Ladewig.com

Spring may have started already according to the calendar, but it officially arrived at our house today. After I cam home from work, I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. It seems strange to be pushing the lawn mower around the yard in March (especially for a Wisconsin native like me), but that’s not unusual down here in St. Louis.

Not all of the lawn needed to be cut, but in my backyard I have several areas where the grass grows much faster and thicker than the rest of the lawn. Of course, these areas are where we plan on putting a deck, so eventually the grass will have to go, but we’ll enjoy it for now.

Now I need to try and kill off the clover that is growing on our hill and then get started on the raised bed for our garden. And then paint the inside of the garage, and seal the bench on the front porch, and so on and so on. Ah, the joys of owning a home.

Some sad news to report. Kristin’s grandma passed away last week at the age of 93.

This will come as a great shock to many people, but I’m coming clean… I tried Mozilla, and I like it.

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For Kristin’s birthday, we went to the new Melting Pot restaurant in Town and Country with our friends, Jay and Minday. If you’re not familiar with the chain, they are fondue restaurants, great for celebrating birthdays, etc. This is our second location, just opened in February. None of us had been before, so we thought we’d give it a try.

We started with the Traditional Swiss Cheese Fondue (with bread, apples, carrots, celery, and cauliflower) and learned from our server the secret to a cheese fondue is to lightly flour the cheese. Remember that the next time you make fondue at home! The cheese fondue was followed by a salad, and then the entree. Since our booth only had one fondue pot, we all had to agree on a cooking style. We finally settled on Fondue Court Bouillon Style, a seasoned vegetable broth… excellent!). For our entrees, we selected the Shrimp and Sirloin and the Twin Lobster Tails, which come with fresh broccoli, mushroom caps, new potatoes, and various sauces.

We finished up with the Yin and Yang dessert fondue, a mix of dark and white chocolate. For dipping we had cheesecake, brownies, sponge cake, bananas, strawberries, pineapple, and marshmallows. Mmmmm… good!

It is neither inexpensive nor fast, but it makes for a fun and relaxing evening with friends and good food. We’ll definitely go again.

As you can see, I’ve given the site a complete makeover. All of the old site was coded by hand, which discouraged me from making more frequent posts. It simply took too much time to keep everyone updated. To remove that obstacle, I looked into different systems that were designed for use on web logs, and decided to use Movable Type for mine.

I first heard of MT(Movable Type) when Steve moved NowThis over to it. When it comes to this sort of thing, his opinion carries a lot of weight, so knew it had to be good stuff. So far I’m pretty pleased with MT(Movable Type). It took me a while to get the formatting where I wanted it, even while using one of their sample stylesheets, but that was mainly because CSS still throws me once in a while. The site won’t win any awards for creativity, but it’ll do for now.

Now that the site is up, I’ll move most of my old posts into the system. It isn’t a priority, so don’t hold your breath. Kristin has a few other projects waiting for me to start, now that this one is complete.