Red Jackets

This is the last weekend of my time at home and these days are a bittersweet mix of time with friends and family and moments alone, like now, dwelling on the fact I'll be half a world away for the balance of summer.  For the most part, it was a great vacation.  Traveling to the Dells, meeting LL and Artemis was more fun than we ever imagined.  The weather here in the Copper Country has been great and I've managed not to mortally injure myself for the first time in ages.  Despite some very rough and painful issues affecting my family, we've had some bright spots, including a dinner just a couple of nights ago.  I actually had dinner with my entire family in attendance.  We ate at our favorite restaurant, atop on of the local hotels, overlooking our beautiful, little waterway.  We enjoyed a nice long and very pleasant meal, pretty much with the place to ourselves.  My girls opened birthday presents, PW and I had a few glasses of vino and we all had damn good eats.  For my part, I polished off a brace of herb-encrusted quail, stuffed with wild rice and pheasant sausage and topped with a delightful mango chutney.  We all shared some sort of fudge filled chocolate cake dessert thing accompanied by a fruit sorbet and raspberry sauce.  YUM!

After the meal, we meant to take a walk along the waterfront, but ended up walking around an indoor stadium filled with thousands of old photographs of the area, taken over the last 175 years, all displayed and organized by city, or village, or by topic.  We spent about an hour rediscovering what this area looked like before the turn of the century. Nearly an hour before my teenagers began to moan that they were dying from boredom.  The pictures were that cool.  I saw three of my former residences in photos taken at or before the turn of the century:)

Last night, after a rather boisterous party consisting of little girls who screamed a lot, I escaped into town, still soaking wet from water balloons, a slip n slide and squirt guns.  Spent a while with Mr, Bud and his boys, then I took just him over to view the old photos.  After that we stopped just around the corner at Keweenaw Brewing Company and sucked down a bunch of Red Jacket ambers.  Since neither of had eaten in 10 hours and I promised PW I'd eat and sober up before driving home, we walked down the block to the Ambassador and had a tostada pizza and a couple more Red Jackets:)  Then, since you can't smoke in there anymore AND KBC was still open, we headed back down the street to close the place and help them get rid of more Red Jackets.  Dang that beer is good!  Drove home in a blinding rainstorm and passed the fuck out.

Today?  I'm struggling to get up off the couch.