Into the Post-Season

The regular season ended today with the Packers beating Detroit 34-13. They played MUCH better this week than last. Favre was pulled with 10 minutes left in the second quarter when the score was 21-3, quite an insult. Some of the other top seeds fell this week like we did last week - both Dallas and Indy lost. Only the Patriots won after the Giants collapsed at the end of the game. Now it's watching the games next week and wondering who we'll get in the second round of the playoffs.

In other news, Nick and I have lost at Empire Builder now. After beating Erin last night, we were pretty confident, but the newly home Dave came over tonight and beat us all.

Looking forward to New Year's Eve tomorrow night - should be pretty low-key as we're spending it at home but I'll try to take a couple of pictures for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the end of 2007!

The Great Cinnamon Polar Bear Debate

The rest of my day went well; I got to the library, JC Penney's and Cub. Cub was a little scary - the cashier chided me for not using any coupons. Apparently if I'm a conscientious coupon-clipper I can save enough each year to go to Florida. Too bad for her I prefer to get most of my groceries in bulk at Costco.

I arrived home just after Nick and Marsha, and we settled in and made Marsha eat a giant cupcake before she could do anything else. After that, I took her downstairs and we played with the Wii. She seemed to do better as a lefty than a righty for some reason...

No poker due to the holiday, so after a brief game of TransAmerica (I kicked butt!) we met up with Nic and went to Fuddrucker's for supper - yum! We sat for quite a long time chatting, then headed home, avoiding a strange box of garbage that was left near our car. Nic couldn't stay, but Marsha and I took on Nick in a game of Trivial Pursuit and won easily. The final answer was It was a dark and stormy night. After that, we started doing movie trivia, TV trivia, and random trivia. It was a fun night with plenty of games and entertainment - and it was great to see Marsha again!

Goal #1 Finished!

Our trip is St Louis last May is completely scrapbooked! I've been working helter-skelter on the pages, so the Memorial Day party is also already done, and Nick's birthday camping trip and our Vegas trip are both halfway done - 3 more pages for each of those and I'll be done through the end of June. That was my first goal for the day, selfish yes but more exciting than cleaning the kitchen and putting away laundry. Yesterday Nick and I sorted out all the stuff we want to bring to Goodwill and then watched Spider-Man 3, so it's a little bit of work and play everyday. I'm enjoying these couple of days at home without work!

Christmas Travel Over!

Home again! And for the long haul this time - we have no travel plans in our immediate future at all! We spent last Saturday - Tuesday in Wisconsin, attending about six holiday parties and managing to see the majority of my family. It was a lot of fun! We ate lots of food and had fun visiting. Nick got TransAmerica, bringing the number of train games we own up to 3! We enjoyed playing it with Mom and Thomas and then just Mom, but decided it's not a very good two player game after we attempted to play it by ourselves. We also got enough china to expand our wedding set up to 12 place settings, plus a few serving bowls, and some nice NFL North Champions T-shirts! Finally, in the year of sequels we got Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Spider-Man 3, and Shrek the Third. Yay to movies! Of course, there were other presents too, but these are just some of the highlights. We had pretty good luck driving - fog the last hour driving there and blowing snow the last hour driving back, but it was pretty uneventful overall. Hope everyone else had a wonderful Christmas as well. Merry Christmas to all!

Swept!

By Kyle Orton and the Bears! What a depressing game! At least we were in good company to watch it and we still are guaranteed to get to the second round of the playoffs.

Merry Christmas to all!

Ready for Christmas?

How well do you know your Christmas carols? I got an 80% - one dumb mistake and a couple I honestly couldn't think of. You might find yourself singing out loud trying to get the right answers! Too bad there wasn't a Mariah Carey song, I know that one backwards and forwards!

Nick Makes Beef Jerky

Using some deer meat we got from Nick's dad and a dehydrator Nick borrowed from a co-worker, Nick was able to make beef jerky with hardly any effort at all. I have to say, it's delicious!! :)

Nick and his homemade "Jerky Extruder"


Still Hydrated


Ready to eat!

Empire Master!

As of today, all our Christmas shopping is done. Yay! Only 3 of them still have to be wrapped, and I got our Christmas cards in the mail today, so it's almost time to relax and enjoy Christmas. The extra trip to Green Bay threw off my planning a little bit, but that's ok. The Packers are worth it!

We also enjoyed another game of Empire Builder tonight. I got ahead early and managed to hold on as Nick and Dave attempted to catch up to me. Yay victory! Still no wins for anyone outside the two of us. That takes a lot of pressure off Erin when she visits next week.

Holiday Culture

As some of you may remember, last year Nick and I went to a bell choir concert by Twin Cities Bronze in St Paul to celebrate the holiday season. This year we continued the tradition by going to see Tonic Sol Fa at the Minnesota Orchestra Hall. We met Andrea and her friend Matt after work and headed downtown for dinner at the Staccato Restaurant before the show. It was a great meal and a fantastic show. I can't believe Christmas is only a week away!

Oh Happy Day

Another Packer game aired on TV in Minneapolis, another week we were out of town for it. So far the only game we've watched on our own TV was the Packer-Viking game we didn't attend in person!

We watched this week's game at Nick's grandparents' house in Iowa, where we were celebrating Christmas with his family. Great game, great fun to see Brett break another record (with his favorite receiver this time!). As a special bonus, it was nice to see Dallas fall as well. If Detroit would have finished the job last week we'd be winning the NFC right now! Guess I have to be happy with a guaranteed first-round bye. This is a much better place to be sitting in than a year ago. Hooray to the post-season!

Go Pack Go!!

Karin Goes to Costco

Mmmm, supper!

We followed that with a game of Empire Builder - I won easily. So far the tally is Karin 4, Nick 2, all challengers 0. But it is fun :)

The Curse is Broken!

Nick and I spent last weekend in Green Bay. We took the afternoon off on Friday and got to town around 6. We met up with Marsha and Jill and went out for a yummy perch fry at the Redwood Inn. After that, we hung out at Mom's house, playing Whoonu and messing around with a wooden nutcracker that she had.

My famous friend.

Saturday was our "running around day". After breakfast with Mom and Dave we headed over to Dad's to go out to eat at Brother's Three, one of my favorite Wisconsin restaurants. From there, we stopped over at Grandma's to visit with more family and get a few of Grandma's old Christmas tree ornaments. Then Mom and Dave made a delicious roast for supper back at their house. After that, I was tuckered out and fell asleep. But everyone else played Sequence and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Sounds like it was fun!

Sunday was the true purpose of our trip however: our 2007 trip to Lambeau Field. I was hoping that we would finally see a victory and I was rewarded when the Packers beat the Oakland Raiders 38-7; a blow-out victory. We started off the day by bundling up - I had 4 layers on under my coveralls! Then a round-about drive to the stadium in which we completely avoided all the traffic! Inside, we surprised Sandy and Cindy, who were working at the Hemophilia Booth selling Packers merchandise.

Surprise!


Happy Workers

From there we climbed up to our seats. There was a huge line of people waiting to get into the stadium and there were only 20 minutes until game time. Guess they don't call that side the main gate for nothing!

That's a lot of people!

The game was fantastic! We were sitting with some friends of mine from work who are Raiders fans, and they really enjoyed the stadium and talking to the fans sitting around us. Another Raiders fan I know who was at the game said he didn't care much for the game but that our stadium was awesome! He wants to come back to watch another game. Here are a couple of pictures documenting our time at the game:

Flyover! We actually saw 4 jets practicing the flyover on Saturday. This is so cool - no comparison to when they show it on the JumboTron at the 'dome.


The first kickoff attempt - the ball fell off the T so they had to reset it and line up again.


Touchdown!


Victory - and we clinched the division!


Celebrating the win - do we look cold?

And that was the weekend. GO PACK GO!!

Bacos Squared

Tonight we played volleyball - Bacos I vs Bacos II. Rob is on the other team now and it was fun to watch him setting balls back and forth with Dave and Nick. My team won 2 of 3. I have no clue what the standings are but it was fun to get out and play!

Snow Day!

We did end up getting lots of snow! Nick and I had originally not planned on going out, but ended up doing a Costco/Lowe's/Joann's run when I had a scrapbooking emergency (no more glue). It was slippery, but we arrived back unharmed - and we got all the stuff we needed to fix the drains in the bathroom. Yes, both the sink and the tub weren't draining right, but Nick got both of them fixed. It's so nice to take a shower and not be standing in three inches of soapy water when you are done!

The snow on our back deck.

In addition to the bathroom, Nick (and I!) made more progress on cleaning out the airplane room. I think we just about filled up our trash bin for the week, but we also boxed a lot of stuff up to move down into our newly-redesigned basement closet (pictures of that coming soon). Around 9 PM we got brave and decided to finally play the new game that Smeeta and Dave bought Nick for his birthday. We had gotten it out once before, but after spending a half hour putting all the little stickers on decided not to play. It was a lot of fun! It's another train game, but it's pretty complicated. It took about 4 hours to play, so we didn't finished until around 1. I ended up beating Nick by $4, so it was very, very close. We'd love to try with more players so if anyone has a lot of time to kill give us a call!

The game board - Nick is brown and I am green.

Today's plans: stay home away from the snow! Nick has already shoveled the drive, and is working on the basement while I play on here. We're listening to the Viking game but not really watching - looking forward to the Pittsburgh-Cincinnati game tonight. I'd better go help!

Happy December!

It's snowing and has been since I first got up - getting progressively harder too! It's all sticking so maybe later today Nick and I will build a snowman! I'm so happy that all our plans for today involve staying home. Green Bay already played, so we have no real reason to go out tomorrow either. Let it snow!