Open Flame

Back on Jan 5th, the 47th anniversary of my paternal Grandpa's death, Lisa treated me to lunch at Open Flame, a restaurant on Hwy 100 that she'd been to as part of the "lady's lunches" she attends with her Mom. 

She loved the Christmas decor and excused herself from the table to get these pics. 

As for the food: 

The french onion soup was delicious and affordable. Unlike most places, who so water down the broth you can barely distinguish it from water, the flavor was strong and fresh. 

The complimentary bread and oil was ok, but I found the oil terribly bland, despite the seasonings that had been added to it. 

Lisa enjoyed the vegetable soup. I don't get it. I can think of few soups less appealing, and I don't like soup at all.  But she's a soup person, so take her word on it. 

My burger was ok, but the meat was melt in your mouth soft. If I'm eating a burger, I like a textural difference between the bun and the meat. 

Lisa adored her steak and shrimp, taking enough home for a second full meal. 

I didn't care much for the service, although one server/one visit isn't enough for me to call that a concern. I did NOT like that the restaurant's bar was filled with Packers fans cheering, booing and screaming along as they watched the Packers lose to the Bears in week 18. At times it was too loud to carry on a conversation, which I find obnoxious given the location. I'm fine with that at a tavern or a Buffalo Wild Wings. Not so much at a restaurant charging what they did in the middle of the day. 

Now stay off my lawn! 
 

Our Huckleberry

 

Boston Strangler

 

Lisa and I recently watched this Hulu original, and we were both pleasantly surprised by the quality of what we thought, wrongly, would be a sensationalist rehash of the killings. 

Instead, we found a film primarily concerned with two real-life Boston reporters, Loretta McLaughlin, (played by Keira Knightly), and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) who overcome the sexist structure of early '60's journalism and became the first to identify that a serial killer was on the loose in Boston.

The film, just like the real life case,  leaves you with questions. Was it really the work of one man, or multiple killers, including those who killed for personal reasons and disguised it as the work of the Strangler? Cole and McLaughlin believed  in the latter, and again had to fight the system to get their belief in print. 

Don't go thinking this was dull or preachy:  it has plenty of twists and chills, it just doesn't rely on them alone to drive the story. 

I very much think it's worth a watch. 

Grade: B+

The Ubiquitous Pattern of the 1990's

Maybe I've written about this before; with twenty years of blog material you forget about the random post.  But seeing these pictures (none of which are mine, they were all posted in the comments of a Facebook post) brought nostalgic thoughts to the front and center. 

Lisa and I had a bedding set - sheets, pillowcases, comforter - in this very pattern. As I recall we picked it up from a store in the Gurnee Mills mall in Illinois. Pricey, by our poverty level nineties income: I think it was somewhere between $35 and $50. But man, we had that set forever - heck, we might still have the odd pillowcase laying around. 

As much as we loved it, I can't imagine buying a shower curtain in the same pattern, as in the photo. That, in my opinion, is a bridge too far. 

 

It's Back in Action

Nearly six weeks after vandals destroyed the plexiglass door of the little library outside the high school, I reinstalled the repaired door yesterday.  

It took awhile to do the repair, with the holidays and whatnot keeping the project on the back burner. But Lisa and I cut and installed the plexiglass Sunday, and I ventured out into the deep freeze to put it back up. 

Sorry for the blurry "after" photo, my hands were frozen. (It was 2 degrees F according the radio on the way there; my car's exterior thermostat said 7 degrees)

Now, to restock it . . . 

Bingo with YaYa!

Friday night YaYa joined us for bingo, where I ran into Cheri, my old boss from Job Prior, who I probably haven't seen since 2005. She was there with her Mom Melissa, who used to work in our cafe, but alas Melissa didn't remember me. 

YaYa was admirably into the action, paying careful attention to her sheets and coming close to victory on a few occasions. 

"Close", of course, betrays the fact that we never did reach a successful outcome that evening. Well, we won $4.50 on pull tabs but spent more on those than we took home. Cherri and her Mom, however, both won different games. 

You'll have to forgive me for staring into space in this last picture. There are other versions where I look a little smarter, but in those my lovely companions weren't facing the camera, and I think you'd rather see their faces anyway :)

It was a fun, relaxing evening with the 2001-2003 version of Team Slap!

A Mysterious Package

So this arrived in the mail Saturday. No return address. No invoice. No documentation. No one claims to have ordered it for me. 

I can only assume it's the equivalent of a Hogwarts letter and I've been drafted. 

Deus Vult folks, I'm off to Jerusalem. I hope they stock size 4x armor. 

Tik Tok is Gone

Shortly before 9 pm, a full two hours shy of legal shutdown date, even if you went by Eastern time, Tiktok logged off its users and closed its doors. 

I'm not an idiot. I know that in two days President Trump will probably enact the 90 day extension for the app that is allowed within the bill; in fact, he's already said he is thinking of doing so Monday. 

But for some reason this closure hit me in the gut. 

I don't use TikTok a lot. I'm one of the old guys that waits for a TikTok trend to filter down to Facebook Reels before I give it a view. But YaYa posted heavily on the site, Junie too to some extent, and Lisa and all the kids spent many an hour scrolling through the app. 

And yes, I understand that the data exploitation on Tiktok was a genuine concern of two opposing Presidential administrations. It just seems an awfully specific ban when our country seems so wide open to digital manipulation.  

Today, I literally spent hours trying to download and preserve every video I could from the kids accounts. I'm ticked that each starts with a noticeable, if brief, watermark, but I worked with what I had available on short notice. I had downloaded only one of six years worth of Junie's vids when the app went dark. Theoretically, if the site never comes back, that means her Musically account, which chronicled her life at 7 or 8, is gone forever. 

I should have known better, and preserved it long ago you say. Sure. I'm a data hoarder, and spending the day documenting their posts was right up my alley. But today was *also* the first day the kids allowed me access to see, and download, the videos they'd made private (which numbered in the hundreds) and so I was forced to scramble at the last minute. 

The day the app comes back online, I'll spend the evening grabbing the rest of Junie's posts. 

I pray I get the chance. 

Blubbering to a Lee Ann Womack Song

 After a miserable appointment we had in the late afternoon, Lisa and I set out to the eastern edge of Oak Creek to pick up a work suit for LuLu. 

One the way there the radio played "I Hope You Dance," a song by Lee Ann Womack that Lisa first heard when pregnant with YaYa. It quickly became the theme song of the pregnancy, and of her hopes for our firstborn daughter. 

Listening to it, I had an idea. "YaYa and I should dance to this for the father-daughter dance at her wedding." I said. 

Or rather, that's what I tried to say. 

I got so far as the word "dance" before turning into a blubbering mess, incapable of speech, with tears streaming down my face. 

Lisa soon joined in the waterworks. 

Two blubbering parents getting emotional at the thought of their baby girl now all grown up and engaged. 

But I do hope, I really do, that I get the chance to dance with her to that song on her wedding day. 

Bob Uecker

 

Milwaukee native Bob Uecker, the voice of the Brewers, died today only a short while before his 91st birthday. 

Uecker was ubiquitous here in Milwaukee throughout my life. A former weak-hitting MLB catcher, he began calling games for the Brewers 3 years before I was born, and continued through 2024. He starred in a successful sitcom, Mr. Belevedere, in the '80's, was a standout in Miller Lite commercials, and brought his humor to the silver screen in the Major League movies.

He was genuinely, instinctively funny, and his love for Milwaukee, and the Brewers, knew no limits.. I'm sorry we didn't give him the chance to call a championship for the Crew.  

RIP

Ollie-Ver

 Some pics of Oliver, taken January 9th. 

1st Place - Forensics

Last Saturday, the 11th, Junie finished first in a city wide forensics tournament in her category, "Special Occasion Speaking."

Well done, and congratulations!

Gentle Family Dentistry in Kenosha

Last Tuesday, the 7th, I worked from home - or actually, from a study room in a local library. I had a Zoom hearing at 11, and during that I noticed that a toothache that had greeted me when I woke up, then subsided, was back. No problem, I finished the hearing and headed out for lunch at KFC. I bit into one fry - a french fry - and you'd have thought I bit into a live electrical line. 

Ouch. 

I'm pretty familar with tooth pain and thought I could tough it out until I could see my normal dentist. 

That . . . was an overestimate of my chutzpah. 

By late afternoon I began calling every dentist Google listed in or near our zip code, without luck, and then expanded my search. I finally found an "urgent dental clinic" that was willing to see me, and my insurance, as long as I also kicked in $165. Given the pain, I said yes. 

Then, when I got there, they told me that was just to be seen. To have it extracted? That was another $1500 even after my two (not one!) dental insurances. To pay for this, they offered me the chance to sign up for their financing. They were, and are, the dental equivalent of a payday loan place. Morally, not a good look guys. 

So it's almost 8pm and I'm just about out of hope. I stopped at Walgreens and bought some oral pain killer to rub on the tooth, but it didn't make a dent in the pain. I went back to Google, and on a whim pulled up dentists in Kenosha, where I work. In retrospect, my first call was the best choice I'd made all day. 

That call was to Dr. Robert Salituro at Gentle Family Dentistry. 

Keep in mind I was calling him from Milwaukee, That's 45 minutes away from his office, minimum. It was 8pm. He had never met me, didn't know me from Adam, and had every reason to tell me no thanks. 

"Does it hurt a lot?" he asked, and I kinda think he was hoping I would say "no" and he could go home. 

I told him it did. 

"If you can get here in the next hour, I'll help you," he said. 

But first, he asked me some medical questions, then told me he wanted to research a side effect of one of my medications before he would proceed. As promised, he looked into it, then called me back and gave me the go ahead to drive down. 

I arrived at almost 9pm, but to his credit Dr. Salituro didn't rush the process. He took a more compressive history, took x-rays, and properly numbed the area (I've had a dentist pull a tooth when I wasn't fully numb, telling me "I'll be quick"). 

Whenever he caused me pain or discomfort, he apologized, and he made a strong effort to keep those apologies to a minimum. He prescribed me antibiotics, and looked for a 24 hr pharmacy near me in Milwaukee that could acccomodate the request. 

Me? I tried to focus on the TV in the room, and the horrendous news coming out of LA and the fires tearing up the city there. 

Here's what the offending tooth looked like: 

This dentist rocked. If you have work you need done, look him up. You won't be sorry!

Magnifique

This was the great breakfast Lisa made for each us today. 

A perfectly done over-medium egg, sprinkled with red pepper, placed atop a bed of spicy guacamole spread over toasted sourdough. 

:Chef's kiss" 

Pals

 

Me and Kahuna, Dec 27th of last year

New Glasses and a Trip to Chicago

 On December 28th, the morning after Seth's birthday get-together, Lisa woke me up, on very little sleep, to go with her to pick out new glasses. 

Afterwards we had breakfast at La Crema. Lisa ordered chilaquiles, which were a bust, and I had some  so-so bisquits and gravy. 

 We like the place, the location, the atmosphere, but the food continues to miss. I'm not sure we'll be back anytime soon. 

Afterwards, although I was completely exhausted, I accepted Seth's invitation to go down and spend the day in Chicago. His wife was going with, and he told me that instead of his normal ride, he'd be taking her Suburu. He sent a text saying he was on his way. 

So a few minutes later, when a Suburu pulled up in front of the house with a woman in the passenger seat, I walked over, opened the rear passenger door - 

aaaaaand it wasn't Seth and his wife. 

That's not the first time I've made those types of mistaks. Once, a few years back, I got into a  silverMazda CX-9 at Dollar Tree, and got upset when my key didn't start it. You guessed it. My car was parked a few spots down. 

It's a good way to get shot, to be honest. 

Anyway, we drove down to Chicago, scooped our friend Eladio from his north side home, and traveled to the south side of Chicago, to Ricobene's.

Eladio seconded the propaganda the restaurant puts out: that they serve the best sandwhich in the world. This "masterpiece" is breaded steak on a hoagie bun, toppped with marinara sauce and, if you pay extra, peppers and shredded mozzarella. 

It was fine. 

Was it worth a ride to Chicago when I was that tired? No

Was it worth a ride to Chicago had I been fully rested? No

Was it worth a ride across Milwaukee if there was a location there? No

Was it worth stopping in if you're in the neighborhood? Yes. 

Afterwards, after driving past Seth's alma matter of Loyola, we stopped in Lincoln Square. 

First stop, an upscale meat market called Gene's Sausage Shop, on the site of a famous defunct Chicago deli called Meyer's. 

Then it was down a few doors to a bookstore, The Book Cellar. I guess the identically named store in the Central Milwaukee Library isn't as uniquely named as I thought. 

Lastly, to a tourist shop, where I saw the Taylor Swift ornaments below, and then an apothecary. 

Our departure from Lincoln Square was delayed by a heavy police and fire presence. that boxed in the car. At first I  thought they were there to treat a man I saw trip and bust his nose on the sidewalk, but it appears they were there to prevent any trouble at a televised interview at the large menorah in Lincoln Square. 

From there we dropped off Eladio and then headed back to Milwaukee. 

Suprisingly, sometime after the meal, I broke through my wall of exhaustion and felt pretty darn good, so in the end I greatly enjoyed the Chciago trip. 

A good day start to finish.