but it got rained out and when we got back to the camp sight Puja had broken out of the tent and gone AWOL running around our campground. It took us 20 horrible minutes to find her but she was safely hanging out in the office with the person managing the campground. She was very happy to see us.

The next day we spent hanging around the campground, we went for a swim in the lake and tried to avoid the homicidal mosquitoes in the campground. Then we went into town to the LaCrosse Irish Fest and saw Gaelic Storm perform. (We took the pups with us this time so they wouldn't be tempted to break out of the tent!). It was a blast!

We drove back to Milwaukee Sunday and went to the Rep's annual company picnic and it's annual kick-ball game. It was a great weekend!

Four months... Wow, Bad Blogger. Naughty naughty blogger

So... What's been going on for the last four months? Dan, Christina and Gavin came in to town for a visit and took us to the Childrens museum to play. We had a blast! I think Pete had as much fun playing with all the toys as Gavin did!

Our 10th Anniversary

Since we've been together we have tried to see a new major league ballpark every summer. Last year, we started the tradition of making that new ballpark an anniversary present. So this year for our 10th anniversary, we went to glamorous Cleveland OH to see an Indians game.







We had a great time. We explored Cleveland's west side market, enjoyed a relaxing cup of coffee, browsed through a bookstore and then had dinner at Cleveland's Great Lakes brewery. We took a shuttle to the game from the brewery and had a great time. Our seats were great - high, but right behind home plate.

After the game there were Fireworks set to beach music (since it was a beach weekend) and they were Great!! All in all we had a great time.





Because we were on our usual schedule, we left Milwaukee later than we wanted and I forgot that we lost an hour going to Cleveland so we missed the Akron Aeros game on Thursday night. But now Pete was jonesing for a minor league game, so we stayed an extra day and drove up to Akron for a game.

We got our ball tickets and then found a dog park so the puppies could have a little vacation too. Then we relaxed at the hotel before heading down to have a fairly unremarkable dinner near the park.

The game was a lot of fun and the Aeros, who had been down the whole game, came back to win it in the 8th inning - so it was a lot of fun.

Sunday we made the long drive back to Milwaukee, but decided to skip the turnpike for a while and took some back roads. It's really a beautiful drive off the turnpike!

Secret Vacation!

Our friends Karen, Steven and Anya came to Milwaukee on a secret vacation. Basically - a facebook blackout! We had a blast sharing our new home with them (their visit encouraged us to finally put the other two upstairs bedrooms together!) and we took in a Brewers game. We had an Irish/French fusion day - Breakfast at McBobs, Bastille days in Cathedral Square and dinner & Athas Irish music at Brocach Irish Pub. Steven finagled a tour of the Walthers train warehouse for us before we saw Toy Story 3 (in 3D!) and rounded out our vacation (let's face it - it was as much a vacation for us as for them!) with everyone's favorite Kopps Custard. Yum!

Thanks for coming you guys! We had a blast!