July 2022

Parker Van Buren, a 2020 Middleton High School graduate and a rising sophomore outside hitter on the Loyola University Chicago men's volleyball team, is currently playing for the U.S. men's volleyball team at the NORCECA Pan American Cup Final Six in Tepic, Mexico. 

The Pan American Cup Final Six is a route for teams to qualify for the 2023 NORCECA Continental Championship, the 2023 Pan American Games of Santiago, Chile and the 2023 Central American and Caribbean Games.
Also competing at the Pan American Cup Final Six are teams from Canada, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

TOWN OF MIDDLETON–Why did the golfer cross the street with his motorized cart?

For some, it will be to get to their next drink while golfing at the new Pioneer Pointe Golf Course.

The 13-hole course that replaced Tumble Down Trails has been open about six weeks according to Jeff Haen, who developed the Pioneer Pointe residential subdivision which surrounds the new course.

The course has six public street crossings, and when Matthew Stebbins applied for a liquor license for the entire golf course property, he ran smack into the state law that prohibits an open alcohol container in a motorized vehicle on public streets.

“That’s the sticking point. There’s no way around it,” Town Attorney Eileen Brownlee said the Town Board on July 5.

Stebbins, of Four Putt, LLC, the liquor license applicant, knew he had a tough road ahead but needed to be able to serve alcohol to golfers just like his competitors at other courses.

Stebbins offered to:

WISCONSIN–Cue the “Never Ending Story” theme song. The saga of the Cardinal-Hickory Creek (CHC) power transmission line has yet another chapter in it. 

The latest entry is a ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that marks another victory for the line’s supporters and the Public Service Commission (PSC) that approved construction of the project, which will link wind and fossil fuel-generated power in Iowa to consumers in Wisconsin. 

In essence, critics of line, chief among them the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, had alleged that PSC commissioner Michael Huebsch had a conflict of interest when he approved the line, but the state’s highest court found no solid evidence that the allegations were true. In fact, the majority of justices said such claims were meritless and borderline frivolous. They also disagreed with procedural issues raised by the circuit court, but supreme court justices themselves could not agree on some of the procedural questions, either.

It was so hot in Raleigh, North Carolina last week that it seemed like you could hear the sun. It was like a movie in which the sun was a character, and I was talking about it, only to pause mid-sentence and gasp: “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?!” We were visiting my little sister, who recently gave birth to her first child.

Cassie Geiger is six years younger than me, and in my mind, she is a sarcastic, independent, generous, Korean Peter Pan. One of my earliest memories is waiting for her at the airport with my parents, when I was six. It was as if she was being carried to us by a massive metal stork, in which passengers could still smoke cigarettes and move around the cabin, in those days. Today, I don’t only think of her as a baby, of course, but I do think of her always as my little sister, as a kid who tagged along, and each time I think of her, I must manually change her to an adult in my mind.