Bowling In Nebraska

Posted on by Jordan

This kind of got lost in my campaign to redo the front page… lost but not forgotten about.

Heather and I traveled to Kearney Nebraska to watch my brother compete in a Special Olympics bowling event.

The trip started in Des Moines with a little rain. By the time we were 30 minutes down the road, it was snow, but the snow wasn’t sticking and the weather before we left indicated we should drive through it and be in the clear within another 30 minutes. What didn’t show up in the weather report I read, was the second wave of snow that caught us about 40 miles out of Omaha.

It made for easily the worst winter driving Heather and I have seen as a couple. Even with bad conditions, careful deliberate driving was working ok. What wasn’t working ok was the minority of drivers who were not content to stay in a line and use the narrow set of tire tracks that were open. Apparently getting where they were going 2 minutes faster was worth risking lives for.

Once we made it into Omaha, it really was smooth sailing, and we got all the way to Kearney without indecent.

The next morning we had a quick breakfast and headed over to the bowling alley. The most noteworthy thing we found as we came in was that they were not letting the public down onto the lane-level area at all, meaning the kind of wide hallway landing thing behind the lanes was really crowded. Lucky for us, my parent’s and aunt and uncle were already there, and had a spot staked out.

It was great to get to see my family, and it goes without saying I suppose, that Andrew was ecstatic to have us there for the event. After the hellos we found ourselves with plenty of time to chat as the event was a little lethargic getting started. Andrew headed up to his lane and everything looked all set, and then the PA system fired up and we discovered there were lots of announcements before we could get started.

After quite a bit of milling around, the bowling began. Andrew, as it turns out, is actually a pretty good bowler. His only downfall is that he isn’t actually that interested in winning when there are other interesting things going on. In three games, he pretty consistently bowled well every-other frame, meaning the strikes and spares he was getting weren’t having the compounding effect one would hope for.

The on again off again trend held for nearly all of Andrews games, leaving the last frame of the last game as a notable exception. Andrew bowled three strikes in a row! It was a fantastic finish to a morning of bowling.

We headed on to McCook to spend a little time with my parents. Have I mentioned that Heather and I like board games? We got our second chance to teach new players how to play the game St Petersburg, and I would say did a little better at teaching it. We also got in a round of Ticket To Ride. When not engaging in board games, we did get to enjoy some great weather in McCook (a place that seems to always have much warmer weather than we left in Des Moines), and eat at a great local pizza place.

The pizza place is noteworthy I suppose just for the pizza, but the more memorable thing is that it has a view of the switch yard. The yard was busy putting together a train while we ate. Andrew was perhaps 100 times more expressive about the event than I was, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t also thing it was a great thing to get to watch them push rail cars around while we ate. 🙂

On the drive home, we managed to make connections with some of Heather’s friends from college, missed connections with my sister, and then met up with a good friend of mine from high school before eventually making it back to Des Moines.

All in all, it was a very productive few days!

-Jordan

Geocaching

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made this past weekend into a long weekend, and headed west to McCook.

I don’t think we could have gotten luckier when it came to the weather… absolutely perfect the entire time we were there. We tried to get outside to take advantage of that, and my parents provided a number of great opportunities for us to do that.

The first was geocaching. I was familiar with the basic idea, but hadn’t really thought much about it before the weekend. So first off, what is geocaching? Somebody leaves a cache somewhere, and then posts the GPS location of the hidden container on a website. Then we go to the website, take the coordinates and go look for the cache. The trick is that GPS will only get you with 10-20 feet at best, and the containers can be tiny! They seem to often only have room for some paper so you can sign the log before moving on to the next find.

Better description here: Geocaching

I should mention, we were well equipped for this in part because I got a new phone! (More on that later, back to geocaching for a minute)

So we loaded some points into our phones, and headed out to do some geocaching, or “treasure hunting” as my brother calls it.

Our first find!

They are holding the cache container in that picture… and I am going to guess you didn’t notice it before I said anything. We ended up finding quite a few points/caches… I don’t know the proper terminology. Heather and I really had fun with it, and hope to try doing more of it around Des Moines as the weather continues to improve.

Oddly related to geocaching and to my new phone… if you were to download the larger version of that picture I posted, and then use any sort of tool that will report to you the detailed information about the image you would find a few things:

  • The brand, model, and operating system version on my phone
  • A ton of information regarding the camera’s abilities and settings at the time the picture was taken
  • and…
  • The exact GPS coordinates of the phone when it was taking the picture.

Mind you, I didn’t add any of that… my phone just decided it would be fun to tack that all on. I didn’t realize the GPS coords were being added until I loaded the picture up in Picasa, and it offered to show me on the map where the picture was taken…. Lets just say you could find our first geocache using that picture if you were sufficiently determined.

I don’t want to sound too outraged, I don’t really think this is a terrible thing… I was just a little shocked.

Going back to the phone, I will talk about in more in a few weeks… maybe a miro-review or something, but I am still figuring it out!

-Jordan

New Year Wrap-Up

Posted on by Jordan

This post is going up a touch late to be a true new years post, but it’s clearly as close as I am going to get.

Heather and I trekked out to McCook to celebrate the new year, and to catch up with my parents and brother, as this was my first Christmas away from my family.

We really enjoy McCook every time we get a chance to go there. I am sure a big part of it is just being away from the normal grind, plus being at mom and dad’s house, but it ends up being incredibly relaxing. The relax and unwind factor was there this trip, and we ended up with a bonus new years event!

McCook was hosting a special event for new years “First Night.” I won’t go into a ton of detail, but Heather and I had a lot of fun with everything that was going on there.

first_night_10

Due to the wedding, we didn’t really have much energy / time to observe the new year last time around. That was kind of sad because the new year marks a somewhat important date for us. We spent our first new year’s eve at the Gutschow farm, with Heather’s grandmother “Gigi”, and sometime on the drive home late that night decided to become “Facebook official” (Actually we just decided that we really were dating, and the most obvious step was to change our FB status)

The other fun thing about the night is that it’s one of the few that I can keep Heather up past 9:30pm. She did about fade away on me, and I have to admit it was a little cold outside, but Heather made it all the way to the end, greeting 2010 (just minutes after that picture was taken)

Hope the new one is as much fun as the last 🙂

-Jordan

Memorial Day (The Weekend) (Part Two)

Posted on by Jordan

Even after cutting back to only really talking about weekends, I have managed to fall woefully behind….

Anyway, The second major part of our trip back to McCook was helping Dad build a deck.

The work was really planned for a few weeks later, but the lumber was delivered a few weeks early. We thought it would be good to get a jump start on the project, and at least lay the initial frame down.

memorial_day_deck_tmb

We quickly discovered that the lumber sold as deck building material isn’t particularly exacting with respect to dimensions, so some of our assumptions and plans ended up being derailed. After some minor fussing, we figured our a plan that would work out ok, and finished the frame Sunday night. Dad and I decided to see how far we could get before noon Monday, and actually managed to 100% finish laying out and tacking down the decking.

As you can kind of see in the picture, we pried up the paving stones that would be covered by the new deck. That is going to be another project, but at least we got started re-orienting the pathway to match up with the new deck.

-Jordan

Memorial Day (The Weekend)(Part One)

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I headed to McCook for the Memorial day weekend. We packed our bikes, and really didn’t have any plans other than to enjoy being away from Omaha for a few days.

The first interesting thing to occur was that the bike rack didn’t work as well as I had hoped on the back of Heather’s rather compact car. We drove a few miles before deciding that things weren’t looking quite right in the rear view mirror, and then I got to spend my first hot sweaty frustrating minutes on the side of the road fussing with cargo tied to the car as a married man. I hope those minutes will be members of a very small list, but I suppose time will tell. 🙂

I discovered the rack actually worked ok on the car, I just had to place it differently than I was planning to. Once that was done we had an uneventful drive to McCook.

Saturday we had a lazy morning that eventually turned in to doing some yard work with my parents. At the risk of sounding crazy, both Heather and I rather enjoyed doing it, as it is so much of a change of pace… plus we don’t have a yard. Heather got to help my mom prep for, and eventually plant flowers, and Dad and I cut sod out of the location of the new deck, and used it to fill some voids elsewhere in the lawn.

That evening we took the bikes out:

memorial_day_bikes_tmb

McCook is a really nice place to ride bikes! They have fewer hills than we have in our neck of Omaha, and less traffic besides. It helped that we had basically the perfect weather I suppose.

I will leave off here, and pick up the weekend soon!

-Jordan