We're all saddened to hear that Jake's is closing their doors. Jake's has been a little piece of sanity in the Chippewa Valley - good food, nice atmosphere, and live music.   They join a growing legion of local businesses, particularly restaurants and entertainment venues, that are closing since they just can't cope with all of the problems facing small businesses at the moment.

We hope that Jake's will find a new owner and will re-open in some way, preferably as a Northern Wisconsin supper club - a rarity these days, particularly around here.  

Goodbye Jake's - we'll miss youl.

I noted with some dismay when I drove past yesterday that the Parker's Tuscan Grille Restaurant in Menomonie had suddenly become the Parker's Family Restaurant.  Parker's has been one of my favorite places in the area to go get something to eat, so I'm a little frightened by the name change, since at least in this area Family Restaurant is not exactly a synonym for fine dining.  We'll let you know more after we get a chance to try it out in the new incarnation.

Update ---  Apparently nothing to worry about - same menu, same food ---seems to have just been a name change, thank goodness.  We'll be eating there again soon.

This is a current map of the road closed in Wisconsin due to flooding.

Just thought I'd explain why things are being a little slow on the site at the moment.  I'm attending 3 different conferences this week - one as an attendee, one as press, and one as a speaker -- so I'm on the run with my laptop at the moment.  Things will pick up again next week - keep those events and emails about things coming in in the meantime!

The Chippewa Guide Photo Contest has ended, and we're happy to announce the winners -

A couple of the entrants will rake in the prizes since two people won in two different categories.  Our congratulations to the winners  - here the are, and the prizes they will be receiving:

Grand Prize Winner - Claude Schilling of Altoona for his photo Liquid Violets  in the Abstract Category - Claude will win a $50 Gift Certificate from the Menomonie or Eau Claire Chamber of Commerce for this photo.

Claude Schilling also won the Landscape category with his Bloodroot photo in the Landscape Category.  For this photo he will win a 1 Gbyte SD storage card for his camera.

Lissa Marsolek of Menomonie won the People category and tied for first in the Kids category with her photos of her two children, and her son and husband.  Lissa will win two tickets to any show at the Mabel Tainter Theater for these photos, along with a pair of movie tickets and a T-shirt donated by Clear Channel Radio.

Jessica Agustin of Menomonie also tied for first place in the Kids category with her photo "Are You Listening".  She will win two tickets to any show at the Mabel Tainter Theater in Menomonie for this photo.

The Pets category was won by Normal Larrabee Gabriel of Menomonie, for her photo of two horses.  The Prize for this category is two tickets to any show at the Mabel Tainter.

The winning photos are shown below.  

Again, congratulations to all the winners, and our thanks to everyone who entered.  You may view all of the entries by clicking on the camera above.

Our thanks also go to the Mabel Tainter Theater and Clear Channel Radio for their generous donations of prizes for the contest.

The local Downsville political blog Uppity Wisconsin  has been selected as the Wisconsin member of the Democratic Convention State Blogging Corps.  

Uppity Wisconsin will live blog directly from the floor of the Democratic Convention. The members of the state blogging corps were announced this morning by Howard Dean in a web video.

Note - Steve Hanson, publisher of the Chippewa Guide is also the editor of Uppity Wisconsin, and will be a major part of the Uppity Wisconsin reporting team in Denver. 

The Chippewa Guide is in the Leader-Telegram today, with a nice article about what we're doing here.

 Look for the "Best Of The Valley" information mentioned in the article in the next few weeks.  You'll get  a chance to tell us about your favorite businesses, restaurants, and other favorite places in the Chippewa Valley soon.

Well - that's interesting. It looks like YouTube has disappeared off the Internet this morning. At first I thought I was seeing some sort of weird fallout from our server maintenance last night -- but the reason you're not seeing any YouTube videos on the site today is that it appears that YouTube is temporarily dead. Which is --- odd, to say the least. WELL - They're back --- apparently reports are that this was a world-wide outage - at least their DNS stopped working altogether. I don't think this is the same as the failure they had in February caused by Pakistan being a little over-zealous in blocking them.