2007 Year in Review

Since today is the last day of 2007 and the conclusion of year 1 of the Chateau Dusseau blog I thought I would post a year in review picture slideshow. Many of the pictures you may have seen throughout the year, some probably not. The pictures are in chronological order too. Anyway, I hope this has been a great way to keep up with family and friends throughout the world this past year. See you in '08!

Christmas Vacation in Florida

We spent a relatively short time in Florida this past week. We returned to go to a wedding yesterday, which was very fun, but it cut our trip to Florida pretty short.

Some highlights of the trip included great weather. I always felt bad for people when they came down to FL for the week and we had a week of cool (cold to us) weather. I got to golf twice and carded a 38 on the front nine on the second day. I "could" (good golfer term) have shot par or under par but I couldn't make a putt. For those of you who golf with me, you know that is the weak link in my game, but just the day before I was draining 30 footers left and right. Unfortunately I couldn't hit a 10 footer to save my life. Anyway, 38 represents my low 9 ever. Pretty good with rental clubs. We also went to the Arabian Nights dinner show. It was OK, I guess I'm glad I went. Liam got to putt-putt golf, go swimming, and went to breakfast with Mickey with Grandma & Grandpa. And of course, we opened presents. All in all a great but short trip.

Owen in the pool... nice hat!

Liam with his new Michael Redd jersey.

Liam golfing...

Owen getting some ice cream... all over.

Christmas

We had our Children's Christmas Service tonight, but since my parents were in FL there was no one to take non-flash pictures. It wouldn't have mattered this year since it seemed like we had a lot of flashes going off anyway. Here are some pictures from after the service, thus Liam's tie being a little undone.

We are leaving for Florida for a couple days tomorrow. Sorry no pictures of Owen, he is fully mobile and tough to get a good shot of. We will be back in only 5 short days due to a wedding we need to be at on the 29th, oh well.

Merry Christmas from Rob, Cathy, Liam & Owen
-- and Sofie and Fred the Bat.

Bats

So... last night I was upstairs getting Owen's PJ's and something seemed like it flew into his closet. I did a little investigation but chalked up to the creeks and cracks of a house built in 1920. Well, today we get home from church and Liam calls for Cathy saying "I need your help!". She goes upstairs and then comes down and says we have a "mouse" up on the valance. Well it was no mouse, it was a bat! Not a real big one (I guess) and now I'm no chiropterologist (one who studies bats) but my scientific knowledge identified it as a common brown bat (Myotis lucifugus). Liam told me he knows more about bats because... he's... BATMAN! Anyway. I got a ice cream pail and the clear top to a tub and after taking pictures, reading How To Catch A Bat in Your House, and contemplating how not to get bit and die of rabies I simply put the pail over him/her (didn't check) and slid the plastic top behind him. I then took him over to a tree line nearby and dropped him off. I felt kind of bad in this bitter cold, but he can't live in my house! So, that was the fun for the day.

Owen Walking

I posted some videos a while back of Owen and his early attempt at walking. Well, he is now fully mobile. He hasn't hurt himself yet thank goodness. Notice the bandage on his left hand.

Agony & Ecstasy

As most of you probably know, I have had a Call to St. Lucas Lutheran School in Milwaukee for the past 6+ weeks. It has been an exercise in not eating or sleeping, although I did manage to lose 15 lbs. in the ordeal. It was a tough decision, one based on trying to figure out where I am going professionally and what was best for our family. It kind of depended on what day you asked me on where I was going. Two or three self-imposed decision deadlines came and went and I still couldn't make up my mind. One school of thought is if you can't make up your mind you should stay where you are, but that didn't seem to fit. I had used that before with a Call to Salem, OR, but just didn't feel right about it. I went and visited to see if that would clear things up, but it really didn't. So I told people my announcement would come today so that I couldn't back out of it.

Well, last night when I went to bed I was 80% sure I was going to be making a move, but when I woke up this morning (and through the night as I didn't sleep much) I had decided to stay at St. John's. Everyone here was happy, although calling St. Lucas wasn't a fun task.

We will see if it turns out to be the right decision, but at least I will be able to sleep now. Got a free drink out of my faculty after school today anyway.

Owen and the Dr.... Again

Well, Owen made another trip to the doctor yesterday because he decided it would be a good idea to pull the cord dangling off of the bathroom vanity. Unfortunately for him it was attached to Cathy's curling iron. He got a nice big burn on his the back of his hand. I didn't think it was that bad (having burned myself at Thanksgiving on the grill) but while we were at church some of the 'concerned' moms talked Cathy into it. Since we are way past our deductable it really wasn't a big deal I guess. Poor little guy is oft injured, probably due to the fact that he isn't real coordinated and loves to climb things and because we just don't pay as much attention to him.

The Worst Day of the Year

Well... it happened today, it snowed (sigh). I know I've said it before, but I was just ignorant about the cold for much of my life. Now that I have experienced the joy of 80 degree December days the cold depresses me. May be someday again. The picture doesn't do that good of job showing the driving wind and blowing snow.

Videos

I thought I would post a couple videos of the past couple weeks. The first and second ones are Owen making a valiant attempt to walk. The third one is of little Liam when he took his first steps... oh how times have changed. I also have uploaded a video of Liam chasing Liam. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving

We spent (are spending) the Thanksgiving couple of days in the Milwaukee area. We are staying at my parents and the festivities were at Cathy's sister's house yesterday and today. Her dad and family friends are up from TX. The picture below is of Grandpa Schmeling and Owen.

I made both turkeys yesterday. Two standby favorites, nothing new this year. I don't know why, but I just went with two I've done before. One was a pancetta covered turkey (picture #2) and the other the famous orange-sage turkey (picture #1) on the grill. Both were very good but I think that I preferred the pancetta one done in the oven. I don't know if the difference was that the one on the grill was an organic turkey, but it wasn't as juicy as the other one - which is strange because the grill always produces the juciest one. We will see next year I guess.

Wisconsin Dells

This past weekend we were able to visit the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells for one night. My dad had gotten a room and they were leaving on Friday so we stayed Friday night and on into Saturday. Most of the big resorts in the tourist laden Dells now have indoor waterparks and the Kalahari is one of the biggest.

It was a very fun time, although I can only handle so much fun with all those little kids screaming in a closed space. Overall, a great time.

Musings

Sorry it has been a while, too much has been going on to make a new post for everything so I thought that I would highlight some happenings here at the Chateau.

Call

If you haven't already heard, I received a Call to St. Lucas Lutheran School in Milwaukee, WI on November 1st. They are asking me to serve as the Director of Christian Education (principal). It is a school of about 125 students plus preschool and daycare. It is located on the south side of Milwaukee near the lake. It has been an interesting deliberation so far and I'll keep you updated on whether or not the Chateau will be moving. There website is not good, but you can check it out if you like: http://www.saintlucas.org/.

Packer Game

My cousin, James, flew out from Lincoln, NE this past weekend for a little rest (not really) and relaxation. We had a pretty good time. My cousin, Heather, who is in Milwaukee this semester came down for Friday and Saturday. We introduced her to a culinary delicacy that you can't go without: Hooter's wings. James and I had planned on taking our annual trip to a football game so we traveled up to Lambeau Field to take in a Packer game. In the past we easily scalped tickets but not so on this day. The Vikings + a 60 degree day + Milwaukee season ticket holders + the 7-1 Packers all led to us only seeing two tickets for $500. A little out of our price range. That was a bummer, but we had a good time. We found a guy in the parking lot with a TV in his converted ambulance, now called the "Lambeaulance". Packer fans are smart too. We watched the game there for a while and then went back to the car and listened on the radio as we sat in the parking lot. Seems to many like a lost weekend and I felt bad, but it was a good time.

Liam & Owen
Liam and Owen are doing well. Liam is enjoying school and Owen is getting ready to walk one of these days. I've included a couple of pictures below.

Trick or Treat?

We had trick or treating on the Sunday before Halloween. Liam couldn't decide who to be but finally decided on Luke Skywalker. Luckily mom is a thrifty shopper so she and Liam found everything at Goodwill for $5. Liam even found the boots himself and with a little help from Grandma for the cape we were on our way. Owen was Buzz Lightyear and really didn't care.

Electronic Age

In an effort to save some space and prevent Owen from ripping everything out of our entertainment center cabinets I have decided to pack up all our CD's and rely completely on our computer for our music. Over the past year I have loaded all of our music onto itunes and now that will be it. I feel a little better since I have the external hard drive to back everything up. As of now, I have over 3,000 songs, 12+ gb , and 9+ days of music I could listen to. I have the computer wired into our stereo in the house and out to the patio out back, so with that and our ipods, which we can use in the car, we shouldn't really need them. Most of the music I have bought lately has been electronically anyway.

Pumpkin Farm

Cathy took Liam and Owen to the pumpkin farm with my parents, my cousin Heather, and their cousin Anna. Looks like they had a great time. I got to meet them at the ice cream stand only to find out it was closed for the winter. Fun time for me. Anyway, some good pictures below.

My Garden

When we bought our house there was an enormous, two-tiered garden in the back. It is probably 40 ft by 40 ft or so. This year I decided to grow some things, mainly cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, cabbage, peppers, and peas. I also have a pretty extensive herb garden in pots, but it would spread too much in the garden. Well, since it is so big, I bought a lot of tomatoes: 24 plants. I didn't realize how many tomatoes 24 plants would produce, but it is a lot. The first time I picked, pictures below, I picked two 5 gallon buckets worth of Roma tomatoes. I bet that over the summer we picked 5 or 6 times that much. Next year I will be a little more judicious in what I plant.

Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Titanic, the Challenger, and the list goes on and on and on of classic and monumental meltdowns and crashes. Now you can add the St. John's server to your list. That's right, our main home server (domain controller) went into critical and utter death yesterday. I think that it was the worst day of my life as everyone looked to me (whose fault it wasn't) when the last 15 years of their files were lost when Solomon (nice name for a server) imploded. It has been pure hell as all home directories, permissions, network accounts, etc... are all gone. And of course this is a WELS operation so we operate our entire 5 server, 55 terminal+ school computer system on $19.99 per year and volunteer manpower, so to fix it isn't exactly easy. To boot, we were in the process of building a back-up domain controller that was days away from being built and backing everything up. I'm one who kind of knew this would happen, so I only lost about a months worth of stuff, others weren't so lucky.

The ironic part is that I was just saying to Cathy the other night that we had a lot of files on our home computer with really no back-up. So I ordered a Maxtor 300 GB external hard drive to back-up my home computer and I was going to take it over to school... well, it arrived today. Anyway, it is working pretty slick, I'd recommend it.

Pizza

Liam and I decided it would be a good idea to make pizza tonight. He likes to help so I made the dough and then gave him his own to make his little personal pizza. He invented a nice pepperoni, chorizo, and cheese pizza. It actually tasted better than the one I made.?.?

New Header

Well, I like to think that I could have done some website design if I wasn't a teacher, so I spent some time redesigning the top header tonight. It wasn't quite as easy as one would think. You have to tinker with the html, but I finally got it. I still have a little trouble when you scroll down and then back up, but I don't know if that is me. Let me know what you think.

Owen and the E.R.

From the title of the post you might have thought that Owen liked to watch the TV show E.R. Well, not really, but he really does have a pension for visiting it. This afternoon he made his second trip and it was partly dad's (my) fault as I turned away for a second and he decided to try a face first slide down the kitchen steps. On one of the 5 steps he also thought it would be fun to try and stop himself with his teeth! Well, his two bottom (and only teeth for that matter) didn't win and they were basically bent horizontally forward. Cathy wasn't home so I ended up pretty much rushing him to the Emergency Room to see what they could do. There was a fair amount of blood too, so I was a little freaked out at that time. He was a pretty good trooper and didn't cry to much.

We didn't have to wait long and they checked him out for other injuries but it seems that he really didn't even hit his head or hurt any other bones. His teeth were another matter, the Dr. said that they would probably have to be removed as if he just bent them back into place they would adhere and grow onto his adult teeth and that wasn't good either. He had us try to contact our dentist but we couldn't get ahold of him so he talked to the dentist on call at the hospital and he said it would be best if he just yanked them out there. So back into the exam room Cathy went with Owen and he came out with a teddy bear and two less teeth for a total of zero now. They have a dentist appointement for tomorrow morning to take a look at what is left (which is nothing).

He has sure bounced back a lot better than I would be right now. He was smiling at the ER and has eaten and taken a bottle. He isn't really any worse for the wear other than no bottom teeth until his adult teeth come in. Poor guy. Oh, and I kind of feel like a deadbeat dad for not watching him.

Stye

Well fans... I have had a little trouble the past week and a half or so. My eye got real puffy like I had been punched and I had sort of a black eye. Then it turned into a pimple like growth right on the outside of my eyelid. From what I read it had all the symptoms of a stye and I was just supposed to let it work its course and burst or whatever. Well, today it was really big and starting to get painful so I went to the eye doctor to see what he would say. I had all I could do not to lance the big thing with a pin. So he told me it was a clogged oil duct/stye I guess. An hour later I was done with him flipping my eyelid back, numbing the area, taking a scalpal and cutting it open, scooping out all the gunk that was in there, and cauterizing the incision. All-in-all it wasn't that bad but it is just a little freaky having someone work on your eye. So the moral of the story is... well... nothing as I gather you can't do much about getting them. Oh well.

So I'm adding a picture of my eye... sorry if they are kind of disgusting, but I thought someone might like to know what I was talking about. No worries, though, I'm back to looking like Brad Pitt again.

Liam's First Day of School

Today was Liam's first day of school in PreK4. He hasn't been real excited about going to school up to this point. The other day he said, "I just want to stay home with you guys!" He did fine and had a good time.

Liam in front of the school doors.

Liam with his teacher, Mrs. Meinke.

Texas

While I was in New Ulm for the Synod Convention, Cathy, Liam, and Owen took a trip to Texas to see her parents. Liam enjoyed swimming in the lake and helping Grandpa on his tractor pick up sticks in the yard. It was the first time Cathy's parents had seen Owen in person, so all-in-all a good trip for everyone.

Jimmy Buffett

In between our trip to South Dakota/Nebraska and my trip to New Ulm for synod convention we took our sort-of-annual trip to see Jimmy Buffett. For anyone who has not been to see Jimmy, it is one of those things you just need to do before you die (or he dies). A couple pictures below.

Liam Reading

Well I learned a lot tonight. I recorded this video of Liam reading Green Eggs and Hambut I had recorded it vertically. So I had to find out how to rotate it and then compress it back small enough so I could upload it. Whew! Take a look at Liam's attempt at reading, he doesn't have all the words memorized yet, but he is trying. I recorded this while we were at a gas station on our trip and Cathy was inside changing Owen.

Nebraska

We took a little family trip a couple weeks ago. I had to present at Great Plains Luth. High School in Watertown, SD. So after that we made the trek down to Norfolk, NE to see my Grandpa & Grandma and aunts, uncles, and cousins. Liam was out there last year with my parents but it had been a while for us and of course Owen needed to be shown off. It was a great time and below are some pictures from the trip.

Liam and Owen in the car trying to keep themselves busy.

Liam and I enjoying some time in the pool at our hotel.

My parents and Anna went to South Dakota before coming to Nebraska and they bought matching t-shirts for the three grandkids.

Here is Owen with Grandpa and Great Grandpa.

Owen with Great Grandpa and Great Grandma.

Finally, Liam helping out.