Earlier this week my Marquette grape vines arrived on our doorstep. I'm currently soaking their roots and will be planting them tonight. That's exciting! What's not exciting is that I won't really have a decent crop of grapes for another few years.

Wine making is a great way to teach patience.

Those grapes I picked were indeed Concords as I suspected. I got about 36 pounds or so, which turned out to be plenty for concord wine as you want to dilute it down with a lot of water because they are very acidic.

On Saturday night we cleaned and destemmed them all and Anne volunteered to give them the stomping of their lives. We learned that the machines that crush and destem for you are probably worth the money; destemming sucks and stomping isn't a whole lot of fun either.

Following the first recipe listed here (times 6), in addition to the crushed grapes I also added two and a half gallons of water and about ten pounds of sugar to the fermenter. Wow, that's a lot!

I do plan on doing the second wine recipe as well, where you take out the mashed grape guts about 5-7 days into the first fermentation, squeeze as much juice from them as possible, dump them into another fermenter and add more water and sugar and ferment again. Very soon we're going to be having a lot of wine in process around here.

The thing about concord wines is they have to age for a long time before they get good. This recipe says at least 3 years, so I guess in 2011-12 we'll see if this wine turned out well. (Maybe I should do the same thing with the cherry wine?)

Each year IAMRA, the rescue organization where we got Dora, has a homecoming and fundraiser even called Malawalk. Basically all the adopted out malamutes (and their owners) are invited to a big malamute picnic. We went down this year with Mitch, another IAMRA adopter who lives in Milwaukee, and two of his Dogs, Lance and Molly.

We had a lot of fun. Dora had a great time and behaved very well considering the amount of dogs there. She participated in the bobbing for hotdogs event (she got her hot dog) and also competed (and sucked it up) in both the kissing and singing contests.

More photos here

I saw this billboard truck outside after lunch today and I couldn't not take a photo.

As most of you know we live pretty much right next to the St. Francis Seminary though there's a bit of forest between our house and the seminary grounds proper. Well on the other side of the seminary grounds there is more forest that we had neglected to explore until last night. Now we're regretting waiting so long.

The sign reads: "Seminary Woods Wildlife preserve endorsed by Milwaukee Audubon Society protected by state and federal laws" which is good. Hopefully that means it's unlikely to get turned into condos.

We wandered through the woods on a whim, at first our path led us mostly along the fencing at the back of St. Thomas More High School and the elementary school next to it. After walking a while we started to move further into the woods themselves and came across a creek of sort. Initially it was coming out of a sewer pipe; one of our neighbors who works for MMSD once told us that there are a number of streams and creeks in the area that have been moved underground or routed through sewer ways. As we continued to wander the path grew wider and more maintained, we went across a bridge over the small creek and then we came upon a clearing which held a cemetery.

Apparently the Seminary has a small graveyard out in the woods where it buries it's nuns and priests. Most of the graves were dated in the 19th century. Many of them were very simple markers, though, as you can see, there were a few very ornate stones as well as a big metal crucifix.

Unfortunately we didn't get to linger long in the graveyard, the mosquitoes were running rampant in there, while they had been pretty much non-existent in the forest. We left on a different path than we had entered so as to continue to explore the lovely woods. Just inside the woods from the cemetery clearing was a little grotto with a sitting area and a spot to have a fire, at first I thought it was some sort of Catholic shrine or something but it was just a big fireplace.

The woods were so huge and beautiful and peaceful, it was hard to believe that we were surrounded by city and only a 10 minute drive from downtown Milwaukee. We continued our stroll through the woods and eventually came out onto the Seminary grounds between the convent building and the main building. There were a few fruit trees growing here, some apples and some plums hanging from the branches; not yet ripe. We headed home having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and with plans to return very soon.

more photos

This weekend we finally finished the patio. I am glad to have that done and I don't ever want to make another patio myself again. However, considering the money we saved doing this ourselves, I may have to...

We went from this...

...to this.

Once we got the foundation in it wasn't so bad...

...and went rather quickly.

And, we're done!

The fireplace.

More Photos

Last weekend Anne and broke ground on our patio. As you may remember we got a bunch of pavers from my parents when they replaced their front walk. So we figured out how large of a patio we could make with them and determined where we wanted it and what we wanted to do. And finally we started digging.

The beginnings of our mud hole.

We're going with a basic rectangular shaped patio because we don't want to be cutting any of the paver bricks. It's just easier that way. We are adding a little bump out on one corner for the cast iron fireplace that you can see in the left of the above photo.

We made some pretty good progress until the torrential downpour ended our work. This past weekend we finished digging and I removed a couple of old concrete post anchors from the old section of our fence.

Sledge hammering is fun! Hack sawing is not.

This past weekend we began re-filling our hole with crushed limestone, which i don't have any photos of yet. At $2.50/bag it seems cheap until you realize how many bags of the crap you're actually going to need, yikes!

Our foreman keeps us on task throughout the process.