Patty Johnson's Blog

Since Steve Lori and the kids decided to stay an extra night because of the bad weather we all got to play outside in the snow on Monday and shovel a little. They were having a snowball fight which was humorous especially when my dad hid behind Lily so the boys wouldn't throw snowballs at him!

A Bunch of us gathered in the living room at my parents house to watch the Academy Awards this year. This included my parents, Steve, Lori, Matt, Danny, Johnny, Aaron, Vanessa, and of course Adam, Lily and I. Some of us filled out ballots for our guesses on who would win and Steve ended up winning with the most correct, followed by Vanessa and then Lori. I had the least correct as usual. Lily had fun making a pile of shoes then jumped into it like it was a pile of leaves.

We had lots of fun this weekend hanging out with the family. Johnny and Lily had fun with Grandpa in the kitchen playing "rockababy/jump" and "cold feetsies" VIDEO: Rockababy Jump Jump Jump
VIDEO: Cold Feetsies

Friday night Gwyn came over so we could go to get prices for our team trivia shirts this year. We went out to dinner with my parents and then went for a fun trip shopping at Wal*Mart. Once we got back to the basement Lily and Gwyn had fun coloring with markers which was good because with Lily distracted it's easier to get stuff done. VIDEO: Lily and Gwyn having fun with markers
Gwyn stayed til about 10 and then we waited for Steve Lori and the kids to show up. The hit some big snowstorm in Madison so it took them alot longer than expected. Then, after a while of family bonding I finally went home where Adam pulled up behind us after a long night of being out at the bars.

Lily was wearing a cute dress today so I took her outside to get a cute photo. We got a bunch of really cute ones Then, she noticed the puddles. There are puddles all around my house including this huge one in back of my house. She ran around in the puddle until she slipped and fell into it. Then, she decided it would be better to walk in it while holding my finger.

Valentines day was pretty nice this year. I went shopping with my parents in Wausau during the day while Adam was working. Then, Adam came home with basket that included a stuffed teddy bear, a champagne glass filled with Hershey kisses, a happy valentines balloon, and also a box of chocolates. I was pretty surprised because he had been ranting about Valentines day being a stupid holiday for about a week. We went to Hudson's for dinner which was pretty good. I love those fried pickles! Lily fell asleep on the way there and slept through the entire meal! We picked her up some Arby's on the way home. After that we came home and watched "Open Season" We were all pretty tired and ended up all going to sleep at like 10:30pm!

We decided to play St Cloud trivia but since we knew that we weren't going to be playing seriously and that we'd be barely playing Friday at all (Since almost everyone was going out for Aaron's birthday) we just gave any answers we found to our friends from a different team. Friday I played a little by myself before going out. Saturday once our friends got up in the afternoon they all came over. We had fun playing the contest but it was nice to not be playing seriously because we could get other trivia things done at the same time. Lily had lots of fun watching movies, playing in buckets and generally getting into mischief.
1) Patty smiles 2) Vanessa kisses a cereal box 3) Gwyn takes notes 4) Lily falls asleep reading a book

Friday was Aaron's birthday so we (Aaron, Vanessa, Eric, Adam, Lily and I) went out to dinner at the restaurant at the Country Springs Hotel. Ian was our waiter so he could be there too. Then, I took Lily back to my parents house to play St. Cloud Trivia while Adam joined the rest of the crew at Joe's Bar. Gwyn was going to play the contest with me but something came up. Then, Adam called at 10ish saying he was ready to do the bar switcheroo because Aaron was already pretty silly. Joe's was fun...mostly fun watching Aaron be drunken crazy and try to talk drunken trivia plans to me.

We got back to Stratford and dropped my computer off at our house on our way to my parents house. We had a yummy dinner with cornish hens, stuffing, baked potatoes, and corn. We watched the Superbowl (I only really watched the commercials) there too. For a snack we had mini hotdogs and little smokies with various dipping sauces. I spent most of the time organizing a bunch of comic books that we got from Adam's mom.

So, I finally got a new computer. I got a sweet deal on an HP computer that included a 15" monitor and a photo printer. It's got a gig of memory, 250 gig hard drive and a lightscribe dvd burner. Pretty sweet.
We went to Stratford this weekend so we could put one of my old drives in the new computer and burn some files off the smaller old hard drive. Also, we were going to see if we could get my broken computer to work or figure out what was wrong with it.
We got to the Strat shortly after 6pm and then went to the highschool for some basketball games. We got there in the middle of the JV game and left in the middle of the Varsity game. Lily liked watching people run back and forth with the basketball, but she absolutely HATED the buzzer going off all the time (substitutions, end of quarters, end of time outs, etc) She'd get scared even if we mentioned that it was going to go off soon! We also checked out their new fitness center that they bought with all the donations they got after winning 4 football championships in a row. There is a bunch of equipment, plasma tvs, and overall it's very impressive! There is even one of those fingerprint-reading pads by the door so only authorized people can enter! Pretty high tech for a little school, eh?
On the computer front, my computer rocks. The hard drive I wanted to put into it didn't have the right kind of connectors so we've decided to just turn it into a external drive (once I get the necessary equipment to do that) I spent lots of time making DVD backups of my smaller hard drive and we never figured out what was wrong with my old computer.
Besides computer stuff we just basically hung out, played video games and tried to stay warm. It's so incredibly cold in that house that we slept with 5 blankets (including a heating blanket) and we were still cold!