Adam & Amber’s Blog

It has been exciting times this past week in Rochester, MN with the week-long Rochesterfest in town. Rochesterfest celebrated its 25th year this year and brought back many of my favorite events including The Midwestern Lumberjack Championships, The Grand Parade, and Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race. I realize that we aren’t talking Football, Fireworks, and Ice Cream here but the Rochesterfest events have a certain small city festival feeling that is pretty cool.

The week started with the Lumberjack championships, now I know that it sounds kinda Wisconsiny to goto a Lumberjack Competition, but it is cheap, entertaining, and in an awesome setting at one of the only Lake’s in Rochester. Plus, where else can you see One-Man Bucking? I would explain the events but it would be much more boring then just checking out the photos (you can also check out pics from the 2005 competition here).

As I said, Rochesterfest is a week long event. However, other then lunch on Thursday at the street vendor’s downtown there isn’t much that we goto during the week. Plus, this year the week was much busier for me because I was working with the Marching Band Monday, Wednesday, Friday as they prepared for the Parade.

Speaking of the Parade it took place on Friday night and both Amber and I were in it walking along with the Rochester Lourdes Marching Band (which we help out with). The Rochesterfest Parade is a very interesting experience, it lasts for about 2 hours and there are HUGE gaps between many of the entries. This year I learned one of the reasons why this happens. For many of the bands that march the parade, it is a judged parade competition (I am sure I will be writing much more about Marching Competitions once the field season starts next fall). For those of you unfamiliar (as I was), parade competition bands learn and march drill just like field show bands, the difference is they travel around to parades all summer competing instead of competing at shows in the fall. Here is where we get to the gaps, the band’s shows are designed to be performed in front of a judging station, this means every time they stop to perform it consumes about 5 minutes. The bands try to catch up as best they can, however I heard that this year one band had an 11 minute gap in front of it by the end of the parade.

Here is some video from the parade of the Lourdes Marching Band, they did well. Keep in mind that we just recently started rehearsals and will keep going through the entire summer, so this is just the beginning.

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Today we did our final Rochesterfest events, the Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race (no, they don’t actually race) and Breakfast on the Farm. We were up at 5AM to get out to the Balloon launch (which didn’t end up happening until 6AM). Why do we get up so early to watch hot air balloons? Because we are idiots Plus, it is a fun time and having to get up early just adds to the fun. As always the photo ops are a-plenty.

Seeing as how we were already up, we went to the Breakfast on the Farm. This was the first time we went to this event (it was the first year we were up early enough) and I have to say it was really impressive. It is your standard pancake breakfast, but they feed over 3,000 people. It was interesting to learn from Amber that they have never had this event at the same area farm twice in over 20 years. Kinda gives you an idea of the vast nothingness that surrounds Rochester.

“There is a truck in our yard”, That is what Amber said when she called me at work this afternoon.

At first I thought she meant that someone had parked over the curb a bit and onto our lawn. Then she started talking about the recycling bin being crushed and I thought to myself, “Why would someone run-over our recycling bin?”. At this point she told me that the truck hit one of the trees in front of our house, I finally understood the scope of what she was talking about. Sometimes my slowness is astounding.

While Amber checked the car for passengers (there were none) and called the Police (because we figured that is what you do when someone parks their truck in your tree), I headed home from work to help her sort it out.

Driving home I had plenty of theories about why there was a truck in our yard. I figured that it couldn’t have been a sober adult because if you accidentally drove your truck into my tree you would either knock on the door ad fess up (which I would prefer), or you would immediately drive away (dragging away my recycling bin). I thought about an intoxicated adult, but then why would you run? And if you were drunk enough to park your truck in my tree, I would imagine you couldn’t run very far before ending up on your face. The most obvious choice to me was that a neighborhood kid, of which there are plenty, went on a joy ride that ended with an amateur parking job in my tree.

It just so happened that at almost the exact moment I arrived home, I also learned how wrong I my theories were. After meeting Amber in our front yard (that had a truck parked in it) and talking about a variety of topics mostly surrounding the fact that there was a truck parked in our tree. A neighbor from a few houses up the street comes running out her front door, very curious as to why the truck she parked on the street a few hours before was now parked in my tree. Apparently, she had borrowed the manual transmission truck and was given instructions not to set the parking break. An old transmission and gravity took care of the rest.

Luckily no one got hurt and the truck didn’t make it to the intersection at the end of our street. The tree held up like a champ with only minor bark damage and the remarkably springy recycling bin was, well, remarkably springy. So other then losing 15 minutes of work and wasting a few minutes of the Police’s time, no harm was done (Well except to the front of the truck, but come on everyone knows you set the parking break on manual transmission’s, especially on a hill).

Our friends Andy & Darcy got married this past weekend (Congrats Guys!) and both of us were honored to be in the wedding party, Amber as a bridesmaid and myself as the best man. As an additional duty that I bestowed on myself I decided to organize a group gift among our Rochester friends.

Andy and Darcy have been together long enough that they have most of the things you need to run a household, which meant that they really only needed a few small things and couple big things. We of course decided to go big and bought them a Blue Ember Grill with just about every bell and whistle a person could ask for. However through the generosity of our group (and the large number of people that contributed) we had enough funds to buy the grill, every grilling implement known to man, a fire pit, and even a chefs hat for the cook. A large haul by anyones standard, but how to package it? Such a large gift deserves more then a simple card and bow, that is when genius struck.

I will now give a dramatic (and inaccurate) dialog on how Jon and I came up with the idea:

Adam: Hey Jon, I had an idea for how we should package the gift.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: I was thinking that we build a box large enough to fit the grill and all the other gifts inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We would have to make it HUGE, like 7′x7′x7′ just to make sure we can fit the 6′ wide grill inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We can put it on their deck, wrap the entire thing and make some ribbon and a bow out of fabric to make it look like a gift.
Jon: You’re an idi……. Can we fill it with balloons?
Adam: YES!

And that has nothing to do with how the idea was born, other then that Jon and I talked about it and he thinks I’m an idiot

We had this crazy idea 4 days before the wedding, which meant that to pull it off we would need to find a group of people as crazy as us, people willing to put in long hours building something thats entire purpose was to be destroyed, people willing to work for pizza and laughs. Luckily, Rochester is just dull enough that we convinced a good chunk of our friends to help out.

After putting out a plea for cardboard, purchasing a crap-ton (it’s metric) of 1×2’s, finding silver table cloth rolls to use as wrapping paper, and getting strange looks by going alone into Jo-Ann’s (picture a large guy perusing the fabric section in the middle of the day) to get “ribbon”, we were set. We gathered 2 days before the wedding to pre-assemble as much of the box as possible. The plan was to frame nine 3.5′x7′ panels, cover them in cardboard, and individually wrap them. The tenth panel was the exception, it included a door so that the contents of the box could be accessed and would be wrapped on location after the box was assembled.

One of the best times when doing a project like this, is the moment when everyone buys into the idea (still realizing that it is completely absurd and insane). As I watched 11 people work for 2+ hours on this completely crazy idea I couldn’t help but think how hard it was going to be to convince them to help assemble it after the reception, being past 1 AM and having partied and drank for hours. But we had come to far, so this box was going up!

The wedding was of course beautiful, went off without a hitch, the women all beautiful and the men handsome. The reception was a blast, everyone danced more then they should have, ate more then they should have, and some even drank more then they should have. However, that is not the purpose of this post, all that is important is that everyone was well dressed, tired, sore, tipsy, and it was 1 AM.

It took another two hours but we got the box up (with the magic power of zip-ties), put in the gifts, filled it about half full of balloons (over 300), wrapped the visible surfaces one more time, slapped on the bow, and at around 3 AM called it good. Were we tired? Hell Yes, But we had accomplished something! We had build a completely useless, but impressive, 7′ gift box. Now all that was left to do was to go home, get my 5 hours of sleep and goto the gift opening in the morning.

Luckily there is video of the remainder of this story, so I can stop typing and you can stop reading. The reaction was completely worth the effort and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Congratulations Andy and Darcy!

Enjoy the video.

That is right, after the previous storm last weekend that dumped over a foot of snow on us we had only a couple days rest before round two came Thursday and Friday and dumped another 10+ inches. I would guess that at our house the undrifted and unshoveled total of both storms is about 2 1/2 feet of snow. We are starting to run out of places to put it. We have tried hiding some under the deck but now that is so full it is blocking the entrance. We have crested the neighbors fence next to the garage and have started throwing the snow over it. And don’t even get me started on our poor mailbox.

Where the plows have helped create snow banks they are easily topping out over 5 feet tall and where they have not helped we have piles nearing 4 feet. Each foot, mind you, shoveled by hand by Amber and myself.

The good news is that snow is out of the forecast for the next week and we might even start warming up! We just have to keep reminding ourselves that soon it will be spring and then we will just have to deal with all the flooding.

Checkout more pictures of the aftermath here.

I grew up on the west coast of Michigan, went to school in the Northern U.P. of Michigan, and now live in Minnesota. Point is I have always lived around snow and truth be told Minnesota has the least snow fall of any place I have lived (although that is made up for by being the coldest place I have ever lived). Most of the time I love the snow, it is beautiful to look at and fun to play in. That being said there is a dark side to all this winter bliss, snow removal. Amber and I do not yet own a snow blower (from our time outside this morning, we might be the only ones on the block that don’t), this means we get to remove our snow the old fashioned way shoveling.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. This weekend Southern Minnesota had a blizzard. Judging from the snow in our driveway, which was between 6 inches and over 2 feet deep (after I already shoveled once yesterday), I would bet we got over 15 inches since Friday afternoon. The snow wasn’t so bad, it was the fact that we first had 1/4 inch of ice first is what made things interesting. Our temperatures hovered around freezing so most of what fell was either freezing rain or really heavy snow. Today Amber and I spent the better part of 2 hours shoveling the driveway while trying our hardest not to slip down it.

I did take advantage of my time outside by taking a few pictures, check them out here.

What is a Buckeye? Well to be frank it is a poisonous nut that grows in Ohio. However, the people of Ohio couldn’t stand for being associated with a nut that is inedible by humans. Their solution, turn it into a delicious piece of candy. Amber and I gave them out as part of the wedding favor at our reception (the candy, not the poisonous nut) which is what brings us to the topic of this post. One of the people that was impressed by these candy creations that Amber cooked up was our photographer Scott. He was so impressed that it was all he could talk about when we went to pickup our photos a couple weeks after the wedding.

Spring ahead to two weeks ago… Scott gives Amber a call and wants to place an order for 30 dozen buckeyes. Yup, 360 of these little buggers. Seeing as how we really enjoyed having Scott as our photographer and that he was going to pay us, we were happy to fill the order. Is this the start of a new side business? Only time will tell.

Oh, ever wonder what 360+ buckeyes looks like? Check out the photo set here.

Continuing on yesterday’s theme of well thought out toys, something a little more current. So let’s say you are a toy company that produces a robot made for kids and you want to sell more robots without putting much work into R&D, what do you do? Easy, you take your current product and paint it to look like a popular character (or two), slap a doll head on top, throw it in a special edition box, and release it around a movie. In that spirit I am proud to present to you Homersapien, a slightly slimmed down (in features) version of Wowwee’s Robosapien. This has got to be the freakiest looking toy I have ever seen, I may have nightmares now about thousands of these things trying to take over the world. That being said I would love one for Christmas 2007 if anyone is looking, these things are just the sort of toys that will be worth a bundle one day.

When I was but a young lad I loved watching Macgyver, no matter how impossible of a situation he got into and out of I had no problem buying it. I was looking around the net today and ran across this picture:

From what I found this is not a real product just some really great photoshopping. Which is really a shame because I would buy this in a second. I looked a little deeper and found that the truth behind this is so much better then the photoshopping. In the 1980’s a company called Glasslite sold Macgyver toys in Brazil. The base of the photoshopped product above is the Macgyver Action Figure (pictured below), part of an entire line released exclusively in Brazil including a jeep, motorcycle and helicopter.

There is nothing incredibly special about this action figure, until that is you zoom in…

Wow…just wow.