A Day in My Life

We just returned from the very sunny city of St. Louis, Missouri. If you have never been there before, I would recommend that you make it a point to visit the city at some point. While it is smaller than the Twin Cities, for what it lacks in size, it makes up in culture. We made this the second trip to the city in less than a year in order to visit Bethany’s sister Erika and her husband Eric and their new little baby, Liv. If you remember, I posted when Liv was born about seven weeks ago. As you could very well imagine, we were making this trip with the primary goal of meeting and spending some time with our newest little niece.

I took last Thursday and Friday off of work so that we could make the most of our trip. We left shortly after Bethany got home from work on Thursday morning and headed out on our nine hour trip. As she had worked all night, Bethany did a lot of sleeping on the trip. Unfortunately for the both of us, I wasn’t paying very much attention to where we were going and I ended up missing an exit. Next thing you know, we’re taking a big detour through Des Moines. Whoops. It didn’t really take that much longer, and we got to see some nice sights in Iowa. We got down to St. Louis around 6:00 that night and proceeded to check into our hotel.

We quickly settled in and headed the 2.3 miles over to Erika and Eric’s house. That night, we just laid low around their house. Eric grilled some bison burgers and Erika whipped up a salad. I hadn’t had bison burgers before and I have to say I rather enjoyed them. After talking for a while and holding the baby, we took off for the night.

On Friday, we stopped by Einstein Bros on the way to their house for some bagels. Eric had to work that day so Bethany and I hung out with Erika and Liv that morning. We took turns passing Liv around between the three of us. She really is a very good baby. She is very content, doesn’t do a lot of crying, and does a lot of sleeping. That afternoon, we did a bit of baby sitting so that Erika could get out of the house and hit up the gym for a bit. When Eric got home from work, we got Liv all situated in her car seat and headed out to the St. Louis Art Museum. I was surprised with the amount and quality of art that is there. I must say I wasn’t expecting to see a wall size Monet there. On the way home from the museum, we stopped off for some dinner at a local resturuant/pub for dinner. Our timing was great since we got a table right away and made it there for the beginning of the Twins game. The food, drink, and game were all very good, I must say. After dinner, we went back to their place to hang out for a while before Bethany and I went back to the hotel.

The next day, we got ready for the day by putting on our Twins shirts. That’s right, the big event of the day for us was going to the Twins game against the Cardinals in Busch Stadium. We knew it was going to get pretty hot that day, so we lathered on the sunscreen since we are both still pretty white. After some breakfast at Eric and Erika’s, the baby sitter came and we took off for the game. I must say, we were not ready for the kind of heat that we would meet that day. Throughout the day, we saw the stadium thermometer top out at 99° as we sat in the direct sun. Eric checked out the heat index and saw that it was 105° shortly into the game so it’s anyone’s guess what it topped out at that day. Throughout the game, we went back for food/water every three innings just to get out of the heat. Also, a pleasant surprise was that my good friend Tim Koch was also in town and at the game. He stopped by for a little while during the game to catch up. What a small world! Unfortunately for us, the Twins weren’t able to pull out a win that day. We blame our loss on Mauer not playing that day, not on Pujols hitting two home runs.

After the game, we went back to their house to relieve the sitter and to cool off and just relax for a while. Eric and I made a quick trip to the storage locker to swap out a chair that afternoon and to pick up a salad for that night. For dinner, Bethany made baked lemon pasta from The Pioneer Woman, some garlic bread, and the salad. It was great. I thought it was even better than the first time she made it. That’s really saying a lot since it was fantastic the first time! After dinner, the ladies went and picked up some cupcakes at the Cupcakery. Those things are amazing! I had the Italian Cream cupcake that had coconut and cream cheese frosting. Boy was that thing great! That brought us to the end of the day and we headed to bed.

Sunday morning brought checkout at our wonderful hotel. After a quick checkout, we stopped for breakfast at a nice breakfast/lunch restaurant before we headed out of town. I had my usual French toast – you really can’t go wrong with French toast. After breakfast, we took a couple pictures with Liv and said goodbye to Eric and Erika. On our long drive, we tried to listen to the Twins game on any AM station that we could pick up. Thankfully, the Twins were able to win the series and improve their inter-league record. We made it home around 8:00 that night, unpacked, went for a quick walk, and went to bed. What a great weekend!

Be sure to check out the rest of the pictures from our trip here.

As you have probably figured out by now, I have my blog hosted on my own domain, BGerdin.com. I’ve had this domain since, oh, the summer after my Sophomore year at Bethel. I distinctly remember sitting down in the blistering summer heat at what is the ITS Helpdesk with nothing to do, causing trouble with Mr. Bleess. I remember that he had recently acquired his domain of bleaus.net (be sure to check it out, it’s pretty sweet!) and I was really interested in having one of my own. It didn’t take long before I had decided on and purchased my very own domain. At the time, it made way more sense for Austin to have a domain because he was, at that time, a computer science major. Me, being the finance major that I was, really had nothing to do with and shouldn’t have even been thinking of having my own website. But alas, here I was with my very own domain.

I thought this was pretty cool, however, I had no idea what I was going to do with it or even how to begin working on it. Thankfully, I was surrounded with all the computer people that I would need to start my site and get it up and running. Also thankfully, Bethel provided all of their students with a copy of Dreamweaver on their servers. This handy piece of software became the life vest for me out in the ocean known as the internet. I started out with a blog and it slowly grew to include regular html pages that I painstakingly learned how to code. This was quite a task for me being that I had never coded anything in my life. I asked both my coworkers and W3 Schools a lot of questions as I went along. Over time I moved my blog back and forth a couple of times from being hosted on Blogger’s servers to being hosted on my domain. Finally, I think finally that is, I moved my blog back to my server and started using Wordpress to author my blog. I have never had any second thoughts since that move.

A couple years ago, equipped with my vast knowledge of website creation, I decided that I could help my dad create a website for Gerdin Auto. As you probably could guess, my knowledge is no where near vast when it comes to programing. You could probably figure that out pretty quickly by simply looking at GerdinAuto.com. Looking at that site now, it looks like a bad site from the late ’90’s. Bad, I know. But hey, I was having fun. I had made a website from scratch for my dad’s business. Pretty cool I thought. But, let’s be honest now, I’m not really sure that I want to be associated with the site any more. It is pretty lame. So, within the last six or so months, I decided it needed an extreme face lift. But how, and where would I even start on it? Those were two very good questions.

I just started to play around with what was currently there. I became frustrated with that pretty quickly because I knew that it was just awful. I hit a road block and didn’t really know where to go from there. So what I did was look around for websites that I liked and take some ideas from them for the new site. Since all of the sites that I looked at were in simple html, it was rather easy to look at their code with the simple “View Page Code” in Firefox and figure out what was going on. After searching for a while, I found a great site and started to completely redo the shops site using their code as a guide. Along the way, I have created a Wordpress page that will be incorporated into the site and have also been doing some work in flash to add some special enhancements to the page. Everyone that I have shown it to so far has been blown away with how much better it looks from what is currently up there. Really, it’s not very hard to get that reaction coming from the current page.

So that’s really been taking up a lot of my time recently. I’ve been learning some flash, fumbling around with php, and doing a lot of trial and error with good ‘ol html and css. After I get some more of the content ironed out, I think it’s going to be ready for world to see. But as of now, it’s still in beta. I’m really starting to be excited with how it is turning out. I don’t want to link to it here on my site, so if you want to see the work in progress, let me know and I’ll send you the link to the testing pages. If you check it out, you’ll have to send me some feedback so I can make it even better than it currently is.

Keep fumbling around with your web skills, you never know what will come out on the other side!

For this first weekend in June, we stayed home. You got that right, for the first weekend in three, we didn’t go anywhere. It is so nice just to be able to stay home and not worry about traveling. The cool and rainy weather also allowed us to do some nice relaxing as well.

My Saturday morning start off at a much earlier time than I usually see on Saturday’s with an 8:00 Bible study with some guys from church. All I can say is that it was a good thing we meet Caribou at that time of the morning. This was our summer kick-off study so I can expect many more of these early Saturday mornings this summer.

Immediately after Bible study, Marc and I scooted over to my place and started to work on replacing his passenger outside car door handle. His door handle had broken off quite a while ago which made it very difficult for his wife to get into the car. Now that the drivers lock was also broken, replacing this handle was a necessity. He had ordered and received the part a couple weeks ago so we were able to dive right in to replacing it. We had the door panel off in a matter of minutes and started to survey the wreckage.

After we figured out what all needed to come apart in order to have it replaced, a couple trips for a small screw and a long magnet, some scrapes on my arms and hands, and some good ‘ol fashioned teamwork, we had that thing back together, good as new. Well, I suppose it wasn’t exactly good as new as the new handle is a different color than the rest of the car. But lets be honest, I would much rather have a working handle that clashes than one that matches and rips up my hand.

All-in-all, I think it looks pretty good. The whole process, including the couple of trips, only took us a little over two hours. Not too bad considering neither of us had ever replaced a door handle before.

That evening, Bethany and I had our good friends the Bleess’ over for dinner. Bethany had found a new Indian recipe that she experimented with for dinner that night. The process of making the dinner was more fun for her since she was able to use her new rice cooker. Since we both have a Scandinavian palate, she was worried that there would be a little too much spice for us. However, it came out great! The way she talked about the recipe, we were kind of worried to try it, but we were all very pleased with how it tasted! After dinner, we played some guys vs. girls Trivial Pursuit and had some ice cream with a little chocolate and caramel toppings. There’s nothing like a fun evening with good friends!

And thus ended Saturday. I’m not going to post about Sunday until a little later because I still need to take the pictures from the day off of my camera. Stay tuned for more.

This was the second weekend in a row that we left the house and went out of town. This weekend, the destination was Duluth. More specifically, our destination ultimately was our friends Kari and Per’s wedding. Originally, we were only going to stay up there for one night, but I found a great deal on a hotel for a buy one night and get one free with one free breakfast deal. That was so good there was no way we could pass that one up. So I left work a little early on Friday so that we could get a jump on the weekend travel. Once we made it past Forest Lake on 35, it was smooth sailing. We arrived in the city and checked into the hotel right around 8:00. We threw our stuff in our room and went out to grab something to eat. A couple Jimmy Johns sandwiches later, we were back at the hotel, using a free drink ticket the hotel gave us and hitting up the hot tub. Even though the tub wasn’t very hot, it still felt good. Back in the room, we discovered that we had HG TV. Since we don’t have cable at home, we were hooked! Once you start watching that channel, you can’t stop. There were many times throughout the weekend where we would say “this is the last show,” and then we would proceed to watch another two shows.

On Saturday, we woke up and went to get our breakfast in the rotating dining room at the top of our hotel. This was a pretty fun experience. I wish I would have brought my sunglasses to breakfast though. The sun was really bright reflecting off of the buildings and the lake. After breakfast and a couple HG shows, we made our way up to Enger tower.

If you’ve never been there, Enger Tower in on the top of a hill overlooking the city and the lake. It is a great location just to relax and enjoy the city. Not only is it a great tower to look out from, there are also some great gardens up there.

Across from the parking lot for the tower, there are more gardens and a great lookout place. They have some benches and a nice gazebo up on the hill so we took a load off and enjoyed the view of the city. We were really able to soak in the whole city from up there.

After resting on the bench, we packed it up and drove down to Canal Park. We had been there together before so we just decided to walk around and soak up the sun. The weather was pretty nice that day, a little breezy though, but since the town in right on a huge body of water, that is to be expected. We walked to the end of the pier and we were able to watch a boat drive though and the bridge lift for it. It was only a small, personal boat rather than a huge ocean liner, but that was OK.

That brought us to mid-afternoon so we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. We arrived at the church about ten minutes for it started so we ended up pretty close to the back of the church. Even though we weren’t very close to the front, we did have a good view of side of Sven Sundgaard’s face. Yep, he was sitting right in front of us. We expected to see him there as we knew he was a cousin of the brides. The wedding lasted right about 44 minutes. We filled out to congratulate the happy new married couple and waited to blow bubbles as they made their way to the limo. We jumped in the car and made our way over to the reception site.

The bride is a friend of Bethany’s from work which meant that I didn’t know anyone there. We ended up at a table with a couple other nurses and a few engineer friends of couple’s from college. They were all a bunch of fun people so we had a good time talking with them all. I had the walleye and Bethany had the chicken for dinner. That was the third time that I had walleye that week and each fish got progressively better. That was a big relief after I had the first fish of the week. We stayed at the reception talking with people until around 9:30 that evening. After getting some pictures with the happy couple, we headed back to the hotel.

Sunday was pretty restful as we didn’t end up checking out until about 11:30 that morning. We stop for some brunch at Perkin’s were I was able to get my French toast. After that glorious toast and a few cups of coffee, we got back in the car and made the couple hour trip back home. Since it was still nice outside when we got back home, we decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. All in all, it was a pretty great weekend. Be sure to check out the rest of our pictures from the weekend.

For Memorial Day weekend, Bethany and I made the long trek up to South Dakota to visit her parents. We actually hadn’t made it up there since last August. I took Thursday and Friday off of work so that we could make it an even longer weekend. We left Thursday morning when Bethany got off of work after working for twelve hours. Needless to say, she slept for most of the ride. We made pretty good time on the eight hour drive by making it in only six and a half hours and we arrived mid-afternoon. We just bummed around the house for the rest of the day. It’s amazing how much a long drive can take it out of you.

Bethany has a dog at her parents house whose name is Sam. Sam, you should know, is a farm dog of farm dogs. He loves running around the farm, rolling around in mud, and eating whatever he happens to find. Because he is such a farm loving dog, he gets pretty dirty really fast. Bethany said that the last time she gave him a bath was when she was in high school. On Friday, Bethany decided that Sam needed to have a bath after all of these years. Let’s face it, he smelled. So she broke out the dog shampoo that was left from eight years ago and went to town on him while I just sat back and relaxed in the sun. Sam was such a sport. While I can’t say he really enjoyed the bath, he did put up with it without much of a struggle. After getting hosed off and shaking a bit, he did what any good farm dog would do, he walked right over to the driveway and rolled around in the dirt for a couple minutes. It was pretty much a taunt saying that no matter how clean you make me, you can’t change me.

Saturday we woke up a little earlier than we did the previous day, which really isn’t saying much, to head over to Aberdeen for some horse races. Aberdeen is the closest city to Eureka at about 70 miles away. We arrived at the track right about 1:00 on what was really a beautiful day. To our amazement, the tickets to get in were free and the program was only $3 so we decided to splurge for one. While we’re not gamblers, we did pick out a horse to root for each race. The first race started at 1:30 so we had plenty of time to scoop out the horses and have ours picked for the first race. What we didn’t realize after the first race was that it took 30 minutes before the next race would start. Thankfully, there were good concessions at the track for during the breaks. It was quite a fun day. What I didn’t realize though, was sitting in the same position all day puts the sun on the same side of me for the same amount of time. Unfortunately, this meant that the sun beat on me all day and gave me a nice sunburn on the left side of my neck and part of my face. Not a whole lot of fun let me tell you. Thankfully, the burn is about gone now and it doesn’t sting too much anymore.

We went to Bethany’s home church on Sunday morning at 9:00 which meant the earliest morning of the three. After church, we went back to the house and started to pack up our stuff. Along with all of our things, we also packed up a whole bunch of food. It’s hard to say no to a whole bunch of meat from a cattle farmer! That is some of the best meat you will ever have, hands down. After lunch, we loaded up the car and started the long trek back to Oakdale.

Just so you have an idea of what a good looking place South Dakota can be, here is a picture to mull over until you get your chance to visit. Be sure to check out all of my pictures from the weekend posted on my pictures page.

For those of you who were at Bethany and my wedding, you may have noticed that at that time, Bethany’s sister Rachel was currently pregnant. What you didn’t know, and frankly, neither did we at that time, was that Bethany’s other sister was also pregnant at the time. She ended up telling everyone that she was pregnant the very next day after our gift opening. Talk about adding more happiness onto excitement! She proceeded to tell us that she was due on May 15th, this coming Friday.

Well, Bethany and I were sitting at home last night just about ready to start heading to bed when the phone rang. She looked and me and said, “I bet you it is Erika and she had the baby.” I’m not kidding, she said that! She answered the phone with a “Hello Erika” and we knew there was going to be some good news. She told us that at 6:05, May 11, little Liv Isabel Klawiter was born!

Isn’t she so cute? Erika said that when she starts to cry, she has a little pouty lower lip. If you’re interested in the baby stats, she was 8 lbs 9 oz, 21 inches long. We are planning on heading down to St. Louis to visit everyone this coming June. Now we have one more reason to make it a high priority to get down there this summer. Before I was married, there were no little ones in my family. Now I am an uncle to two nieces and four nephews. Wow, what a change! I do have to say that all those little guys are a lot of fun and they have a lot of energy! Have you ever tried to keep up with a five year-old, you can’t do it. Now there is going to be one more little kid to try to keep up with, and I can’t wait to try.

Since owning my house, I have only had to make one improvement to the house which was replacing the garage door opener. My old one went out one morning before work – not a convenient time to say the least. Thankfully, one of the guys that works for my dad also works on garage doors on the side. He was able to come out rather quickly and replaced it with a used unit. Since I have already been here for two and a half years, I thought I was doing pretty well. That record was broken last weekend.

We had Bethany’s sister Rachel, her husband Paul, and their new baby Abram staying with us for a few days last week. I had noticed that the water heater had a small leak a few weeks ago, but I didn’t think that it was anything to be really worried about. I knew that we would have to start thinking about having it replaced fairly soon, but since it was only a small drip, we had some time. While they were staying with us, I mentioned to Paul that it had started to leak ever so slightly a little while ago and asked his opinion on it. He thought we should go take a look at it that night. It is a good thing we did! That thing had really started to leak. Now instead of a small drip, we had Niagara Falls on our hands! Well, not quite that bad, but it had grown significantly worse. He told me that it would have to be replaced, and soon. I gave a call to my friend Marc hoping he may know a plumber as I had never had to call one before. He pointed me towards Paul the Plumber. I left him a message that night asking if he would be available in the next day or two to replace our water heater. Paul called me the next morning and we set up a time for first thing Saturday morning.

Saturday rolled along and Paul showed up around 8:30 and jumped right to work. He had brought out a new water heater that he compared as being the Buick of water heaters. Since I’m not really a GM fan, I was a little skeptical right off the bat. He assured me that it was a step above anything that you would find at Menards, so he dove right in. He had the old one ripped out in no time at all. While doing the work, he found that the valve that controlled the water flow from the main wasn’t working properly so he put in a new value that would actually do what it was supposed to do. He also had to adjust the pipe length because the new heater was slightly taller than the old one. After some quick pipe cutting and soldering, it was ready to be installed. This also took him no time at all. When it was all said and done, he was here for about two hours. I was extremely grateful to Paul for coming on what is normally his day off. He was very pleasant and very knowledgeable. I now have no doubt who I’ll be calling for all my future plumbing needs.

I didn’t think to take a picture of what the old heater looked like. That would really have made for an interesting pic. However, I do have a picture of what our new “Buick” water heater looks like.