Last weekend wasn’t even worth writing about. The weekend was Doomed from the start. By Doomed I mean I spent the entire weekend playing my new video game Doom 3. I like to just waste weekends on video games instead of spending every night during the week doing little by little. I did solve it so I can have my life back. The other highlight was I switched my computer back to a tower case from my little cube case. I need more space for storage so I’m back to the full size. Nothing really even worth mentioning last weekend; boring and geeky.

This past Monday was worth mentioning. We had our tasting for the food that we’re going to have at the wedding and my is it good. We’re having too much to list so all I can say is everyone will be pleasantly stuffed when it is over.

That brings us to this weekend. I was finally able to make the trip to the Marti’s cabin up North in the Crivitz area. Chad has invited me to about ten of these trips and I’ve always been busy on the weekend that they go up. I finally got to go along. Chad flew in Friday afternoon and Pyrek picked him up from the airport. After work I went home, packed up my long underwear and went over to Darren’s apartment to meet up with Chad and Ryan. Ryan drove us three and a half hour drive up to the Northwoods. We met Telly (who I haven’t seen in about six years), Chad’s dad and brothers at a bar/restaurant in Crivitz. The bar was your typical up North snowmobilers watering hole. We had a couple drinks there and some pizzas. While we were warming up in the bar the weather was getting colder and colder and dropped to -10 without the wind chill. After we finished eating we drove north the additional twenty minutes to get to Amburg which is the actual town the cabin is in. Amburg has two bars and we split our night between the two. The bars were your typical up North taverns with your typical up North clientele. There was a nice mix of the hick locals and the snowmobilers taking a break from driving eighty miles an hour to the next bar. After the bars we headed to the cabin and staked out where everyone was going to sleep in the cabin. There were ten guys staying there and there was enough room for all of us, barely. So after eating some more pizzas to soak up all the Miller Lite I hit the floor to get some sleep. Friday night was the worst night of sleep I have ever had. I actually didn’t get any sleep, not one wink. Craig has a new dog and the thing stayed up the entire night whimpering and yelping. The thing did not shut up for one second. I was so irate and I thought the thing would shut up eventually but it never stopped. We went to bed around three thirty and the fishing folk were getting up at five so I thought I’d tough it out until then. So I rested my eyes for ninety minutes but no sleep was to be had.

The people that were going to go ice fishing pressed the snooze button a couple times and didn’t get up until around six thirty. I woke up with the fishers and complained about the dog and told them they were nuts for going out in the cold to fish. So once the left with the dog, amen, I claimed one of the beds and got a good hour of sleep. After my cat nap I bundled up to join the guys on the ice. There was a tournament going on on the lake so there were a bunch of people sitting in zero degree weather looking into a hole. It was nice and sunny without one cloud in the sky but flat out cold. I stayed outside a little over an hour. Nobody saw a fish all day. Even the fish knew that it was too cold to be out there. The only fish I saw the whole weekend was breaded. After fishing we headed to the same bar from the night before to get a hamburger. We ate and then headed back to the cabin for a nap. The nap was a necessity for all. After everyone woke up we headed to the Amburg Pub for the ice fishing awards and a raffle. The raffle was a fun. They were selling paint stick paddles for huge hams, huge pork loins, cheap leather jackets, a bread machine and a rotisserie grill. I dropped at least $20 on the paddles but came away meat free. Chad won a turkey and Darren won a Budweiser collector’s beer bottle that was promptly drank by everyone. During the raffle they have prizes for almost everyone. Most everyone in the group ended up with some sort of booze shirt and a shot glass. After all the prizes were gone so were we. We took ourselves back to the same bar where we had lunch and got another burger for dinner. We asked the girl if she could just redo our orders from lunch. We stayed at this bar for a good portion of the night. There was craziness throughout the night and I haven’t laughed so hard in a long long time. Some of the highlights included an atomic wedgie, the burning of the aforementioned atomic wedgie underwear in the wood stove, fun with taxidermied animals, the toilet papering of a mounted moose, and other craziness. Props to the bartender. I really don’t know how she was able to put up with all our crap. Probably because money was flying around like crazy. After we drank the bar out of shorties of Miller Lite, the group drink of choice for the weekend, we went to one last bar called The Northwoods over by the cabin. The bar is in the middle of nowhere. We stormed into there like a tornado. There were a couple locals there that weren’t too happy when we came in and they made it clear to us that they didn’t want us there. They yelled at one of the guys and then the local guy went off on a tirade. He called the bar a “family place”, told us that he knew that we were “fancy” and “we had to be from down south, someplace Sheboygan or South” and finally he insisted that “I’m not inbred, everyone thinks we’re all inbred up here and I’m not inbred.” The last point continued to be reiterated throughout the night even after the confrontation calmed down. We stayed there for a little over an hour and we all decided we had had enough and headed back to the cabin. After some more pizzas at the cabin and more craziness we all managed to find our sleeping space and concluded a very long day.

Sunday we cleaned up the cabin and headed home about noon. We stopped at a bar in Wausaukee and had one last up North burger. The burger I got was really good and consisted of one Italian sausage patty and one hamburger patty. Good stuff. We made it back to Milwaukee around four and I spend the rest of the day on the couch. I had a lot of fun and a thank you goes out to Chad and his family.