The Circle of Life

The past week has been a tough one for my friends.

One friend's father passed away Saturday very unexpectedly. Another friend's mom has been going through some rough times and it looks like the end may be near. Today I got a call from my mom about another friend who I have not seen in probably 10 years that her mom had passed away on Monday.  Three months ago another good friend's mom passed away.

I know all about the circle of life. I watched The Lion King, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

I just hate that my friends and I are now getting to that age where we are losing our parents.  I am not that old.

It has been a little over two years (Aug 21st) that my dad passed away.  I still miss him so much. I miss talking to him about stupid stuff or just to even say hi.  While the pain has subsided, the heartache is still always there. 

This past weekend at camping it was decided that we are doing away with the third week of August. Too many bad things happen. Three years ago, my friend's brother died, two years was my dad and this year, two friends lost their parents.

The only good thing was 11 years ago two great friends got married. They were even nice enough to offer to move their anniversary date to not coincide with the "bad" week.

I want to go to more weddings and less funerals.

Boys of Summer

The Milwaukee Brewers have been red hot the past month or so. They have the best home field winning record at 46-15. Unreal. They have won 19 out of the last 21 games.

They are getting great starts by their pitchers and not giving up the stupid plays that used to beleaguer them in the past.

The best part is that they are fun to watch and look like they are having fun playing.

Nyjer Morgan (aka Tony Plush) has been a hoot to listen to in post game interviews and on Twitter. Yesterday he adopted a kitten from the humane society and Twitter was all abuzz about it. The kitten's name is Slick Willy.

John Axford has 35 saves so far this season and 32 consecutive saves. Unbelievable.

I've only been to a handful of games this season so far but have plans to hit up at least two more. Tickets are now hard to come by.

I look forward to them having a long extended season this fall.

Jo and the Volcano

I didn't sleep very well last night.  I kept waking up while having the most bizarre dream.

I was in Hawaii. Or at least that's where I think I was. I explain more about that in a minute. It was cold but yet warm out. I was bobsledding down an active volcano. Weaving in and out of the snow. Avoiding the lava rivers. Every so often it would erupt and make the course more challenging. Once I would get to the bottom of the volcano I would put the bobsled in the back of the blue VW van from the tv show, Lost. The scenery was very tropical and lush so that is what makes me think I was in Hawaii.

It seemed like after every time I would get to the bottom of the volcano I would wake up. Not all the way but that kinda weird dreamy state where you can sense things but not quite cognizant of things.

It seemed like this went on for most of the night.... or at least until 4:36 when the newspaper hit the porch and woke Boomer up.

As a result, my butt is kinda dragging this morning. 

Update: The volcano may have been Mount Etna in Italy since I see that is also erupting.

Just Ducky

Last Friday was @Sp0on's birthday. She had put the word out on Twitter and G+ that she was having a mini bowling party at a local bar, Koz's

I never remembered it being called mini bowling before. We always called it duck pin bowling. Why?? I have no idea. I have not been duck pin bowling in at least 20 years. If I recall, R and I went before we were even married.

Anyhoo... We met up at Koz's about 7pm. There ended up being about 20 people who showed up during the evening. We broke up teams by the old fashioned way. We counted off by three's like you did for gym class in school. This made for some interesting teams to say the least.

Since about half the people had never met each other before, in real life, we had to use everyone's Twitter names. Then we all knew each other. Only a couple people knew how to mark score. I was one of them. I tried to keep score for the first game but gave up on the second. The others were on their own. I did teach a few and they seemed to catch on so all was well.

After two games, people were getting restless. By this time everyone was enjoying the $2 bottles of Lite or the $1 glasses of PBR or Schlitz and talking and laughing. We stopped for a bit when it was noticed that there were fire trucks and ambulance across the street. Turns out the firefighters weren't here to strip for Sp0on but to attend to a child that was hit by a car. (Side note: you never heard about it on the news or in the paper)

We then headed up to Bryant's Lounge. There ended up being about a dozen of us there. We walked in and noticed that it was dark. Very dark. Like so dark, we all pulled out our phones so we could see where we were going, dark. Because there were so many of us they said that they had no place for us to sit. We headed outside to discuss our options and decided to head to Bomb Shelter instead. They have a great selection of craft beers and was just down the street from where we were. It was fun to sit in the back area and check out all the beer and Milwaukee memorabilia. They had some classic stuff. Check out their website for some of the pics of the place.

After a few hours, I was running out of steam and headed home. It was a good time exploring of of Milwaukee's little known and fun treasures.