after a week away, we arrived home at 10pm after a seven hour drive to find a Good Samaritan slow blowed our 100 feet of sidewalks and our 100 foot driveway!
they didn’t leave a calling card, but i think i know who did it. THANK YOU! Mightily appreciate not having to come home and dig out of 8 inches of snow that fell while we were gone.
odin’s hockey team won their third and final tournament game 6-2. great game. even though they won 2 of the 3 games they played, in a bracket tournament, losing the first game means the best they could hope for was third place, which means no trophy. hi. ho. who needs a trophy? not these kids!
the parents tried to get a proper team photo of the kids, but they were excited to get some time in racing around the 400m olympic training speed skating track, so the best we could hope for was a half-hearted team photo 🙂
the kids played two games of a two today tournament today in the impressive pettit national ice center which is an official us olympic training facility in milwaukee, wisconsin. it’s a little hard to see in this photo but in the arena there are two international-size ice rinks ( the second rink is behind the one in the foreground ) surrounded by a 400-meter speed skating oval. it’s impressive!
the first game was pettit versus viroqua. we knew it would be a tough game on pettit’s home ice and uuuufffffff-dddaaaaaaaa viroqua got a character building lesson and lost 1-9!
the final score doesn’t tell whole story. they were tied 1-1 at end of first period. kept it together and it was 1-3 and end of second period and it stayed that way until the final 7 minutes when, i think, viroqua ran out of gas and spirit.
the second hockey game of the day was in the evening and viroqua faced off again shaw. we hoped they could bounce back from the first loss even as it was getting late the kids and already played a tough game.
it was a little ugly but viroqua won 5-4 in overtime! we’ll take it!
did i, or did I not, swallow a cadaver bone graft? back visiting the oral surgeon and it turns out, i’m all clear! I am fused with the cadaver graft! which, i guess, makes me a human/cadaver hybrid.
when i told the oral surgeon i hadn’t taken any pain medicine because i hadn’t felt any pain she looked surprised a little skeptical, “maybe you should just be happy you’re not in pain. you’re unusually lucky.”
“i don’t think you understand how much I can overthink this.”
we drove back from the upper peninsula of michigan and turn around the next day and drive 35 miles for a double header hockey game against onalaska.
odin’s team won the first game, 3-9, with 22 shots on goal to their 16 shots on goal and they tied the second game against the same team 7-7, with 33 shots on goat to their 23 shots on goal.
rumor has it onalaska was not expecting to lose by 6 points the first game so they had fire in their bellies for the second game. congrats to both teams for a great games.
i have to say, odin did a good job but he was off a bit and didn’t play his best games. i think vacation sleep schedule, the drive and quick turnaround took a toll on him.
back in southwest wisconsin. FIRST SNOW! we’ve gotten away with a relatively mild winter so far, but the november shorts running weather is probably gone for good. how much snow will we get and will our friend the wooly bear caterpillar be proven correct? time will tell!
first, some detail might be in helpful. the 11’x5’ treehouse movie theater screen hangs off the 2nd floor of the house and is attached at the top to the house soffit. there’s a 10 pound piece of metal conduit in a hem on the bottom of the screen to keep it even and flat. support ropes are linked to clamps that are attached to the bar to keep the bar from banging against the house when it gets windy.
recently, we had a couple days and nights with crazy winds and on one of those nights we could hear the treehouse movie theater screen banging against the side of the house. great. the winds were so strong they snapped the support lines on the bottom of the screen. but there was nothing to be done in the dark during 40mph gusts so we settled in for a night of listening to the banging.
but then it stopped. “huh.” i thought. “i guess the screen must have ripped apart and fallen down entirely.”
not exactly. somehow a gust of wind got in the foot of so space between the screen and house and whipped it onto the roof and over the drain waste vent?! you can sort of see the metal conduit that runs along the bottom of the screen in this photo and how it had to make it up and over the vent.
it might be hard to visualize but if hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, i wouldn’t have thought it was possible.
i have to admit, lacking a 30 foot ladder, it took some time to figure out how to get myself perched on what is probably the most inaccessible section of our roof to try to get the bar back over the vent. i’m looking down on the treehouse movie theater deck which itself is 15 feet off the ground.