borborygmosity

Kelly's parents rented a condo in the Admiralty House this year...

It was recently renovated and looks more modern than the other condo...

The view of the beach is pretty much identical. Both condos are on the 17th floor. You can even see the old building peaking over the top of the building in between...

Here they are from the beach at night. The new condo is in the building to the left (north), on the right side, second from the top. The old building is to the right (south)...

I took a picture of the pool from the balcony...

Take a look at the last picture again. Notice the palm tree in the top-right, just above the four lounge chairs. Here it is again when we went down to use the barbecue...

And then again a day-or-two later...

We walked miles-and-miles on the beach. We saw ibises...

And jellies...

And sea slugs...

Here's a close-up...

And egrets...

And driftwood...

On our longest walk (about 6.5 miles!), Kelly found this huge hermit crab. The shell it was living in was about a foot long...

Wednesday is Farmers' Market day on Marco Island. Kelly and her mom at a stall...

We watched the sunset every day...

Click the whelk to see more pictures...

We went to the Woodland Wildlife Park Zoo & Safari, The second biggest zoo in Wisconsin! If you ask the tortoise nicely, maybe it will let you see more pictures...

We went down to Florida for most of a week. The first day, it was a hundred degrees warmer than it was back home.

Kelly took way more pictures than I did. Click the sunset to see some of them...

Read more: 2019.03.09 -- FLORIDA TRIP

The ESRI Wisconsin User Group 2018 Annual Conference was held in Green Bay again this year. Apparently, they've held a Conference every year for the last twenty years, but nobody thought to tell me about them. When in Green Bay, there is no place other than Lambeau Field to hold a conference...

Attached to the Stadium is the Atrium. It has the Packers' Pro Shop, a restaurant and bar, stadium tours, offices, and conference space. This isn't my picture, but shows the view from the fourth floor balcony where we were...

The conference rooms are at the same level as the sky-boxes. One was open, so I went in and took a picture. There were lights out on the field Friday morning for the grass...

Yes, I had goofy hat-hair. They had lunch for us both days...

The tables were bare when we were there. Friday was kind of a tailgate meal...

I stayed at a small motel a mile-and-a-half away from and built one year after the stadium. It had a built in music system...

Only channel 2 worked if I jiggled the knob just right. Smooth jazz!

For some reason, Clay Mathews was at the conference, but nobody said a word about it. He looks a lot different in real life...

Thursday night was the vendors' reception. They had a raffle, and I won a table...

I would rather have won one of the handful of gift cards that were raffled off, but I'm sure Kelly likes the table.

We went down to Tennessee to see the eclipse...

I mean, we went down to Tennessee to see my mom. Yeah, that's it. Here's where they will build their new house...

There just happened to be an eclipse while we were there. They had a canopy set up so we didn't have to fry in the sun all day. We watched the eclipse progress on it...

I found a purple passionflower on the property...

And finally, a picture of my wife being goofy...

I went down to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for a couple days of computer training. Here's the Science Hall building at 7am...

We were up on the third floor, in the Geography department. You can look downtown and see the Capitol a mile away from up there...

After class Monday, I walked down to Capitol Square...

That is where we took the State Christmas trees a couple times all those many years ago. I continued walking past the Capitol and found the main DNR building...

A couple miles later, I reached my final destination...

I had written them and asking if I could join them for their Monday class. Their style is a bit different than the one I attend in Ironwood, but it was still fun.

Then, it was an hour-long bus ride back towards the hotel I was staying at. With all the miles of walking, more than I've done in one day in a few years, carrying my duffel bag with my Aikido clothes the whole time, then getting beat up for an hour, I was pretty sore by the time the bus reached my stop. (I had an all-day pass and should have taken the bus after the Capitol, but it was a beautiful day and finally felt like Spring was actually here.) When I got off the bus, I didn't know if I would be able to walk the final half-mile to the hotel. Luckily, I made it and didn't have to sleep on the sidewalk.

While I was away, Kelly started collecting sap to make maple syrup...

She did the setup on Sunday, and was so excited that the sap was flowing that she boiled down the little bit she had that evening into her first syrup...