Monday, November 17, 2014

Midwinter in Mid-November


Sorry no poem on Friday – I was frantically trying to get things done before the weekend. In the evening OK Cap and I met at the chocolate shop for hot chocolate while we waited for our table at Café Porta Alba, which I believe means Café White Door in Italian, although the door is clear glass, not white. Soon after we were seated, Luxuli joined us, and eventually Travalon did too. He said he got to drive a red Camaro at work! How cool is that? Because he is so tall, he had to put the seat down almost to the floor in order to fit into it. We had amazing cappuccinos after dinner, even if they were decaf in deference to the late hour, but then everything at Café Porta Alba is good. 

Saturday Travalon and I went to the coffee shop near our house, and they gave us a free hot cocoa they had made by accident, so we called Richard Bonomo, since that’s what he always drinks. He came and joined us for a while, then he left and we took Rodney to the dog park, but it was freezing out. Our furnace was not working right, and our cable and internet were out, so we had to go somewhere to watch the Badgers football game. We went to the Great Dane on the east side… but they had had a kitchen fire and weren’t really open. We went to the East Side Club, but apparently their winter bar has not started up yet, even though winter clearly has. We ended up at the Next Door Brewery to see the excellent game; the Badgers really beat up on Nebraska, and they’re a decent team. We’re sick of seeing the Badgers decimate what Travalon calls “cupcake teams,” but maybe they are the real deal and deserve their ranking in the Big Ten. They didn’t do very well against LSU earlier this year… It was snowing so hard that we just stayed in the rest of the evening and watched movies. How can it be midwinter when it is only mid-November??

Sunday after Mass and brunch, Travalon went to a Badgers basketball game while I hung out with Rich, then we headed home in time to meet the cable guy. He fixed our cable so we could watch the Packers game at home, and our furnace seems to be working again. Travalon really wanted to go to a nearby bar called the Willows, so we went there at halftime and were soon joined by OK Cap. Afterwards we went to Rich’s house for dinner with Kathbert, Cecil Markovitch, and Rich’s next door neighbor. We brought a frozen yogurt pumpkin pie from that coffee shop by our house, and it was really good. But you know me – I like pumpkin anything. I bought a really cute pumpkin at Trader Joe’s the other day, and now I have to decide whether to just cook it and eat it for dinner some night or to save it and make it into a pie for Thanksgiving.

Famous Hat

1 comment:

Travalon said...

The Willows tavern in Westport, less than a mile from our condo is a typical small-town rural WI. bar, with down-to-earth patrons, cheap beer( $1 mugs of Fat Tire on Sundays) and mixed drink specials, good burgers, appetizers and frozen pizza. Country music, oldies, and classic rock usually blasts from the jukebox. It's sort of a blue-collar middle-income crowd of regulars, you will hear lots of hunting and fishing stories here, and the bar dice keeps shaking. My kind of place ! Friendly and comfortable, a good alternative to downtown Madison college bars that are over-crowded with twenty somethings.