A week in my hometown

Well, close to my hometown anyway. DeForest, when I was growing up in Madison WI, was a little village. Now it is a town with 2 water towers and more than 10,000 residents.

My week included a number of social and recreational activities:

• Dinner with 5 friends from high school at Paisan’s which, in my opinion, serves the best thin crust pizza in the world. Or, I should say, served the best thin crust pizza in the world – it has been temporarily shut down due to the condition of the building (structural issues?). I am glad I got to dine on its incredible shrimp-and-green-olive pizza. Hopefully it will be back in operation soon. It is a treasure.
• Dinner (pizza from Salvatore’s) with 2 high school friends and their spouses. The mushroom pizza was spectacular, as was the conversation.
• Dinner of homemade tempura by Junko, the wife of my bff Benjie from high school. Junko gets my vote for Most Accomplished in Every Way as she is not only an amazing Japanese chef but is also a very talented artist and photographer. And she has a high tech job, too.
• A meeting of the Steering Committee, organized by Benjie. Don’t worry about what is being steered – it is just an excuse to drink beer.
• Another beer-consumption event, this one at the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Union Terrace, which is maybe the only thing that makes me regret not attending the University of Wisconsin.
• A dinner at Patty and Oren’s house, with Benjie and another couple from high school. More beer, lots of appetizers and a very nice lasagna.
• Golf with high school buddies George and Blum. This was just 9 holes, but was at the Monona Golf Course, which is adjacent to my high school. The course has been completely redone in the nearly 50 years since I last played it so I recognized almost nothing about it. But I played reasonably well, which means that the other two only beat me by about 10 strokes.

I drove by my childhood home and gradeschool, too. Lots of memories here.

You might get the impression that I ate a lot that week. You would be right. But I didn’t put on more than a pound or two because I starved myself between feasts.

I spent some time during the week booking upcoming campgrounds and also arranged to have one of the RV tires replaced. It probably would have been fine to Florida, but my recent experience with an exploding tire convinced me that it is better to replace a tire before it is necessary than to deal with the damage resulting from waiting too long.