Visitors to the Chaos and a couple of small tornados

Hmm, slightly long pause between blogs I'm afraid. Nothing more serious than a delay to the kitchen project but it meant that we had to get ready for Denise and Bill arriving at the last minute and we've been living with 4 small children in the house ever since so it been all hands to the pumps in trying to retain some measure of sanity.

The granite company were a week late (for a full blow by blow account of our dealings with this treacherous company I'll shortly update the house project blog) which meant our kitchen was ready for use 2 hours before Denise and Bill's plane landed rather than a full week before. It was all hands to the pump for the contractors too in the last week as you can see from the driveway.This delay had a small but noticeably detrimental effect on the planned calm attitude with which we undertook our guest preparations. Still we were able to meet them at the airport with some hot tea which is pretty much medicinal after such a long flight with children - by all accounts Ethan and Toby were well behaved though.

The kids were... hmm, is pleased the right word or does the expression 'manic to the point of insanity' better convey the atmosphere in the house over the first few days as the cousins got used to seeing each other again. It has got calmer since then or maybe it is just the medication that us parents have been taking. Dr Bill has prescribed 150cl of wine to be taken every 24 hours while symptoms persist or the children leave for university.

The kitchen still has more work to do (we also bought a fridge that was too deep so we've had to get another one) but is looking pretty good now - take a peek.
The basement is also getting thereSaturday was pretty much just finding our feet with the house full, visiting some of the local shops to buy whole summer wardrobes (don't we just love the strong pound!) and off to a local restaurant to eat. We also managed to find a buyer for all of our old kitchen cabinets and appliances (strange but true) and had to help them get it into their van. They first arrived with a tow-trailer so small we could only get about a 20th of the kitchen in it, but then they came back with a proper one, which only took them 5 loads to get it all into.


It was a really hot day (high 70s) but during our meal we had a storm and it hailed, really big hailstorms for the UK as you can see, but really small for Minnesota, when they have bad hail cars and houses get really badly damaged.



One of the perils lurking in wait for visitors is the dreaded 'Cruelly Placed Low Hanging Chandelier' which has claimed many victims but Bill managed to earn the dubious honour of being the first person to have had blood drawn twice.
On Sunday we went to church then headed out late to the beach as it was in the 80s during the late afternoon.

Went to the Wisconsin Dells with the whole crew on Thursday for 3 nights. The Dells are the waterpark capital of America (and correspondingly low incidence of rabies), its kind of like a watery Vegas wannabe with a lot of the great, the good and downright tacky all off of the same road. It really is one of those places that makes you say 'Only in America' - they have an upside down Whitehouse for goodness sake. Sadly no pictures of the road but I'm sure we'll be back as its a great place to take kids to. We stayed at the Wilderness resort which has 7 waterparks inside it just for the guests, we didn't even get to one of them over the course of 3+ days there. Here's a link so you can see some of the rides as we didn't take that many photos.

Oh, maybe we did, here are some...








This was a fun one, Dan and I had races down it.









Apart from all the watery fun we had some fun with the wind too as there were 2 tornado warnings which mean we had to evacuate the pools and take shelter in the corridors of the ground floor of the hotels. Imagine 600 people crowded into a long, narrow corridor. Fortunately I managed to brew a couple of sneaky mugs of tea which we shared and it was only around 45 minutes each time.
On the day of the tornado Bill went up the wall - literally.

The kids found it all really exciting!!!!

Lake Rebecca

Not a lot of verbage today (which I'm sure you'll be glad about), rather some pictures of our trip to Lake Rebecca which we did after church this morning.














This one is for Claire, somewhere to visit when you return!

Bacon Chocolate, Bacon Chocolate!

Now that El Presidente has her own business she is always on the look out for new ideas. Andy and Debbie (my work Debbie from previous blogs and near arrests at the Vatican) went out on Wednesday to the local cheese shop (just to spite me) and also found these self proclaimed haut chocolate bars.Not sure if bacon truffles would catch on, maybe as part of a meaty range which would include 'Smoked Duck and Plum', 'Smoked Turkey Satay' and 'Billtong'. We also considered a range called 'Offally Good Chocolates' which may be a little too far ahead of their time.

Both Dan and Becky were ill this week, each with temperatures over 102. Dan got sent home from school on Thursday and just lay like a sock on the sofa but still insisted on going to see our next door neighbour's daughter star in her school play of Alladin (she is 14 and Dan is smitten - bless). The play actually wasn't bad and McKensie (sed daughter) was one of the few there who could actually act and sing.

On Friday Andy made 100 truffles to give away as samples and the orders have already started to roll in. Andy's business partner, Nizrene is a born saleswoman and sold 7 boxes in the gym on Saturday morning and has 2 weddings lined up. Andy and Nizrene are thinking about precisely measuring the average cost of producing each chocolate in a batch so that they can figure out how much to sell them for, at the moment they are going for $1.50/each - shipping to the UK makes them a little on the spendy (MN phrase) side.

This evening, given that summer is finally here, I strapped on the roller blades and went for a skate round the local lake. There were 2 main challenges to this, getting up the driveway, then getting down the driveway when you don't know any way of stopping other than crash landing on the grass.

The new kitchen bits have started to arrive, and we even managed to sell off all of the old cabinets and appliances! The plan is that by the end of this week we'll have the new kitchen functional again - I certainly hope so as Denise and Bill get here at the end of the month.

Just to finish with a minor observed difference between the US and UK, Kebabs are called Kabobs in the US.

Minnesota turns 150

Minnesota celebrated its sesquicentennial today (that's 150 years) so I thought I'd report on some of the icons that help define where we now live.

1) Hormel foods of Minnesota introduced a food 'classic' in 1937. Have a guess as to what this is then read on to find out the answer.

2) The jolly green giant first appeared as a scowling white ogre in 1921 then turned green and jolly in 1946.

3) Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox
The legendary lumberjack and his ox appear all over Minnesota, most famously in Brainerd.

4) The Loon, voted by schoolchildren and sportmen's groups in 1961 as the state bird (the unoffical state bird is the mosquito)

5) Lutefisk, Minnesota has a massive Norwegian heritage and lutefisk means 'lye fish', cod, dried, soaked in lye and boiled

6) Post-It notes, invented by two 3M scientists, 3M is also a Minnesota company, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.

7) The cultural icon formally known as Prince

8) Garrison Keillor, inventor of the fictional Lake Wobegon and satirist

9) The Coen brothers - cool writer/directors of Raising Arizona, Blood Simple and of course Fargo (compulsory viewing before visiting yah)

10) International Falls - situated in the NorthEast of the state, this is usually the coldest place in the US.

Back to the food quiz, did you guess, it was of course



And you just have to check out the web-site

Andy becomes President of a Company

Yesterday Andy became President of Mmm-Chocolates, leaping in a single bound to the top of the career ladder while I sweat it out in the ranks of middle management. She is officially registered and has the web domain (empty currently of course) which we'll post when it has something to show.

Next steps are to create the catalogue, branding, web-site and of course product. There may be an order for 400-800 for a single person for her wedding. Anyway it is very exciting, I'm just hoping she'll give me some sort of discount!

Onto other company news, Best Buy and Carphone did a deal this week to bring Best Buy to Europe which has certainly raised the profile of CPW within Best Buy. I think this will go down really well as Best Buy is miles ahead of company's like Curry's and PC World. It is also a sort of mixed blessing as all eyes are now on our team to deliver this year. Anyway it is very exciting, I'm just hoping we'll be given some sort of discount (deja vu).

Living without our kitchen has not been too bad, fortunately the weather has cheered up a little bit so we can eat Al Fresco.

Other than that we've moved lots into the front room
Becky has taken up gymnastics and is thoroughly enjoying it. Dan finishes school in 3 weeks then has a long holiday until the end of Auguest when he starts at Normandale, a French immersion school where they only speak French! Apparently it is a bit of a struggle to start with but then the kids pick it up. I really hope my ineptitude with French isn't genetic. We're really pleased as we really wanted Dan to go to this school and then he was 17th in the waiting list so we didn't know what to do as his current school has has lots of issues with the staff. Anyway it was a real answer to prayer about him getting in and now he also gets to go on a school bus every day. Let's hope it fares better than the school bus my boss's kids were in that came off the road and rolled down a bank :-(

Onto lighter things, we've spent the day in the garden, which has recovered somewhat amazingly from the winter, I get to play with all sorts of toys such as my leaf blower and petrol mower having not touched them since the end of November. It is Mother'd Day in the states today so we had a picnic in the garden and ate huge numbers of grilled prawns, drank some wine and generally had a very nice relax. We are a little jealous of the hot weather in the UK though, it sounds lovely over there at the minute.

What should be confiscated at Customs

Martin and Margaret have just gone home yesterday after a 10 day visit. They brought with them tea-bags, biscuits and some presents for the kids. Becky is a real tom-boy, but she has a penchant for dresses, so she loved this present and has pretty much lived in it ever since.
They also brought us some rubbish English weather. It had been lovely and sunny for few days, we even hit 80F then on the day they arrived we just had rubbish weather for the next 7 days, it rained on the first day they got here then snowed on the next 3. Here is the view out of our living room in May!

Now that they have gone home it looks like this (this is just 7 days later).

The lesson here is that US customs should stop asking if people are bringing in tins of beans and start asking if they are packing any nasty weather.

Still we made the most of it, we tried walking around one of the local lakes on the first Saturday they were here and then gave up as it was really windy and we were getting horizontal snow which was no fun. The next day was less windy so we went to Carver Park Reserve, about 20 minutes away and walked around one of the lakes there.

As you can see, there wasn't much wind but you can tell from their expressions that Martin and Margaret could do with it being a bit less chilly.

Andy and Becky are so used to the cold that this is a pleasant day out.Dan meets the resident birds, they have injuries and can't survive in the wild so the reserve look after them.Snakes tooPlus the obligatory kids playground

I had to go to Vancouver during the week so I missed some of the poor weather, Vancouver is a spectacular city and made me realise how much Minnesota needs a mountain or two; having 10,000 lakes is fair enough but if you can only see one at a time it misses out on the grand vistas.

On the last weekedn they were here we managed to get out to Minehaha falls, which was far less frozen than last time.






Then on the last day they were here we finally made it around Normandale lake, the bizarre thing is that you see loads of trendy teenagers fishing, it is far less of an anorak activity in Minnesota than back home.

Andy dropped Martin and Margaret off at the airport and then we had empty out the kitchen as it was due to be removed the next morning. We're trying to sell on the cabinets and appliances and have had some interest, we were just going to dump them but now it seems we might get quite a lot for them.

Anyway, we cleared out the food etc and you can check out the house blog for more details but here is what out kitchen looked like 4 hours after they got started.