Lucky Weekend

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Mine was lovely and relaxing, starting with a ukulele newbies jam on Friday evening just a few blocks from my house. Talk about convenient! Saturday morning the Rosary Ladies got together for coffee (with Rich and Travalon), then we prayed a rosary together, and then OK Cap, Travalon, and I tried a new Mexican restaurant right by our church. Travalon and I went to a winter festival at the East Side Club that was a fundraiser for a local food pantry, and we bought $10 worth of raffle tickets. I put a couple in a prize package that wasn’t very popular, and I won! So we got $40 worth of taxi vouchers, which is a pretty good return on $10 that goes to charity. The package also included two bags, one T-shirt, one tire gauge, four bottle cozies, and a baseball cap all emblazoned with the logo of the taxi company. And the woman sitting next to us at the bar bought me a drink! In the evening we went to a spaghetti dinner at the Catholic church in Monona with a bunch of guys: Cecil Markovitch, Rich, Twins Fan, Trinidad Cap, the Single B-Boy, and Mr. N’Awlins. Boy, did I feel outnumbered, but it is a lot of fun to see those guys joke around. Afterwards we went to the Avenue Bar for ice cream drinks, and Cecil really enjoyed the old R&B music they were playing in the background. We forgot all about the fireworks at the Union Terrace to celebrate Chinese New Year, but a coworker went to see them and she said she never saw any, so we missed nothing.

Yesterday was such a relaxing day. We went out to see the eagles in Prairie du Sac again, and Travalon just got satellite radio in his car so he let me listen to my favorite station (The Fly, playing hip hop from the 90’s and 00’s) on the way there. (To be fair, on the way back, we listened to his choice for music.) I call the 00’s “the ohs,” but on The Fly they call them “the two-thousands,” which is quite a mouthful. Some people call them the Naughty Aughties, and I was in my Dirty Thirties during the Naughty Aughties, so I like that. We saw a couple of eagles sitting in a tree across from the VFW park, and some flying around by the dam, but I hope the bass from The Fly didn’t scare them off! Then we relaxed at home, and I colored in an adult coloring book. They are all the rage lately, and now I can see why – they are so much fun! In the evening Travalon and I went to Imperial Garden for a Chinese New Year dinner. I had pot stickers because they are dumplings that look like money purses, and sea bass, because the word for fish sounds like the word for plenty in Mandarin. Those are traditional New Year’s foods for good luck. Of course I wore red too, but the restaurant does not have the moon cakes that are the lucky New Year’s dessert. They sell them at an Asian grocery store next door, owned by the same guy, but by then it was closed. Oh well. My favorite tradition was that we were supposed to pour each other’s tea to thank each other for sharing the meal. They told us that dates back to when the emperor would pour his servants’ tea to thank them for their service to him. So Saturday we had lots of luck, and yesterday we did all the right things to have a whole year's worth of good luck!

Famous Hat