We are keeping busy!

Not too much down time here in Wisconsin. "Up" movie with the grandkids, Action City for an afternoon, and now to the swimming pool. Painted a tea set from Aunt Gigi for Rachel. Wow! Going to dinner and lunch with old friends the next two days and then...The Trout and I will be visiting "The Milk Man's Wife" and the milkman on Sunday afternoon. Heidi has the greatest blog (see her in my favorite blogs on the right) and we are so looking forward to seeing the dairy farm and the kids. Oh yah...Milk Dud will be there. Right Heidi?

Heading West, way West on Tuesday morning. Montana, here we come. Will be blogging more as we settle in.

This must be Iowa!

We are visting the Trout's brother and wife in Iowa. Is the corn "knee high by the 4th of July?" Oh yah... The corn looks beautiful this year. We're from I-owa, I-owa that's where the tall corn grows! That's what we learned to sing in grade school.

This is the view The Trout grew up with. Beautiful Iowa farm land--black prairie soil--the best! It's good to get back to the roots--at least for a little while.

I also got back to my home town and took a couple of pictures of my childhood home and made a stop for German smoked sausage at the local Meat Market. It's always good to get home again--at least for a little while.

The sign says it all!

P.S. I'll talk to you in Montana if not before!! Schnitzel

A very favorite place!

Instead of packing, like I should be, for our summer trip, I found a picture I have been looking for, for a very long time. This was taken in the Turks and Caicos in 1994. I have always loved this picture because I felt I got a lot of dimensional elements into one snapshot. This is truly how beautiful blue the water is and can't you just hear the surf? One of my favorite places in the world.

The finale...

And, the conclusion to this raspberry madness is......peach melba and ice cream!!!

Oh yum!

My favorite color and berry. No more words are needed, except, they were not home grown. They were bought and the price was right!

A genealogy hit!

Not that often, but every once in a while, I get the genealogy bug. A cousin of mine has done a lot of research, and Marianne has been kind enough to share with me. Sometime back, she enlightened me to a website of a place in Klagenfurt, Austria, that is owned by our ancestors.

Yesterday I went back onto that website and saw that more pictures had been added. They own a pension, or gasthaus in Austria. This home was originally owned by my ancestor, Hans Kleinsasser, who was born in 1689. It is still in the Kleinsasser family.

There was an email address on the website, so in my fractured German spelling, I made myself known and gave pertinent details of our possible relation and I got an email back several hours later telling me that we are related. Can you imagine? This goes back 320 years. He was willing to answer any questions I may have, so have started a list to ask this gentleman, my relative!

Now this town goes onto my "Bucket List." What is so very strange is that back in 1991, I was actually in the town where this man lives. I wish I had known then what I know now.

So, this goes onto my genealogy postings here and hopefully more information will be added soon. Anyone want to make a quick trip to Austria, to meet my relatives and visit cemeteries and churches? I do know that Europe has the tradition of unburying old graves to make way for new generations, or they bury them very, very deep to keep adding family members on top. There is a shortage of land over there and this seems like a positive solution to a centuries old dilemma.