My Week that Was - January 4

Post-game party at Pop Tarts Bowl. dwm screen shot 12/28/24

The last two weeks of December and first week of January are filled with football games, college and professional.

 

The NFL wraps up the regular season this   weekend, then start their play-offs the following weekend.

 

Starting in 2024, twelve college teams were picked for championship tournament. Another 72 schools continued playing, facing off in 36 bowl games. 

Last Saturday, one of those bowl games, the Pop Tarts Bowl, featured two ranked teams who missed out on the play-offs, Iowa State and Miami University (Florida). 

It was an exciting game, with Iowa State winning in the final minute. The thing you won't forget, is the celebration. The bowl has three Pop Tart mascots frolicking during the game, when it's over, the captain of the winning team decides which life-sized Pop Tart they'll eat as part of the celebration. (Not really, no mascots were injured.)

The cinnamon roll Pop Tart was selected, that's it on top of the giant toaster. It was lowered in then moments later slid out of a slot with enough ooey-goodness to feed a football team. 

The Packers had something else on the line in their game against the Minnesota Vikings. Despite taking an early lead, 3 - 0, the Vikings had the upper-hand most of the game until the Packers fought back in the last quarter. The Pack fought to get within 2, 25 - 27. The Packer defense had a final chance to stop Minnesota but the Vikings picked up a first-down and ran out the clock. Green Bay finishes tomorrow against the Bears at Lambeau Field, a week later they will play in the Wildcard Round of the post-season.

Monday I worked on the database, taking actions from the old system and entering them as tasks in the new one. Unfortunately the conversion didn't actually convert actions into tasks. Entering the data increased my familiarity with Bloomerang and thanks to customer support, I learned how to develop a report to identify more donors with whom to stay in contact.

2025 started with a workout, a full one, since I was on holiday. Unfortunately, the year started with sad news that a suspected terrorist drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. 15 people were killed and dozens injured by the driver who got out of his truck firing his gun at police who successfully returned fire. The Sugar Bowl is the least of anyone's concern when things like this happen, it was postponed to Thursday.

We took down the rest of the Christmas decorations on New Year's, then organized the boxes holding them. It's fun to have the tree, garland, and ornaments around the house, but it's also nice to put them away and get back to normal.

The Domes. 1/2/2025 dwm photo

 It was my wife's birthday Thursday. Since it's the day after New Year's, I've traditionally taken that day off so we can do something together. We spent part of the day in Milwaukee, after breakfast at the Pine Cone in Johnson Creek, then visited the Mitchell Park Domes for the first time in 12 years. 

 After the Domes (look for a blog about them in a few days), we stopped at Aggie's Bakery in West Allis. We bought a small cake for the birthday (a tradition my baker wife enjoys) and donuts for Friday's breakfast.

It was a bit strange going back to work Friday. Tuesday felt like like last week, which it kind of was, since there were two days between time in the office. I wasn't the only one, most people working Friday said that one day off in the middle of the week felt different.

 

After three weeks trying to get our new online giving page up and running, I finally reached the right person. After talking through the process, the situation was resolved and the new system worked! The rest of the day I worked on letters we'll need later this month and began the process of scheduling seven donor events.

The holidays are over, next week should be closer to normal. I hope your year is off to a good start, thanks for reading!