Light You Up

Good evening. Going to make this quick, hopefully. Still waiting on consistent warm weather here in Wisconsin as it's pouring on this dreary Sunday night. Monday on the other hand, was really nice out. Mia had a 2nd round of pictures taken at school complete with graduation photos with cap and gown! It's hard to believe her school year is almost over. She wore the nicest dress on the rare warm day we had. Sadly the weather didn't last. School is still going well for her. Wednesday after school, BFF Olivia and Mia went to Chuck E Cheese. Mia still is afraid of Chuck so when he came out and danced and tossed tickets to the kids, Mia hid, but Olivia ran out and grabbed some for her. Such a sweetheart. The kids played a bunch and picked out some prizes. I hope they can keep their friendship as long as possible.

Anyways, throughout the week, I've been doing some Torrent stuff and started the salon logo in Illustrator. I'm still baffled by this woman's concept that she wants. It's just about complete so we'll see what she thinks. I found out this week that Mia's all-time favorite band Tegan and Sara are coming to Milwaukee in October, but unfortunately on a school night. I wish they were coming in Summer so I could take her, but it's just too late of a show. They're headlining a huge tour all across the globe. Mia was pretty obsessed that I told her we can't take her but alas, I'm going to make the best attempt to write the band, maybe have Mia draw the girls a picture and see if they can meet her downtown Milwaukee before the show. It's worth a shot. She's such a huge fan of them.

Speaking of music, she's been singing Maritime's "Light You Up" a lot lately and dancing in the car. It's pretty cute :) Saturday, the Torrent played their 3rd friendly against UW-Green Bay. I didn't go to the game on the cold and dreary Saturday, but I did stream it while cleaning the living room. They ended with a 0-0 draw and it sounded like the fans had a good time. Mia and I went to a cookout at my younger brother's house while Jill sadly had to work a 2-7. The kids chased each other around and Mia even drew the boys pictures. A lion for Cam and a Popsicle for Easton. She was pretty proud of her art and glad to have done it.

Later we had dinner with Jill and watched the Penguins vs Capitals game as a family. Those moments together are always short which can be pretty upsetting. I'm glad the good guys won :) This week, hopefully better weather, I want to finish the salon logo(s) and try to complete the Chelsea supporters banner for the Milwaukee chapter. The boys in Blue play the Spurs tomorrow at 2pm which I'll sadly miss. If they win or draw the Spurs, Leicester wins the league so I'm hoping they don't disappoint.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Do The Penguin Slide!

Good morning everyone. Hope you all enjoyed your week, and that if you're a Packers fan, you're feeling better today :) We'll get back to that later. It was a busy week, but we had a lot of fun. Earlier in the week, I took Mia sledding. I made the attempt at this golf course real close to our house. The fresh powder was too deep and we couldn't get good tracks to get her down the hill. So, before we gave up on the day, we tried a different hill. Mia LOVED this park's sledding hill! It was big enough to get some really nice speeds down, and she only fell out once but didn't care. Wednesday (later) I took her to this man-made ice rink in New Berlin to do some skating. It was getting dark, so it was a tad cold for skating, but she did skate a little while and ended up being the only person there. She's getting more confident on skates and is starting to really impress me. Friday she had school and got to finish her snow flake she's been talking about. She told me her favorite part at school was when her friend gave her a hug goodbye when I picked her up. Awww..:)

Saturday, I got up and watched the Chelsea vs Swansea game. Wow. Opening 50 seconds and Oscar got a goal. Perfect way to start. He would finish the game with two goals, Diego Costa secured two as well as Andres Schurrle. We finished 5-0 and took the 3 points easily. What made it even better, was that Sunday morning, Man City fell to Arsenal 2-0 giving us a 5 point lead. After the game Saturday, we went sledding again, and Jill came along. They had a lot of fun. Mia discovered sledding on your belly on the sled was a LOT of fun. The temps were upper 30s so it was real nice. A little TOO warm to skate, but we tried anyway.

We should have left it at that, but we tried skating (Me and Mia did at least) The ice was horrific. If I would have remembered, we could have gotten in for free at Eble Ice Arena near our house. They had free skating Saturday. UGHHHH!!!! Saturday night, we all were working on different projects. The girls were working on custom jewelry and I was hand-painting a Tegan and Sara shirt for Mia. I'm going to have to go over the yellow in "Sara" again. I should have done all of the lettering in White. The hot-pint blank shirt was too heavy of a color to paint on. The colors I used were bright neon ones, but they look quite muted on the shirt. Oh well. Mia loves it still.

Sunday I worked. I am so glad I'm not a Packers fan,  because if I was, and had any chance of watching it post-work, every single customer came in talking about it. From the moment they were winning, to the gut-wrenching loss. The moment I found out they lost, was when this guy came in with tears running down his face, in disbelief. HOW does a team blow a 16-point lead? Did they get cocky? Overly excited for what they thought was a sure-thing? Whatever the case is, everyone is going to be hurting today, except everyone in my house. :) That's one of the many things Jill and I came together on on our "date" the first time we hung out together. She didn't like the Packers or American Football, and I clearly don't either. She even made cupcakes and delivered them to my store before the game was over "to soak up the tears and to celebrate LAST DAY OF PACKERS PLAYING" as she was broadcasting.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

HOW ARE YOU DOIN MILWAUKEE!!???

HEY! Hi, and how everyone's doing? Hopefully great, or at least pretty good. Lots to discuss. First off, the weekend was quite busy. Friday I took off for Summerfest, but before then, I did some finishing touches cleaning the house before Jill's surprise birthday party. Friday night, my sister and I met up and took the ol' bus down to the grounds for Tegan and Sara. Since it was Friday, it was incredibly busy, but we made our way to the Briggs and Stratton stage. A local cover band was playing when we claimed our spot 8 rows from the very front. They were quite boring. 4 guitar players, two dudes playing keyes and of course one bass and drums with a female doing back up vocals. They were covering Bon Jovi, country crap, Matchbox 20 and other typical cover band tunes. The opening band for T&S was a group from Canada called Soho Ghetto. Right away I could easily tell the singer was another Springsteen fan. His look and the way he sang was a dead giveaway. Their first couple songs were tolerable, but that was about it. An unfortunate woman passed out at some point during their set from too much beer or alcohol. Security kept rushing in and eventually stretchered the girl out. Finally it was Tegan and Sara's turn to light up the stage. Literally.

They knocked out a good chunk of songs, mostly favoring their newest album Hearthrob, but they dabbled into their back catalog a bit playing some hits off The Con and did a couple songs from Sainthood. It was a total dance party the entire time. Tegan goofed up some lyrics during a song (that I can't remember at the moment) but Sara was going to punish her by making her sing the National Anthem. Didn't happen, but they restarted the song and she nailed the lyric. Some songs that were played were:
The Con
Back in Your Head
Walking With A Ghost
Closer
Goodbye Goodbye
I'm Not Your Hero
Dark Come Soon
plus many many others. It was deffinately worth the 3 1/2-4 hour wait. The only song missing from their set list was "Hell", one of my all-time fans because it sounds like an Alkaline Trio song. After they finished up, we made our way through the hoards of people lingering around. There were fights breaking out at the Five Finger Death Punch show, and some how we got on the bus. This is one of the reasons why I don't go down to Summerfest that often. The crazy amount of people everywhere. Luckily the bus ride wasn't too bad. A lot of older people looking at their photos they took of the bands they saw. I took a few good photos, but had to shoot in b/w to make a desperate attempt of getting some detail in the shot. If I had our DSLR camera, that would have been slightly easier to get some good color photos. I remembered the Hanson show I shot for the Rave/Eagles Club and how it was a pain in the ass fighting the low and ever-changing lighting.

Saturday was Jill's party. Gonna keep it short. It went quite well, despite the fact that it was meant to be an outdoors one, and we got rain (which lead to muggy air) so we all stayed inside. I had the Brazil/Chile game on (which was intense to the end) Jill loved her sushi-looking cupcakes and sashimi crispies. The gift was what I was most excited about. Her very own KitchenAid mixer. She's been wanting one for almost a year now. In fact, Sunday when I came home from work, the neighborhood smelled like fresh baked goods. MMM!!

Tuesday, the USMNT played Belgium. Two teams I was hoping would do well this World Cup, so this was a difficult game. In the end, Belgium won (which is what I predicted) and at the hands of two Chelsea boys, but US gave them hell. Tim Howard, who's now a household name, had 16-17 saves that night which is a new record. I've watched the highlights and it was definately a nail-biter. We may not have gotten out of this round, but we proved that they are a team with a lot of fight. And any Donovan fan can say "well see? We should have played him, we would have won" all they want, you really don't know that for sure. Most likely, he'll be too old for the next WC. Looking forward to the next games (if I can watch them).

Lastly, my friend Nicole and I took our kids to the zoo Wednesday. Despite the rain, they had a great time. Mia decided that today would be the day she'd conquer her fear of the zoo train. "I promise I won't cry Daddy" and she didn't. In fact, she LOVED it. I was so proud of her.

Okay, that's all for now. Thanks for reading :)

Closer

Greetings. Just finished watching a very awesome performance broadcasted on Youtube of Tegan and Sara live from SXSW. It was supposed to start at 11, but it started 30 minutes later. BOO! Oh well. Totally worth it, plus I got some art time in working on this ridiculous Weezy portrait. I hope I never see his face again after I complete this thing for my friend's daughter. The performance was quite awesome. Wish I could have seen them in Milwaukee last week. Mia and I enjoyed our time off today. I recently switched from hard contact lenses to soft ones. My hard contacts, I've had for a very long time and year after year, they'd get dried out. Well, the eye doc suggested soft lenses, and sure enough they work quite well. Today, Mia and I went in to order some, and headed over to Steffans soccer to mainly poke around, see what I can't buy. So a while back I was paging through a Soccer.com catalog and showed Jill a pair of purple and pink Nike cleats, the Mercurial boots. I said "I bet these will be what Mia will want to wear for soccer cleats when she's older. Today, FIRST shoe she sees on the shelf. The EXACT same pair I showed Jill. "Dadda, put on my foot??" Already into soccer. Hopefully it lasts. I can't wait for Spring soccer to start. It's gonna be so awesome. Later tonight since Modern Family was a repeat (curse you March Madness) we got Mia all dressed up and headed to the Mall for a picture with the Easter Bunny. She was totally not into it, till the photographer bribed her with a frog stuffed animal. Plus, Jill had to sit with Mia and Mr. Bunny. The picture turned out nice, which is what matters. Mia was running through the mall so excited to see the rabbit but when she got too close, she grasped onto my leg.

Took a rad video of Mia drumming a few days ago. She really went to town on my kit and it was quite amazing. She loves music almost as much as I do :) Anything else I can quickly mention before heading off to bed? It was a late night last night. Mia crashed at 2am. Hopefully she sleeps well tonight.  Alright, that'll have to do for tonight. Thanks for reading.