Finally finished!!

After two years, we finally have everything on the outside of the house finished. I will put in a bunch of pictures here so you can see the final product:

The plants are small and need a lot of growth but they are low maintenance and will grow quickly I am sure.

As a reminder, this is where we started (seems so long ago!):

Our Winning Special Olympic Teams

Congratulations to our Waupaca Special Olympic Basketball teams! Our A Team (on top) brought home a silver medal and our B Team (on bottom) brought home the bronze from the Wisconsin state tournament last weekend. As unorganized and underfinded that our program can be, this was a great moment for us. Thanks also goes to our coaches: Aaron, Joel, Clark, Carrie and Tom for all their hard work and dedication. It paid off in medals this weekend!

Home in snowy Wisconsin

After a 5 days of beautiful weather in Texas, we got to come home to this:

About where we left it but a new layer of ice on top of everything. Hopefully this new year will be less snowy than the past month has been. Maybe Mother Nature will take pity on us.

Here are some images of our time in Texas:

This is a waterfront area near Phil's home with restaurants, shopping, amusement rides, etc. It sustained quite a bit of damage from Hurricane Ike but they are working hard to rebuild. The tall blue tower in the far right used to be a ferris wheel. Most of the cars were either destroyed or disappeared during the storm but they plan on having it reopened by March of 2009.

Our other big trip down there was to visit Space Center Houston museum, which also includes a tour of the Johnson Space Center. One of the items on display (outside) is this Saturn rocket. This was built to be Apollo 18 but the program was cancelled prior to it's launch. The rocket now resides in Houston for public display. Amazing how large it is. I could not even get it all in one picture.