Spring Means...

...new jobs!

Last month Trevor started his new job as photo editor for the Modern Luxury publishing company, which publishes, most notably around town, Chicago Social (or CS as it's know to the cool kids) magazine. Trevor's working on four of the magazines: Manhattan, Washington D.C., Miami, and Hawaii, in addition to some of the special "brides" books each of those cities do each year. As soon as he knew which books he was working on I said, "so you'll get to travel to these wonderful cities, right? Right?!" And he said, "No. All of my work can be done through the Internet." And I said, "booooooooo."

But, this is very exciting. As he put it, he's worked in studio photography, fine photography, and now editorial photography. It's a great move for him and we're really excited about it. Plus, he gets a full hour for lunch! And the fact that we're so excited about that says maybe a little too much.

...a mini-vacation, courtesy of Greg and Paula Bork!

For Christmas, 2011, Greg and Paula got us a ridiculously wonderful gift of a weekend away at the American Club in Kohler, WI. We finally used it this month and went away the weekend after Trevor's birthday (April 12, in case you don't already have it on your calendars). When I made the reservation I told them that it was his birthday, so there was champagne waiting for us in the room when we checked in, and everywhere we went people wished him a happy birthday. He was both embarrassed and pleased.

We didn't do much on Friday night except check in and eat some dinner.

Friday night we ate dinner at the Horse & Plow

The hallway to our room

On Saturday we had a lovely breakfast in the Wisconsin Room

 
and then drove to Sheboygan to check out the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for a dose of culture.

I didn't see the sign about not taking pictures: the security guard made me delete all of them. I only pretended to delete this one.

Trevor snuck this one to avenge my honor. Silly security guard.

And he couldn't resist taking this one. Another T. Power

After the arts center we popped over to beach and pier in Sheboygan to enjoy a bit of the lake.

The birthday boy

We headed back to the American Club to get ready for our spa day, which included amazingly soft robes, a whirlpool, all the almonds and yogurt-covered raisins, lemon water, and tea we could consume, and a couples massage. Oooh, yeah, baby. That's luxury.

There were no pictures taken.

That evening we had a nice dinner and then drinks at the hotel's library. Fantastic.

On Sunday morning before heading out we visited the Kohler Design Center to check out the stunning kitchen and bathroom designs and, of course, the wall of toilets.

...the end of the semester!

This semester my students have been up to some cool things, so I thought I'd share some with you before the semester ends.

My creative writing students got to hang out in MCC's Black Box Theatre while they worked on their 10-minute plays

Here are two little videos from the day my learning community students watched our ceramics instructor firing raku ceramics. They're doing their own projects this week (and writing about them), so they got to see the process first.

This is what the pieces started as:

And this is what they looked like when they were fired:

Cool, huh?

So, that's our spring update. Two more weeks of classes and finals week. And then. Nothingness. For two whole weeks before summer school. Nothingness. Fantastic.