Rosary Ladies, Rich, and the Rick-Rack Cactus Flowers

 

Today I worked from home and had a lot of meetings. Travalon and I walked on Governor's Island at lunch, and we saw these cute mushrooms.

Then he left to go see Willy Nelson and Bob Dylan at Alpine Valley, and after work I went to Craftsman's Table in Middleton to meet Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, Richard Bonomo, and OK Cap for dinner. It's a straight shot down Highway M for me, so I got there fifteen minutes early and got us a table outside. (Part of the reason I left so early was because a train was coming, and I hopped in the car to catch it at the crossroad, but first someone was coming from the left, then someone was coming from the right, so when I could finally turn onto Westport Road, the train had almost passed.) 

When someone at a nearby table got a sample of green beer, I had to order my own glass.

A Youngblood fruited sour - delicious! I think it might be the same one I had at the Brazilian concert a few weeks ago. It tasted like pineapple. My dinner was delicious too: potato-encrusted walleye and green beans. I did bring half of it home because we ordered a giant Oktoberfest pretzel before dinner, being too hungry to wait. That was also very tasty. Rich ordered a chocolate mousse so we could compare it with his, but this one was thicker, more like a custard. It was so chocolatey. We sat around talking for quite a while, and then I hoped to see a train at the crossing on my way home, but it came a few minutes later, while I was on Night Prayer.

Got another weird DuoLingo saying today.

Also, Travalon drew this picture at work, but not for Jilly Moose's birthday. He just felt like drawing a moose.

The last couple of days I thought there was a wonderful scent around me, like when Travalon and I walked by Stricker Pond last night before going to Jilly Moose's birthday dinner, and today it was really strong in the kitchen. I thought I was having scent hallucinations, which only happened to me once before, right before I had a seizure, so I wondered if the anesthesia had done something strange to my brain. Then the logical part of my brain took over and said, "Check the obvious source - your rick-rack cactus," and sure enough, it has one bloom past its prime, another right in its prime, and a bud. It has gotten very big and is sitting on a bar stool, and the flowers are on the side I can't see easily, so I had to pick it up to find them. Hopefully this doesn't portend something bad, since the last time it bloomed, Dear Leader was somehow elected a few days later. 

Speaking of all that, I was fascinated by the text messages they released purportedly between Charlie Kirk's assassin and his trans lover. It reminded me of that essay by Mark Twain, "The Literary Crimes of James Fennimore Cooper." How could someone in such a desperate state of mind write such long, flowery texts? People who know more than I do also pointed out that he used terminology that only cops use, which seems unusual for a college dropout who had no background in law enforcement. It does seem strange to think someone would write long texts like that; I only do it on the computer, and so I can only harass others with iPhones that way. Writing on the phone itself? Forget it, I'm keeping it as short as possible! And I'm not even running from the cops.

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Jilly Moose is Fifty

 

Today I worked on campus, and Hardingfele and I went for a walk at noon. As usual we complained about the new system, and then I asked her if she remembered a gig we had a couple of months before COVID hit, at a school gym. She didn't remember much about it, but I'd heard the caller thought it went terribly. I looked on this blog and there wasn't much about it, so I looked in my diary Mariah... and there wasn't much about it. We were scheduled to play for two hours and the kids lost interest after one hour, and that was all I said. Was there tension? I don't remember. Then Hardingfele said we did another gig with this caller, but it was one I couldn't go to, a Maypole celebration at the local German restaurant and our first gig during the pandemic. Since I wasn't there, I can't say anything at all about that one. Maybe I misunderstood about the caller being unhappy with us, because if she was, why would she have worked with us again? 

After work Travalon picked me up, and we went to the Nitty Gritty for Jilly Moose's actual birthday. (The festivities keep going on and on, because on Saturday a whole bunch of them are going to a Badger football game.) We met Anna Banana II (who is back in town), Hockey Girl, and OK Cap there, and Jilly Moose of course, in a light-up tiara that said "50." Rich came later, and we ordered a cake for the table but could only eat half of it. The waitress led us in singing "Happy Birthday," but I threw everyone off when I tried to sing harmony at the end. Oops!

Jilly Moose asked me to write a poem for her 50th birthday, so here goes:

Happy birthday, Jilly Moose!
Now you’re the big five-oh!
You’re officially Over the Hill
Where nobody wants to go.
Our youth is all behind us,
But at least we’re not yet old.
At least we have a decade or so
Before we reach that age of gold.
I’ve been in this club a few years now
And I’ll say it’s not too bad.
The years I’ve spent within this decade
Have been the best I’ve ever had.
Now we can see the other side
Of the Hill, and it’s a great view!
So enjoy life on the far side,
And I hope this decade is good for you.

This poem is square, with sixteen lines, so our bass player would approve. It drives her crazy when we play a tune that isn't square, with sixteen lines. Hey! Maybe you could contra dance to this poem!

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Leta Zeta

 

It has not been an exciting two days for me. Yesterday I had asked for a substitute for Adoration, since they said I shouldn't drive for 24 hours, but then they said, "Yeah, you can drive." I worked from home (but remember nothing about it, so here's hoping I didn't royally screw something up), and by the end of the day I was like, "Nah, I'm not making it to Adoration." They prescribed nothing for me post-surgery, no antibiotics and no fancy painkillers, so I've just been alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen, and that only works for so long. (Especially the Tylenol.) I did manage to lead Night Prayer. Monday night I was weirdly hoarse, besides being exhausted, so I skipped Night Prayer. Did they have to intubate me? They didn't say anything about that, but today I looked at my discharge instructions online and noticed something that I hadn't seen on the paper version: they said to sleep sitting up or on my side because if I slept on my back, I could DIE. Travalon says he's pretty sure I slept on my side Monday night, and clearly I didn't die, so it's all good, but yikes!

Today I felt very lightheaded and worked from home. I did get a lot done at work, and it's probably higher quality than whatever I did yesterday. There were two things going on tonight, a Halfway to St. Paddy's Day Hooley and a ukulele strum, but I didn't do either one. Travalon and I did take a very gentle walk on Governor's Island, and I took another walk outside later, but boy is it hot out! Tomorrow should be better (judging by when I had the same surgery eight years ago, but then again I was eight years younger and more resilient), so I fully plan to be on campus. 

I am alarmed by how all the comedians who mock Dear Leader are getting canceled, first my guy Colbert and now Jimmy Kimmel. (As someone said, "Silly Jimmy, you should have just said we should kill all the homeless and then you wouldn't have been fired," like that idiot at FAUX News who somehow still has a job.) Silencing dissenting voices is right from the fascist playbook, and then people who support Dear Leader are all like, "I never see you anymore. Why don't you come over? I have lawn darts." Yes, and you also support this regime. Someday these people will be on the wrong side of history, but it sucks living through it. Now I know how the White Rose people felt. Or as this German guy posted, "Please explain this to me - a Republican shot another Republican, and now all the Republicans want to kill the Democrats?" They were just looking for some excuse anyway. Don't sit here and "other" me and say all my kind are possessed by Satan and should all be in jail and then wonder why I don't want to play lawn darts with you. Get real. I thought their side was the one that supposedly loved free speech and hated cancel culture, but we can see what a lie that was!

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I Survived Surgery

 

I didn't do too much today, partly because I was fasting and partly because I had to scrub myself last night and then again this morning, so it seemed ill-advised to take a hike at Governor's Island, which is so dirty that I always have to wash my feet afterwards. Or maybe it didn't matter, because they still made me scrub myself down AGAIN when I got to the surgical suite. Anyway, the surgery went smoothly, I don't remember anything about it, and now I'm struggling to stay awake. Yes, I did skip the Moldy Jam jam tonight.

I do have big DuoLingo news, as promised yesterday:

Wow! That's a long time I've been doing this app every day! 

I don't have much to say about today, but people are sending me photos. My drumming buddy sent me this cool photo from harvesting wild rice yesterday.

That's in Rhinelander. Seabird sent me a couple of photos of musical instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

I want to play them all! But not, you know, tonight. Think I'm going to crawl into bed without showering, since I've already scrubbed every germ possible off myself in the last 24 hours.

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Jilly Moose's Landmark Birthday Party

 

Sorry for the long silence. Thursday I worked on campus and then had a Union meeting. Travalon picked me up, and then we went to St. Charles Station for their corn meal. The first course was elote, or street corn, then the next was corn chowder, then the biggest pork chop I'd ever seen with corn and mashed potatoes and greens, and then a corn cake for dessert with horchata whipped cream. Travalon just got the street corn and his favorite shrimp and grits, but he helped me eat all the other courses, and we brought most of the pork chop and some of the dessert home.

Friday I worked from home, then Travalon and I went to Breese Stevens Field to see Weird Al Yankovic. It was just as entertaining as you'd imagine, with lots of costume changes and a polka medley of recent hits and even some songs I'd forgotten about, like "Word Crimes." I loved the start with a power point song using business buzzwords, and the encore was a song about Star Wars set to "American Pie," followed by another song about Star Wars (Yoda, specifically) set to "Lola." So much fun!

Yesterday Travalon and I walked on Governor's Island, then we ran to the co-op, and that reminded us that the North Side Festival was going on, so we checked it out. We got gift bags with coffee and hot chocolate (yay!) and big jars of sauerkraut (huh?), and other random stuff like lip balm and, very helpfully, a can of sparkling water. We couldn't find the stand with the amazing lamb kebabs, but we found another one with beef and shrimp kebabs, and we already had a beverage. We bought a little stuffed guinea pig for us and a tie-dyed T-shirt for me. Then we drove to a farm outside of Verona for the Brazilian party, because I'd gotten an email saying the bluegrass band some of them play in would be playing at three. That turned out to be not completely true (or true at all), but they did start playing before 4:30. Not too many people were there at first, and Travalon wondered how they all knew that the email wasn't totally accurate.

We had to head back to Madison for my work picnic, where we sat by ourselves and only my former boss and one faculty member and her husband and very fluffy dog really interacted with us. None of the other support staff ever come, and I feel very awkward there, but my (former) boss begged me to come. For some reason our chair thinks we should name the new fridge arriving for the break room on our floor on Wednesday, since they named the fridge on the Slavic floor after him, so I suggested Nat King Cool, and Travalon suggested Rita Coolfridge. It's really supposed to be a contest for the grad students, but this has inspired us to name our own relatively new fridge Calvin Coolfridge. 

After we felt like we'd put in a sufficient amount of time (around an hour) at the work picnic, Travalon and I headed back to the Brazilian party, where we hung out with the woman from my class mentioned previously on this blog who looks like she could survive three years in the wilderness, and her equally rugged husband. I wasn't far off, because they are wild animal rehabilitators, and she has had a fascinating life sailing on a research yacht north of the Arctic Circle, among other things. I was still full from the work picnic, and Travalon had to wait several hours to eat again because of an antibiotic, so we just watched the Brazilian dancers in a barn and listened to the steel drum band. The other student and I tried to swing on a tire swing when the children at the party tired of it, but we couldn't get it to spin like they did, so my buddy tried something that caused us both to fall off, but in a funny way, not like a dangerous way. We gave up, and besides it was close to the time that the Brazilian drums were going to lead us down to the beautiful, enormous bonfire.

We enjoyed it for a little bit, but it was VERY hot near the bonfire, so Travalon and I went back up the hill to the barn and finally tried some of the food everyone had brought. Then the Brazilian drums came back up the hill and performed right in front of us. My buddy and her husband had to leave because today they were collecting wild rice in Rhinelander, but Travalon and I stayed to hear a few songs by the bar samba band we often listen to... and really, the entire reason we were there, because it was when I asked the guy playing the little instrument that looks like a ukulele about it, he told me about taking the drumming lessons, which seem to come with lots of parties. It was late, so we didn't stay for their whole set, and the party was scheduled to go on to at least midnight, but we're old and decided 10:30 was a reasonable time to leave.

This morning we had to rush from Mass on the far east side of town to the house where Jilly Moose's landmark birthday party was being held in the shady yard. Lots of people were there, including her parents, some Night Prayer regulars, Rich, Kathbert, Cecil Markovitch, R-Van the Terrible, and the Dairyman's Daughter came late because she'd been out of town most of the weekend. The only scheduled event was telling a memory about Jilly Moose, so I said we'd invented a dance called the Extraterrestrial: "Toe! Knee! Togo! Togo! Togo!" Then everyone asked for a demonstration. Rich, Kathbert, and I played a rousing game of horse shoes, and I think I won, but not one of us got the horse shoe around the post. That was after lunch, and our game was interrupted when we sang "Happy Birthday" to the birthday girl and then all had cake. There was leftover ice cream, so I made "affogatos" for Travalon and me by putting ice cream in cups and pouring the canned cold brew coffee over it. Jilly Moose got some fun cards and presents, but we had already given her the present of a Betty Lou Cruise. Alas, they are no more... at least for now. I keep hoping Captain Rob will buy the boats and start them up again.

In the evening, on the way to band practice, we saw this sunset:

Our fearless leader couldn't be there, but the rest of us were there. The bass player hadn't brought her bass, only her fiddle, and she had even sent me an email saying bring my fiddle, but she sent it to my work email so of course I didn't see it. (I don't check that on weekends!) I brought the mandolin, so I played chords, and our bass player played piano some of the time. It was so much fun! The fiddler who hosted us has a three-year-old boy who is adorable, and he happily tooted his "piano horn" alongside us. His mom says he looks forward to our visits all week. Nothing like having a fan club!

I have some exciting DuoLingo news:

And also:

Tomorrow I will hit a really big landmark, so stay tuned for that.

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Another Political Assassination

 

Today I went to Seabird's new office in my building, and one of her officemates had made cookies because tomorrow is another office mate's birthday. Apparently it was his first birthday when the terrorist attack happened - now I feel old. Seabird and I did walk at lunch, but I was sore and had to take the bus for the second half. I can't take ibuprofen before my procedure on Monday; I can take acetaminophen, and I did, but it never does anything. It would have to happen that my back hurts the one week I can't do anything about it, since I rarely take ibuprofen. Wonder what I did to it?

In the afternoon we had our big department meeting with everyone in person for the first time since the pandemic. We've been having hybrid meetings for years, so some faculty were grumbling about having to be in person. (We staff members have been in person since we could be.) One of the grad students told me that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and while I am no fan of the man, I was horrified. Now rumors are flying about the person who did it, but nobody has been caught, so they are just rumors. I find it rather disingenuous that right-wingers are accusing leftists of doing this, after years of saying leftists are gun-hating pacifist wimps. So which is it? I have my own opinions about who would have the most to gain from this, and it isn't the Left, but I will wait to see if they find the killer and learn a motive. All this political violence is terrifying, and from what I've seen the people on the left are horrified, much more so than the people on the right were when that legislator from Minnesota was assassinated along with her husband. It is a bit haunting to hear Charlie Kirk say not too long ago that a few gun deaths are the price we have to pay as a society for our right to own guns - I suppose he never thought he'd be one of those deaths, but violent rhetoric begets violence. Where does this all end? Nowhere good, I'm afraid.

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Photos of Travalon's Ramblings

 

Yesterday I worked on campus and met the Professor Formerly Known as Lute Player for lunch. In the afternoon I went to my first Academic Staff Assembly meeting. It was more high-tech than the University Staff Congress; for example, we had to swipe our ID card to sign in, whereas the other one just had a piece of paper with your district number on it, and if that piece of paper was missing, it was assumed that you had taken it. That's how they took attendance. I was there for two reasons: the chairs of the committee I was on to do a report on ageism in the university gave their presentation of our final report, and I volunteered to be the alternate for my district, since we have a representative but no alternate. The Assembly seems more female and clean-cut than the Congress, and the weird thing is that their executive committee sat at the front, facing us like a row of mean girls in the high school cafeteria. There were also a lot more of them than there were on the Central Committee, of which I was Vice Chair. I'm a bit sore with them because I had been on a protest response team for years as a University Staff representative, so I applied to be an Academic Staff representative, since the position was open... and they didn't choose me. In the evening I had yet another meeting, for our condo board.

Today I worked from home and had two meetings this morning, and in fact someone tried to put yet another meeting on my calendar at the same time as those two. Travalon and I walked on Governor's Island at lunch, and after work I went to Adoration as usual. I led Night Prayer, as I often do on Tuesdays, and today every regular showed up, so we had a baker's dozen of us. 

Here are the things Travalon got at Greek Fest on Saturday. The fish is a fridge magnet.

Our neighbors were just chilling out this morning.

Here are some photos from the boardwalk in DeForest that we walked on this past Sunday. It's right next to the Yahara River.

It's a long boardwalk, and it feels like you're in the jungle.

Travalon got a Hot Wheels car he had as a kid - it's from 1974 and is called Large Charge.

Here are some other photos Travalon sent me. A tree up by the monastery on Highway M is already changing colors, and this was last week!

While I was at Irish Fest, he went on road trips. Here's the Lafayette County Courthouse in Darlington.

This is the waterfall at Governor Dodge State Park.

This is Stewart Lake County Park in Mount Horeb, which I have never been to in all the times I've been to that town.

And this is Junk and Disorderly Antique Shop in Blanchardville.

Travalon went there when he visited Yellowstone Lake State Park.

As you can see, he didn't get bored while I was away fiddling and speaking in Irish.

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