Well, that didn't go exactly as planned!

We're back from our weekend in Green Lake. This was the second half of a home exchange that was non-similtaneous ... they were at our house over the 4th of July weekend while we were at a family reunion. This house is right on a big lake in central Wisconsin. It was a beautiful house! But more on that later ...

The weekend started normally. We picked up the kids at school at around noontime and started the drive. Yes, I said started the drive. We didn't actually finish it, though we did complete around 98% of the needed 131 or so miles. We stopped to get gas for the boat a few minutes before we were to arrive. When we left the gas station, we went up a fairly steep grade. Smoke started coming out from under the hood. We stopped (duh), and investigate. There was some smoke coming from a small reservoir that had popped open on one side. So we closed that up and kept going. We missed a turn off (no street sign ... thanks Google Maps), and after we turned around, the truck seemed to be starting to lack power. So we tried a little more and then stopped as it became obvious we were not going to be able to pull the boat up the grade in front of us. Enter AAA. We got towed (suburban AND boat) to the lake house. The tow truck left us and the boat there and towed the suburban to a shop. We later found out that the transmission was shot. Now the "Yeah Cyndie" part. When we had the transmission replaced a year and a half ago, she shopped around a bunch to find a place with a good price and a long warrantee. The place we used offered a 3 year/36k miles warrantee. It's been about a year and a half and something like 15k miles! So, it's under warrantee. We had the truck towed down to Lake Geneva on Sunday, and now we're dealing with that shop. We think they'll try to wiggle their way out from under the full repair, but that's not going to happen. It's clearly under warrantee, Cyndie had just checked all the fluid levels before we left on the trip, and we checked again after the "smoking" incident, and the shop that took a look up in Green Lake said that the transmission was not done well. Soooo, hopefully this is just a bump in the road and we'll be back and working sooner rather than later.

On the vacation side, it was a lot of fun. Our friends, the Goreckis, came up with us. The house was a 6 bedroom, 6 1/2 bath house with a media room, foosball (Timmy's favorite) and pool, a spa, and beautiful views. We cruised on the boat (thanks to Cyndie going over to the neighbors and asking if we could use their truck!), including driving into town on the boat to have dinner Sunday night. The neighbor boy was the same age as Kahlib (7th grade), so they played a lot and did a pretty good job of including Timmy. They played a lot of football, and Timmy loved to tackle! Emma enjoyed the spa, though she wasn't feeling 100% the whole weekend.

Monday morning Cyndie left with the Goreckis to drive home and then borrow another friend's truck, drove back, and then back home with us and the boat. I worked in the morning and early afternoon. We got back home around 6:30, and went straight to the Williams Bay boat launch to put the boat back out on the buoy. Then home to unload our junk, then over to the drop the truck at the friend's house ... whew, it was a long day!!!

All in all, it was an adventurous weekend, and a memorable one. Hopefully we'll end up with very little out of pocket on this, and have a good transmission in a week or so.

Low key, but busy too!

Well, yesterday was a bit low key. The usual stuff ... school, Tim and Emma went to the local corn maze and haw fort with our friend Monica and her boys, Cyndie had sailing. When Emma got home from the excursion, she had a bit of a headache and was pretty listless. So we had some dinner and hit the sack pretty early last night ... Cyndie and I too.

Today, however, seems a bit busier. Cyndie has a couple of appointments, we're taking the boat out (to bring with up to Green Lake this weekend), we're packing for the trip, the kids have soccer, and Cyndie is helping serve at a restaurant in town that is donating $7 of every $9 charged to a local charity that she helps out with (Side by Side). The kids and I will head on over there after soccer. So, it should be a busy afternoon and evening.

On the kid front ... Emma is enjoying third grade. She's made a new friend who lives just off Schoefield named Julia. Cyndie met Julia's mom during the apple orchard trip a couple of days ago, so it sounds like a play date will be happening soon.

Timmy totally loves soccer. He's always wanting to play out in the yard, and looks forward to going to what he calls soccer "class".

So that's it on the Wildwood DeVries front!

Well, that was impressive, kind of.

Yesterday we're all out at the soccer fields for Emma and Timmy's soccer practice/games. They're usually 4:30 - 4:5o or so of practice, then the rest of the time until 5:30 is a game/scrimmage against another team. The skies were getting pretty dark and forbidding, so the guy in charge of the leagues tells the coaches to start the games immediately. They're playing and having a great time, but the skies are getting darker and darker and the wind is picking up. There starts to be some lightning and around 5p the games are called. So we pack it up and head back to the car. The wind is really picking up now, and as we're driving away, we're getting hit through open windows (it was pretty warm, in the mid 80's with a lot of humidity) by wind driven leaves and dirt and dust. It looks like at anytime, the sky is going to open up and just dump on us. We drop Cyndie off at Laura and Gow's (to pick up Daisy and Sally who we're babysitting during a Gowan date), and get hit by a slight barrage of rain, but nothing crazy. Over the next half hour, it rained some and was a bit windy, but nothing of the sort promised by the dark, crazy sky nor that which the weather reports carried (hail, 60 mile per hour winds) ever materialized. We ended up eating on the deck and enjoying the sound of the rain and laughing that it couldn't get us!

A Movie Review

There's not a whole lot to write about today, so I'll take this opportunity to post a review of the movie we watched down at Dave and Amy's, The Backup Plan.

The Backup Plan (3.1/5)
So, at first glance (i.e. from the cover of the movie and the preview or two I'd seen), this is a standard romantic comedy ... Jennifer Lopez, right? That's all the movies she makes anymore.

So, that wasn't totally right. It was a romantic comedy. And like almost all romantic comedies, they try to spin it differently so it's not exactly like every other romantic comedy ever made. Well this one was spun by having Lopez's character be pregnant the whole movie. So, we were blessed with the standard throwing up at inopportune times gags and gynecologist visit gags, etc.

I'm sitting here thinking about what else to write, but there was nothing remotely good or memorable to take away. I maybe am being a little over generous dropping a 3.1 on this movie, but it seemed to slot in well next to a similar romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You, so there you go.

The overall summary: A very generic RomCom with pregnancy bits added in (which made it worse).

Movies I've seen recently:
Juno - 4.8/5
Slumdog Millionaire - 4.6/5
Iron Man - 4.2/5
Lars and the Real Girl - 4.1/5
Wall-E - 4.0/5
Traitor - 4.0/5
The Dark Knight - 3.9/5
Star Trek - 3.9/5
TransSiberian - 3.9/5
Iron Man 2 - 3.8/5
Wolverine - 3.8/5
Hurt Locker - 3.8/5
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist - 3.7/5
Definitely, Maybe - 3.7/5
Up - 3.7/5
The Blind Side - 3.7/5
Kung Fu Panda - 3.5/5
How to Train a Dragon - 3.5/5
The Passion - 3.5/5
Valkyrie - 3.5/5
Appoloosa - 3.5/5
Sherlock Holmes - 3.5/5
The Incredible Hulk - 3.4/5
Stealth - 3.4/5
New in Town - 3.2/5
Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakquel - 3.2/5
He's Just Not That Into You - 3.1/5

The Backup Plan - 3.1/5
Horton Hears a Who - 3.0/5
Inglorious Bastards - 2.9/5
Push - 2.8/5
Jonah, a VeggieTales Movie - 2.4/5
Meet Bill - 2.1/5
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 1.9/5
Burn After Reading - 1.5/5

Here we go again!

I guess the title of the blog could really apply to a lot of things ... the Vikings sucking this year (0 - 2), Liverpool going down the drain (4 points from 5 games in the EPL), fall really getting started. But really, all I meant when I wrote it was that it's Monday, and we're starting a new week.

Today marks the "real" start of the school schedule in that it is the first day that Emma has before school Spanish class. She'll do that on Mondays and Wednesdays at 7:50 (until 8:20 or so). Timmy will do before school Spanish on Fridays. So, for now, we're locked in with Spanish MWF, school, then soccer after school on T/TH. That seems like a lot, especially when you factor in the various evening things that Cyndie and I have.

We had a nice weekend. It was fairly kick back. Saturday morning we spent some time (in the intermittent rain) cleaning up the garage. We did a fairly good job of it, but there's still some stuff to be done before winter in order to put the car in there. In the early afternoon, we headed down to Amy and Dave's for some cousin time. It was a nice visit. We hung out, grilled burgers, the kids played some outside and in, and we watched a movie. Good times. We left by about 9:30 the next morning when the cousins went to church. The rest of the weekend was pretty standard Sunday (complete with losses by both the Vikings and Liverpool), with a church meeting (regarding kids programs) at our place after church in the evening.

So there you have it. We're back and raring to go!

Better Blog ...

Yeah, I don't have a ton to say today. Nothing hugely exciting or unusual happened in the last 24 hours or so. But in order to stay consistent, and not get behind, I better throw something out there!

Yesterday was overcast with a nice thunderstorm and downpour in the morning. I spent 15 or 20 minutes working out on the deck enjoying the sound of rain, thunder and lightning. Actually, it was raining so hard, it really wasn't the "normal" sound of rain I was hearing, but really more of a constant roar! It was a bit strange because I went for a run in the very early morning (5:45 is when the alarm goes off, and, when it's my turn for the outside exercise, I'm usually on the road by 5:55), it was actually quite warm. I was definitely not at all cold in shorts and a t-shirt, something I can't say about other runs in the last week or so. So the rain lowered the temperature by something like 10 or 15 degrees, making the rest of the day pretty darn cool. It did clear up enough to be decent weather for soccer in the afternoon. Both of the kids enjoyed their games, but wearing sweatshirts under their jerseys. Tim was in the goal for a lot of his game and spent much of his time (when the ball was at the other end of the field), diving around on the ground making pretend saves and generally not paying a whole lot of attention to what was going on on the field. Anyway, it was good times.

So there's life. We're hoping to work more on the tree fort and to clean out the garage tomorrow, but a lot of that will depend upon the weather (it's supposed to rain).

Tree Fort Baby

Yesterday was the start of the tree fort building effort at our place. I went to get the wood I need for the deck part early. Then my dad came over in the afternoon to help me get the "square" (the main beams) up. It was quite an effort. Included in that was cutting down a tree that was dead so that I can use it for one of the main vertical supports on the tree fort. It was a little trial and error getting the stuff up. In the end we got up two beams. And, due to a number of reasons, they are a bit higher than I originally intended. The plan now is to take those two back down and lower the base to a bit safer level (8 or 9 feet instead of 11 or 12). I think, based upon what we learned in the couple of hours we spent yesterday, it will go MUCH quicker this time. Hopefully we'll have quite a bit of time to work on that on Saturday ... at least getting the main platform up. Fun times.

In the evening, Em and Tim went over to the cousins house to have dinner/play while Cyndie and I went out for dinner with our friends Al and Sherri. This was our victory dinner for winning the biggest loser competition with (against) them. We hit Paisanos, our favorite area restaurant. I was absolutely stuffed after that!

So now we're nearing the end of the week. The kids have soccer tonight ... Cyndie's running errands today ... work, work, work for me!