A baseball player in a blue and yellow uniform catches a fly ball while jumping against a wall, with enthusiastic fans cheering in the background.

We are believers!

Category: Tales from the front lines

  • We spent New Year’s Eve back in time

    In a place out of the way. They don’t make places like this any more. Gilbertson’s general store, established in 1894, located in the kind of crossroads town so vital to Wisconsin’s countryside in the days before the horseless carriage. An unincorporated place called Keyeser (pronounced like “Kaiser”), located 11 miles due north of Sun…

  • Yes, we can read

    and write about it! Great thing about my book club (aside from admitting the likes of me) is members won’t stand for massive tomes. Which probably rules out the Head Groundskeeper’s current read, which totals 758 pages. That would be the Last King of America; the misunderstood reign of George III, by Andrew Roberts. (We’ll review it…

  • The happy little ghosts of Christmas past

    Look, Dave, look! Not a thousand Hallmark Christmas movies can recapture the magic of a child’s Christmas. Maybe Cousin Eddie on Christmas Vacation, our favorite holiday movie (along with It’s a Wonderful Life), whose heart is bigger than his brain. But the Head Groundskeeper hereabouts remembers the magic and wonder of early Christmases. Old guys remember…

  • We’re having a leaky supply chain Christmas!

    We’ll get into the true Christmas spirit probably around 10 p.m. on December 24 — later, if they keep playing those sappy Hallmark movies. In the meantime, we’re playing Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby on the jukebox. (“Another thing: a ring!”) Despite our express orders, the indentured servants have put up the Christmas tree — and…

  • Uncle Greg

    Really, 50 years? Older we get, more time we spend in the past, it seems. Opened our favorite Madison WI daily newspaper to find a remembrance of a significant development in the history of Wisconsin’s dairyland. Our uncle, Greg Blaska, led the way to transform a two-year failed experiment in 1967-68 — a food exposition…

  • Riding two wheels back into history

    In our own back yard Fatigued from Saving America, on the seventh day, the Head Groundskeeper rested. What do you expect? It was the last Sunday in September; how many more days remain with temps in the upper 70s under bright hazy skies? Blaska fired up the HD Softail Slim and headed out for parts…