Early June 2021
Bad news on the floor front. We were supposed to have had it installed on Monday but I received a call from Home Despot the preceding Friday that I did not want to receive. The guy on the other end of the phone began by giving me some gobbledygook lesson on vinyl floor taxonomy that went completely over my head. I was then informed that there had been a mistake and that their flooring installers do not, in fact, deal with the type of vinyl planking that I had purchased.
From Home
Despot.
It took them
nearly 6 weeks to figure this out. Less than 1 business day before the install
was set to be done. I was given the choice of keeping the materials and finding
someone else to do the install or to get a refund. I opted for the latter.
So we were
back at square one. I have hired another (smaller, local) company and am now awaiting them to
assign an installation date that should, I have reliably been told, be a day in
the week of 12 July. It's been so long since we've had something other than
plywood in the kitchen that I've forgotten what it's like to have a nice,
easily cleaned vinyl floor.
OK. Here's a
photo of Grabby and Piper to cleanse the palate after my griping.
********
I've known
for a long time that Georgia O'Keeffe was born in the neighboring town of Sun Prairie. Well, it's fairly sizable these days with 30,000+ inhabitants
so it's more of a city, I suppose. There's a historic marker on Main Street
downtown noting that the artist and one time student at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago grew up on a farm south of the city and I recently found
out exactly where that was.
Here is
the O'Keeffe home. I am unsure when it was torn down.
********
The Frau and
I had originally planned to spend some time up north in the Upper Peninsula the
week of her birthday. We were to stay at a hotel called The Fitz, named after the
Edmund Fitzgerald, on the shores of Lake Superior. She has a friend that
lives up there and we were to visit with her as well as cruise around the U.P. to enjoy the bucolic scenery and try to avoid hitting deer with our car.
These plans
were thrown into jeopardy when we were told by Home Despot that the earliest
date to have our floor installed was the day we were hoping to leave town. I
felt badly because Covid and the Frau's surgery conspired to scrap last year's
plans to spend her birthday in London and history was repeating itself, more or
less. Eventually we abandoned the U.P. trip and she decided that she wanted to instead head west to Dubuque to visit the National Mississippi River Museum &
Aquarium. I convinced her to make it an overnight affair instead of a day trip.
Since our
drive would take us by Dickeyville, we just had to stop there.
Dickeyville is in the far southwest corner of Wisconsin and is the subject of the Goose Island Ramblers song "No Norwegians in Dickeyville".
Aside from
an old fiddle tune, Dickeyville is also known for its grotto. The Dickeyville Grotto is actually a series of grottos and shrines on the grounds
of Holy Ghost Parish. Stones, dishes, seashells, glass shards, etc. are all held in
place with mortar. It was built in the 1920s by one Father Mathius Wernerus who
was pastor at the time.
It is quite
the sight.
No entry would be complete without something food related. Last weekend the Frau came home from the farmer's market with a loaf of Korean cream cheese garlic bread. I presume that, if it's available in Madison, it's available in all larger metro areas and has been for a while.
Bonus photo. I spied these in someone's yard on a recent bike ride. I guess they're really into old sci-fi b-movies.
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