Bill III's Blog

Spring Snowset

Bill — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:27:17 +0000

April 16 Snow Storm

Bill — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:52:25 +0000

Seems like we got more snow today than we did all winter. Nice to have a snow day, but it would have been nice to have power.

Ice sure is powerful

Bill — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:39:35 +0000

Spring is Springing

Bill — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:39:16 +0000

New Website

Bill — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:58:02 +0000

I’ve just started up a new website to document my time learning to fly. For the next few months I will have limited to no flying content, but I’ll be documenting the learning that I’m doing. You can check it out at www.iflymn.com.

Winter is here

Bill — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:41:42 +0000

It seems that fall was taking its time with moderate temperatures and sunny skies. It was a great time to be out in the woods. I spent quite a bit of time working on clearing the ski trails of downed trees prior to the snow fall. I would take off after work and clear trails for a couple hours each evening. I think I cleared about 20 trees. This appears to be a constant battle as Erin and I took a quick ride out to one of the trails we had completely cleared and in just a short distance came across two new downed trees crossing the trail. :( Snow is on the ground now, so it won’t be long until its time to strap on the skis and head out on the trails.

After our quick ride we came back to the house and while Erin was working on school work I started hauling wood for the first time this fall. I loaded up both the inside and outside wood boxes and got the stove filled up ready for a match. Here is a bit of a photo progression of the work.

All this work because the outside world is beginning to look like this….

Sailset

Bill — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:11:47 +0000

Worked again today. I’m planning on taking tomorrow off for the most part. I will have to work from home some to get some data moved around in our student information system. Nothing I really have to other than pull our data and push it to JMC and then when they are done working on it I’ll just need to put it back.

After work the Glass family and the Cheney family came out for dinner and root beer floats. Its fun watching the kids run around excited about everything in their lives. Its starting to seem like Luke is getting a little bigger, but he still is pretty tiny.

After the floats most of the crew took off and Jesse and I got out on the sail boat. It was a little slow going at first, but once we got out in the main part of the lake there was a nice bit of wind blowing. We sailed down towards Norwegian bay and then turned around and headed home. We were able to sail all the way back into our little bay which doesn’t always happen. It sure was a nice night to be out on the water.

Working

Bill — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:40:34 +0000

I’ve been working every day this week which has bee going pretty well, but there is still a lot to get done before the school year starts up. It was a beautiful sunny day out too which makes it that much harder to be inside. I worked on getting iPads updated, which I think I’ll be doing till the end of time. :) We have also run into a slew of problems with our student information system (JMC) and a few bothersome things with Google Apps. I’m hoping that we can get these taken care of in the next couple of days so we don’t have to worry about them when staff and student are back in the building.

After work Erin and I met up with Greg and Corey at the Crescent for some hot wings. They have a deal on Wednesday nights so we met up there to have a little dinner and visit. It is always nice to hang out with them.

The lake sure is nice right now. Its the perfect temperature for swimming and right now its pretty calm out so there are reflections of the trees hanging over the water.

Sure is nice living on the lake.

Time to Start Blogging Again

Bill — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 02:36:17 +0000

The summer sure has flown by. I’ve been back at work off an on the last few weeks. We have quite a few new iPads to get ready for this school year. Erin and I have had a great summer. We spent some time in Europe visiting Erin’s family and our friends Inkari and Peter in Germany. We also spent some time in Italy and Switzerland. It was really nice visiting with everyone over there.

I have been trying to get out sailing as often as I can. I really enjoy spending time out on the water with a full sail.

I’ll try to get back into the habit of posting more often. It gets a bit overwhelming when you haven’t blogged in a while and you feel like you have to cover everything since your last post. So I’m hoping this gets the ball rolling.

Deutchland

Bill — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:45:53 +0000

The trip over to Germany was somewhat long. Mostly because of a 6 hour layover in Amsterdam. We had gone carryon for the entire trip having to look after our bags in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Amsterdam only to find out that we would need to check the back for our last one hour long flight to Stuttgart. This was unfortunate because waiting for our bags at our final destination was the thing we were trying to avoid. Not a big deal though as our bags eventually came popping up out of the baggage carousel. As we left baggage claim we were met by Erin’s family. Her Great Uncle Rolf, his wife Hulda, his son Klause, and Klause’s girlfriend Sabrina were all there with smiling faces. They helped us get our rental car picked up and then escorted us back to Rolf and Huldas house about 45 min away in Ensingen. They have a beautiful house with a garden and a cherry tree. We were able to steal a few of the ripe berries while we were there. We had some tea and visited for about an hour, but then needed to get back on the road as we were planning to be in Trier for the evening. It was great to meet Erins family and we are excited to see them near the end of our trip.

Driving to trier was fairly easy with the assistance of the GPS telling us which way to go. We were driving on the Autoban for much of the journey which wasn’t too bad. If you haven’t driven here yet, my only advice is if you do venture into the left lane to pass someone make sure you check your mirrors as cars can come flying up from behind quite quickly. It sounds like in Germany its pretty much never okay to slow these individuals down so getting quickly back into the right lane is always a good idea. I do enjoy not having a speed limit however, I think I was pushing our little Ford Fiesta to its limits.

We arrived in Trier around eight in the evening. Inkari and Peter were gracious hosts and took us out for a quick walk that brought us by an old Roman colosseum. It is amazing to live an an area that has history that goes so far back. We then headed up the side of a hill that gave a great view over the city of Trier. It is set down in a river valley with vineyards covering the sides of the surrounding hills.

After our walk we came home and Inkari had dinner ready for us. It was nice to sit down and visit with our hosts over a nice dinner and relax after a long bout of traveling.