We went to the US Nationals Snow Sculpting Championships this weekend! The competition was all this week and the judging was yesterday. Today was viewing day, so we went today to check them out. There were several great ones this year, and it looked like only one of them collapsed this time. Click on the thumbnail image to view the photo set. As usual, there are several photos of each sculpture along with their original drawings and the team signs. I missed the actual names for a couple of the best sculptures though, so I did my best to name them appropriately. There’s also a few photos of Kevin and Ty who accompanied me. We listened to the audiobook “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez on the trip there and back. I got Ty hooked on it–now he wants to listen to the whole thing. It sure made the drive go by quick–as usual!
All posts by Jim Trottier
Confessions of an iPod Touch junkie
I’m hooked. Totally addicted. I confess. Since I purchased an iPod Touch, I have become one of the millions of “digital zombies” out there everywhere–head slumped forward, both hands clutching a small device, thumbs moving frantically over the device… you’ve seen ’em, they’re everywhere. Totally immersed in whataever they’re doing. I hear most of them are texting, but I’m not. At least not yet. I’m hooked on the games at the moment. And the music. And the police radio. And e-mail. And everything else, except texting. I have neglected my website, my photo albums (I still have plenty of Arizona Trip photos to go through and post), and I’m getting behind on my chores at home. The fish in the aquarium are starting to look at me funny, as if to say, “Hey, man, we’re swimmin’ in poop here, ya know! What’s the deal?”
The game I’ve become the most addicted to, righty now at least, is called “Flight Control“. Simple game, and I remember playing another one exactly like it on one of my old Atari computers way back when. It’s an air traffic controller game. You’re viewing a map from above and you’re the air traffic controller for the area. You need to guide each plane and helicopter to their appropriate destinations as they enter and exit your area, hopefully avoiding an air disaster along the way. This game also takes this a step further by adding an optional multiplayer mode. If you play multiplayer, each person is in charge of their own adjacent air space, and each will have to direct aircraft to their own runways as well as passing them off to the other player’s air space. The game ends instantly when two aircraft collide. Gee, I wonder why, it’s only a small mistake… Anyway, I don’t know if it’s because I played it years ago and I’m thrilled to be reliving a part of my childhood, or what, I just gotta keep playing to try to get a little bit further and get a higher rank. That aside though, I’m finding the overall usefulness of the Touch to be awesome. I can see how the iPhone would be even that much MORE useful, since you have a connection pretty much everywhere instead of just wifi, and there’s a bunch more you can do with it, but I just can’t afford the extra monthly cost yet. The Touch is a great compromise though, having many of the same features without the monthly commitment. Maybe down the road a bit…like when my current cellular contract expires. So there ya go. A blog entry. Took care of that problem, didn’t I? Now back to my airplanes…
The Flight
I posted another batch of photos from my Arizona Trip. Chronologically, this is the first batch–everything taken during my flight to Phoenix. It was the first time I’ve flown too, so it was an interesting experience. I had a window seat, so I took a lot of photos during the flight. I didn’t realize plane windows were so tiny though–it made it a little bit restrictive, but I think I managed to capture a few good ones. The sunrise shots from above the clouds are my favorites from this set. Click on the thumbnail image, or here, to view the set.
Ty’s Surprise
This is the video I took when we arrived back from Arizona to surprise Tyler. Jay called Ty once we got into Kenosha after driving from Arizona and he told him on the phone to get on the PS3 in about 15 minutes so they can video chat. Ty had no idea his dad was actually in Kenosha. When we arrived, Jay came into the house behind me and was bundled up to cover his face. He even spoke a couple times before Ty finally realized who it was.
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And while we’re talking about Ty, here’s another video of him flying a tiny radio-controlled UFO that I picked up during our recent Arizona-to-Wisconsin road trip. We stopped in Roswell, New Mexico and I found this UFO in the gift shop at the UFO Museum. I thought it would be the perfect souvenir for Kevin, so I picked it up. This is one of Ty’s more successful attempts at a perfect flight.
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Dylan’s First Birthday Party
Dylan (Linda and Kerry’s son) had his 1st birthday party last weekend at Chuck E. Cheese’s. We attended the party with Kevin and took lots of photos. As usual, you know what to do to view them…
Arizona-to-Wisconsin Road Trip
I just uploaded the first batch of photos from the road trip that Jay and took from Arizona to Wisconsin. This first batch is mostly mountains. I was very fascinated, having never seen a mountain “in-person” before. Jay took me up to the top of South Mountain in Phoenix, where I was able to just go nuts and snap hundreds of photos of everything I could. Time was very limited though, as we were on a rather tight schedule, so most photos were take from the car while moving. I did my best to take the best of them, punch them up a bit, and post them here, so I hope they look ok. Click on the thumbnail image to view them. The next batch coming up after this one is from our stop in Roswell, New Mexico. Still editing those though, but they’ll be up soon.
The Achmed Files
Jay and I recently went on a cross-country road trip from Arizona to Wisconsin. We took Achmed The Dead Terrorist with us on our trip and he forced us to take a photo of him at each milestone stop we made. Here are the photos–which he also forced me to post immediately. We took hundreds of other non-Achmed photos and had a great time, but I’ll be sifting through all of those for a few more days before posting the best ones on the site. For now though, check out Achmed in each of the states we travelled though.
In Alien Territory
Greetings from Roswell, New Mexico! Jay and I are here searching for alien phenomenon during our cross-country road trip from Phoenix to Kenosha. Achmed the Dead Terrorist is tagging along with us, and he insists on us taking his photo at every stop we make, so we’ll be sure to post those soon. He doesn’t like to share the covers either, so it’s going to be a cold night for one of us in the motel room tonight! Whenever we try to take the covers back, he screams “I KEEL YOU!”. With any luck we should be back in Kenosha some time time Monday, December 28th. We’re going to stop in St. Louis on the way home too and get some pictures of the Arch. It’s a blast! Be back soon with the photos!
Thanksgiving 2009
Sandy had a pleasant Thanksgiving this year. Kevin and I not so much. We had a tradition of having Thanksgiving at Bear’s house every year, with him and Rick doing up a wonderful turkey and fixings. Sandy always made the pies, and we all chipped in with a side dish of some sort. Well, with Bear’s passing recently, things have changed of course. Diane, Bear’s fiancee, invited us to join her family this year, so we had planned on that. Unfortunately, Kevin got sick on Thanksgiving day with the flu, so I stayed home with him and Sandy had Thanksgiving with Diane and her family (and Rick, George, Mike and Ginger, who always attended Bear’s Thanksgiving). Sandy said it was very nice, and brought back some great food, so I had planned on having a late thanksgiving dinner the following night. Go figure–I must have picked up Kevin’s flu bug and I was sick all through Friday and Saturday! It was horrible. The terms “explosive” and “projectile” would work well in the description of events, but I won’t bother to gross you out any further. I’m much better this morning though, and Wii Fit says I lost over 10 pounds in the past week! Wow, what a diet plan. The flu sure is cleansing! I plan on having a nice Turkey dinner tonight…finally. Then it’s back to work tomorrow. So much for a long four-day weekend. Click to the thumbnail image to view Sandy’s photos.
Rocks and Minerals Exhibit
We went to the Rocks and Minerals Exhibit at the Kenosha Public Museum yesterday. Kevin loves rocks and minerals, so he was very interested. We took a few photos, so you can click on the thumbnail image to view them if you’d like. Kevin also recently did his first church service as an Acolyte! Sandy took a photo of him right here. Last night we also took George (Sandy’s dad) out to dinner at Red Lobster–Sandy & myself, Kevin, Mike & Ginger, Rick, and Diane took him. We didn’t take any photos, but we all enjoyed some great food and a nice night out.
Trick or Treating
We went trick-or-treating today and Kevin had a blast. First we had to stop back at the haunted yard we visited earlier in the month, just to see it during the day, and to see if the death row prisoner actually gets electrocuted. We weren’t disappointed. The display was working great, and the prisoner got zapped and shook violently for several seconds every few minutes. It was quite startling, even during the day. And as usual, Kevin kept his distance from everything, afraid of what might happen. A zombie was there at the front door handing out candy bars wrapped in dollar bills! It took some coaxing, but Kevin finally agreed to go up and get one. I even talked him into going up a second time””this time for a photo with him and the zombie. That’s the first photo in the set (and the one in this article). Click on it to go view the rest of the photos from throughout today’s trick-or-treating. It was pretty funny knowing Kevin was so frightened and paranoid around all the scary creatures and decorations at the haunted yard, while at the same time wearing a pretty scary costume himself. He really frightened a few children pretty good during trick-or-treating, and he wasn’t even trying to!
Pumpkin Totem 2009
We carved our Halloween pumpkins this weekend–between my installs of Windows 7. We did one for each of us–small, medium and large–but we’re still fighting over who’s is who’s. Sandy had to work, so Kevin and I worked together to do the gutting and carving. I carved the main details, then Kevin took over and cleaned up the finer details. When they were done we stacked them in a totem and added the mini pumpkin on top that Kevin got at the Vista Fall Fest (after we drew a face on it). Since the mini pumpkin wasn’t carved, Kevin held a flashlight to it as I snapped the photos in the dark. Check out the photos! (Please excuse the highly overexposed one… I was just playing). Make sure you compare them to our 2003 and our 2004 totems… Which one do you think is the best?
A Windows 7 Family
I spent the weekend installing Windows 7 on all 3 of our PCs at home. I went with the “Family Pack” of Windows 7 Home Premium for $149. That’s an awesome price for 3 copies of Windows! It took me a while to find one in Kenosha, because everyone else was sold out, but OfficeMax had a few left Friday evening. A single license for Home costs about $109-$119. Each install took less than an hour. You can do a clean install using the upgrade version with no prompting for any type of proof that you own a previous version. I had been running Windows 7 RC on two our PCs for a few months, and there was no pre-purchased version of Windows installed on these PCs. For the clean install, it automatically takes your entire previous Windows installation and moves it into a folder called “Windows.old”, and Microsoft wisely recommends a fresh install and not an actual upgrade from your current installation. This results in a much cleaner, faster-running, and fully functional installation without carrying over any existing problems from your previous installation of an older operating system or having any compatibility issues. There are several differences between Home and Professional, but none of them were worth the extra price for me. The main piece not in Home Premium is the “Windows XP Mode” (which is a virtual XP machine that runs inside Windows 7) This would probably be the only feature in Pro that I would ever use, but I’d still probably very rarely use it, so I’ll go without. Windows 7 is much faster and much less buggy than Vista, requires fewer system resources and can even give you back 30-35% extra battery time on laptops! So far it’s running great, though it’s only been a few days since I installed it. I did use the Windows 7 Release Candidate version for 3 months prior to this though, and even that has run great for me. If it hadn’t, I would have hesitated a while longer before taking the plunge””maybe until the first service pack is released, like a lot of other people (and businesses) do. I am seeing a lot of little changes (and fixes) in the final version that I was concerned with in the Release Candidate, so it’s looking really well polished. Oh, and I also dumped AVG Free and went with using Microsoft Security Essentials, which is Microsoft’s new free Antivirus and Antispyware package, so we’ll see how that goes as well. It’s so nice to be able to spend just $50 per PC to bring it up to date and not have any monthly or annual additional fees to worry about!
Troha’s Yard…Scary as HELL! … Literally!
On Wayne’s advice, we stopped by the Troha house tonight with Kevin and took a gander. As I said in the shoutbox earliier, “Holy Crap!” It’s at 1709 32nd Avenue, and if you’re into the whole Halloween thing, this is really a treasure! I just didn’t want to leave. There’s just so much to see, such vivid detail, gore, blood & guts… Kevin was pretty nervouse about the whole thing, and never got too close to anything, afraid of what might happen. There was a guy in a cage, strapped into an electric chair with his head slumped down–obviously his sentence had already been carried out–and I’m sorry I missed it. I have a feeling this particular display has more life to it at other times. I’m going to stop by on Halloween during trick-or-treat hours just to see it all again, and hopefully see a bit more activity this time. I would so love to volunteer to be a zombie for an evening at this place! There are a lot of ways to really scare people with a setup this elaborate… I could blend in great with a good costume and makeup and “play dead” until just the right times. I fancy myself a pretty good “Boomer” from Left 4 Dead, if you’re familiar with that awesome game. Wayne took some great pictures the other day, check them out. I also took a bunch more, along with some great closeups, so take a look at those too, you’ll see what I mean.
Vista Fall Fest and Jade’s 8th Birthday
We went to Vista’s Fall Fest today at Vista Surgery Center and had a lot of fun. Kevin wore his Freddy Krueger costume for the first time, and he was pretty excited about it. The photos are part of our growing “Halloween 2009” collection. Jade (Debbie’s granddaughter) also had her 8th birthday party today, so Debbie sent us the photos and I posted those as well. Click on the thumbnails or any of the links to view the images.
Halloween Season Begins
The Halloween festivities have begun. Last weekend we shopped for Kevin’s costume. We found a great store too–a giant pumpkin in the Regency Mall parking lot. Tons of great Halloween decorations, costumes, and goodies! It was a blast. We stayed for quite awhile just to check everything out. Kevin was set on a Halo 3 Master Chief costume that we had ordered from Amazon earlier in the month, which said “IN STOCK” when we ordered, but our order was cancelled a couple days later saying that they were out of stock. But at the giant pumpkin store we found the exact same costume–and it was the exact same size as the one we ordered–Adult Extra Small. Good thing we DIDN’T get it mail order though–the giant pumpkin store has a “no refunds” policy, but they let you try on the costumes first. So Kevin tried on the Master Chief costume… The crotch plate alone rested on the floor! It sure was HUGE for being an “extra small”. That was the only size they had, so we gave up on it.
He soon found his second choice though–the same costume he wanted to wear last year, if we had been unable to get a decent soldier costume in his size–Freddy Krueger. We have everything we need except the hat at the moment, and everything fits him nicely. Looks pretty scary. As a preview, click on the Freddy thumbnail and take a look at a collection of the best and worst Freddies we found on Flickr. It’s an interesting gallery I put together. You can’t add your own photos to a gallery you create on Flickr though–since “galleries” are for showcasing your favorite photos from other people–so you won’t find Kevin in that collection, but he’ll be added to the “Kevin’s Costumes” and “Halloween 2009” sets soon though. We also visited Jerry Smith’s Pumpkin Farm last weekend. We picked out a trio of pumpkins to carve this year, and maybe I’ll even try to assemble a new pumpkin totem this year. We’ll see what happens.
Kevin’s Halloween Costumes
At just over 18,000 photos, I’m finally done moving to Flickr. What a relief! One of the nice things about Flickr is how you can use any of your photos in multiple sets easily, allowing you to create custom groups of photos with things in common. So here’s my first set. This is “Kevin’s Costumes” – A photo of every Halloween costume Kevin has worn, from when he first went trick-or-treating at 2 years old (in 2000) right up to last year. Click on the thumbnail and take a look.
Photos, photos and more photos
I’ve been very busy this week trying to get my photo site up and running on flickr. I’m up to over 8,000 photos so far, just a few thousand left to go. So far I’m really enjoying it–much moreso than I did on SmugMug, even though there are fewer options available on flickr for layout and customization. I’m finding that the popularity of the photo service itself seems to be quite important when choosing a photo host. Even with only a small amount of my photos uploaded last week I started getting a lot of views, people marking photos as favorites, leaving comments, and even invitations to add some of my photos to specific groups! Plus, “geotagging” photos is actually fun and much easier on flickr than it was on SmugMug, so I already have thousands of photos geotagged as well! So that’s where I’ll be–uploading photos on flickr–probably over the entire weekend and beyond. I’m even finding and adding many MORE photos and collections than I ever had online before, so be warned! Hopefully they’re arranged much better than before as well, so you probably won’t be so overwhelmed at first, but if you keep digging, you’ll see there is plenty–and I mean PLENTY there to see. So stop by and take a look… and try out the slideshow mode too–it’s the smoothest web-based slideshow mode I’ve ever seen! Jim’s Photo World
“Bear” Photo Collection
During all of the chaos around here this week, I completely forgot that the registration for my photo site, jimsphotoworld.com, was about to expire. I didn’t plan on continuing it, so that’s no big deal, but I did intend to have things up and running on flickr, which I was in the process of moving all of my photos to. Flickr is only half the price of SmugMug, which is one advantage, but it’s also much more popular, so I’m also seeing more visits and comments from strangers after only a week of starting to upload than I ever did in an entire year on SmugMug. Don’t get me wrong, SmugMug is a fine photo host, especially for professionals, and it has excellent features. But right now I need something more affordable, and flickr seems to fill the bill. Flickr is also owned by AT&T/Yahoo, and it’s integrated into U-Verse, which we just switched to. This means we can view all of our photos instantly on any of our TVs, which is great! I’m far from finishing the switch though, since other more important things have come up this week, so it’s still a work in progress right now. I did, however, manage to put together a great collection of Bear’s photos. Take a look.
Dennis “Bear” Wegmann — August 5, 1954 – September 16, 2009
Dennis A. “Bear” Wegmann
(August 5, 1954 – September 16, 2009)
Dennis “Bear” Wegmann, 55, of Kenosha, passed away Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at his fiance’s home in Zion, IL.
He was born on August 5, 1954 to George John and Irene Mildred (Holtdorf) Wegmann in Kenosha. He was educated in the schools of Kenosha and graduated from Tremper High School. He took various accounting related classes at Gateway Technical College.
Dennis worked at Motorola as an assembler for several years and then at AMC/Chrysler for 30 years, retiring on October 31, 2003.
Dennis was a member of UAW Local #72, the Kenosha Auxiliary Police, the Milwaukee Suds City Van Club and the Kenosha County Line Van Club.
Dennis enjoyed camping up north at the Ponderosa Pines Campground in Plainfield, WI, he was an avid lifelong Bear fan, enjoyed playing darts, riding motorcycles, bowling, and enjoyed clubbing with his van club since 1972. Dennis also considered Jose Cuervo a good friend.
Dennis is survived by his father George Wegmann of Kenosha, his siblings Rick Wegmann, Michael (Ginger) Wegmann, Sandra (Jimmy) Trottier all of Kenosha, his step brother Robert Anderson of IL, his fiancée Diane Bishop of Zion, IL, his nephews Scott Wegmann who is serving in the US Navy in Iraq, Matthew Krumm who is also his Godson who is serving our country in the US Army in Afghanistan and Kevin Trottier, his step nephew Timm Sinnen, his step niece Tiana Honey, his Godson Jeremy Auskirk and several cousins.
His mother and his stepbrother James Anderson precede him in death.
Funeral Services for Dennis will be held on Monday, September 21st at 10:00 a.m. at the Bruch Funeral Home. Visitation will be held on Sunday evening from 4:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. and again on Monday morning from 9:00 a.m. until the time of service at the funeral home.
Bruch Funeral Home
3503 Roosevelt Road
Kenosha, WI 53142
262-652-8298
Visit Dennis’s Online Memorial Book: www.bruchfuneralhome.net
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