A Baptism, St. Patty and Beer

Hey there Patty! St. Patty’s landed on a Friday this year which makes for a guaranteed crazy day. After work I headed over to the Milwaukee Ale house to meet a couple of the guys that had the day off. The Badgers were playing in the NCAA tourney and got their butts spanked. Never-the-less, that didn’t prevent Luedke and Wians from having a few. We stayed at the Ale House for a bit to have some happy hour pints and shoot some darts. After a couple hours there we went to meet Jocelyn and the Delahunts at Flannery’s. I was bound and determined to get a sampling of the world’s largest rueben at the Wicked Hop. On the walk to Flannery’s I stopped and paid my $5 for a slice and was it huge. I gnawed on the thing the entire walk to Flannery’s and I barely finished half of it. I never throw away food but I was stuffed and out of time so once I got to Flannery’s I had to throw some of it away. Once in Flannery’s I joined the “happy” crowd. We stayed there for a couple hours sampling the Jamison and Guinness. After Flan’s we went to My Office for the smaller crowd ambiance and a couple more festive St. Patty’s drinks.

I woke up on Saturday a little groggy from the night before but nothing to severe which was good because Saturday was the Riverwest Pub Crawl. I went on this last year with Luedke and Anna and it was a blast. This year Jocelyn and Erica came along. The crawl started at Onopa and we had good weather again although it wasn’t quite as warm as last year. There are really too many details to describe this event packed day. We snaked our way through the Riverwest area of Milwaukee drinking beers at the nineteen bars on our map. A couple of the bars have food to eat. One thing that every bar does have is an interesting cast of characters because Riverwest is a very bohemian area of Milwaukee. The five of us had a great time. From one until about ten we ventured around the neighborhood. At our final stop, The Squirrel Cage, Luedke, Anna and Erica took a cab home. Jocelyn and I probably should have as well but we decided to walk home. We thought that the walk would sober us up. The problem is you don’t really sober up if you stop at bars on the way home. It was a very long walk home and we stopped at The Nomad on way home for a beer, some rest and warmth. After a drink we headed to Mykano’s for a gyro to soak up some of the toxins in our stomachs.

Sunday was a pretty rough one. J and I had to drive to Sheboygan for my nephew’s baptism. We weren’t in the best of shape but we made it. Sitting through church with tons of crying kids was really the last place I wanted to be. After church they had the baptism. When that was finished we went to Rich’s house to eat the leftover food from my bachelor party. We didn’t stay long. All the noise and people in that little house was pretty nauseating so we headed back to Milwaukee and enjoyed the rest of our lazy Sunday.

Bachelor Bore

On Saturday I had the first of my two bachelor parties. This party was for my uncles and Falls friends because I knew that most of them wouldn’t want to make the trip to Chicago for my main one. I pretty much repeated the beginning part of my previous weekend. I went to Rich’s, helped my mom make some of the bachelor party food, packed it up, drove it to the VFW, and set it and the music up and waited for the people to show up. A majority of my uncles showed up, some cousins, and some Falls friends. A bunch of Rich’s friends also showed up, I guess it was his bachelor party too. We sat around, drank some beer, shot some dice, and ate some food. It was pretty close to the tamest bachelor party I’ve ever been to; sad part is it was mine. A bunch of people took off back to Falls but I stayed in Sheboygan. My buddy Fudge stuck around so at least I had one person to hang around with. Rich, some of his buddies, Fudge and I went to Hops Haven. We stayed there the rest of the night and had a couple beers and smoked some cigars. It was the world’s tamest bachelor party ever. I’ve been to sweet sixteen birthday parties that were more exciting. Oh well, I have one more shot and I really wasn’t expecting too much craziness from the Fallsenites.

A Sheboygan Quickie

This weekend was pretty low key and it was much needed. After a couple crazy encounters with the Marti clan I was able to sit back and relax with my own clan. My cousin Lisa and her husband Jeff were having their 25th anniversary party in Sheboygan on Saturday. Lisa had asked me if I would supply the music and I was happy to oblige. I headed up to Sheboygan Saturday afternoon by myself because Jocelyn was having her bachelorette party in Madison. I went to see my new nephew and run a couple errands. The party started around sevenish at the Sheboygan VFW. I set up the tunes and let them play while we had some classic Sheboygan buffet. The rest of the night I sat around with my aunts and uncles and talked. I didn’t feel like staying over so at eleven I packed up my equipment and headed back to Milwaukee. I called Luedke and a bunch of other guys to see what they were doing but by the time I hit the lights of Milwaukee I was ready to hit the hay. I sat on the couch and fell asleep almost instantaneously. I knew I would need the rest while I could get it with the upcoming weeks.

Getting My Milwaukee Culture

Back to back weekends with the Marti clan, a dangerous yet eventful endeavor. When we were up North last week Paul had mentioned to me that he was going to the Food and Froth festival at the Milwaukee Museum on Saturday. The festival consisted of 200 beers and a bunch of Milwaukee area restaurants positioned throughout the exhibits for sampling, both culture and beer. Jocelyn was going to go to Chicago so I thought that meeting up with Martis would be fun. The festival started at seven so I walked to the museum at about quarter after six. When I got there the lobby was packed with people waiting to get in with their sampler glass. Once the gates open I strolled around the streets of old Milwaukee and the Sahara desert sampling beers. The Martis were running late and I met them at about half past. The group consisted of mister and missus Marti, Paul and his wife, Craig and some of Paul’s friends. The event was very cool. It was fun to stroll through the museum and drink some samples. The event museum was packed and I had heard that the event sold out. We drank and sampled until ten when the event shutdown. So after twenty plus mini beers we decided to go to Wolski’s. It took us about an hour to get out of the parking structure. By the time we got to Wolski’s everyone was geared up for a beer. The group got crazy and had fun and those are the most details I can tell you. I walked home from Wolski’s at an unknown time and got home at an unknown time. I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for this one next year, it was great time.

Up Nort’ ‘ey

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.