It’s snowing today.  This weather is magic.

Magic like Anna’s cello music at the Weisman on a Saturday afternoon.  Yesplease.  Let me grab some cocoa.

Anna’s a senior in high school, taking Post-Secondary at the U of MN.  Way to grab the educational bull by the horns!

I was trying to get tricky with the design files for the blog and I really made a mess of it.  The wonderful people at my web hosting company tell me they’ll have it restored from the backup sometime tomorrow.  In the meantime, just enjoy the weird spacing and cut off words.

Matt’s in Colorado until Saturday, so I have temporarily deemed the dog Head of Operations.  She’s wearing a crown, but she won’t hold on to her scepter.  (No opposable thumbs, you know.  She uses that excuse to get out of everything.  She’s also refused to blog.)

Below is an image of the cottages at the Park Lodge Hotel outside of Spiddal Village, County Galway, Ireland.  We stayed here while we visited our wonderful friends and helped set up the Park Lodge for the big wedding last week, tying bows and whathaveyou.  But the star of this image is really the Red Rocket (reading Julia Child’s book.  Suddenly very interested in naming my vehicles, though not as much in cooking), a 9 passenger Mercedes van with the right side steering wheel and manual shifter in the middle.  Matt and I were pilot and co-pilot.  Everybody else mostly slept.  We returned it to the kind man at Avis in perfectly fine condition at the Dublin airport.

So we did, so.

More images on their way once the master photoshopper returns to the studio.

Red Rocket or, The Irish Rover

Oh, heeeeeeeeyyyy.  We’re in Europe.  It’s our first non-work trip in three years, and we’re living it up.   Staying here.  Eating here and here and here.  We’re a troupe of friends drinking all the wine left uncorked.  It’s the last night of our France trip and we’re off to Ireland tomorrow; Dublin for a couple of days, and then to Galway for the wedding of our friends JP and Aisling.

In the meantime, Matt will be peeping at strangers kissing on the Metro and taking  the kind of photograph that only shows up on desks of characters in independent films.

Annika is an Edina High grad who moved out to LA because she’s chill like that.  Tim, we assume, also graduated from a high school, though we do not know which, because Matt forgot to ask.  They probably both went to college and worked for a while and stuff.

So we’re missing some pieces to this story.  So I’ll make them up.  In my version, Tim is a yachting enthusiast and Annika is an international media mogul.  They both have degrees from Yale and Columbia.  And they eat only orange foods.

Anyway, these lovebirds will be back here at the end of the summer to do their wedding things in the Minneapple.  We think they made a great choice.