Peppa Pig and Ukulele Fail

Sorry that I didn’t blog yesterday. I was planning to put some pictures on the blog, but Travalon and I got sucked into a surreal kids’ show called Peppa Pig that had us laughing helplessly, so we weren’t able to do anything else. Each episode is like five minutes long, but they just kept showing them, and it seemed like each one ended with a statement about how everyone loves X (e.g., “Everyone loves being broken out of concrete!”) and all the animals flat on their backs, convulsing with laughter. Fair enough, that’s about how Travalon and I were too at the end of each episode. Just to add to the delight factor, all the little creatures also have British accents to add to the nuttiness of what they say.

I did forget to mention that the Just Bach concert last Wednesday was technically Bach, but it was not JS. Instead, all the music was by his son Carl Philip Emmanuel. I wasn’t too excited about that prospect, but I did go, and it was actually pretty good. Not as good as old Johann Sebastian, but what really is?

Today I dragged my ukulele to work (not as bad as dragging the mandolin, but still) because there was supposed to be a ukulele jam in the evening. The organizer had sent out a Doodle poll to find out what the best time would be, but I never heard what time was chosen, although it was very clear which time people liked best. I emailed the organizer, and he was all like, what? There’s no jam tonight! There’s one next month. Oops! I had failed to notice that little detail, so I brought my ukulele to work for nothing. And who knows how much I will need to bring the mandolin to work in the future? My band hasn’t been getting many gigs lately, and to our shock the maple syrup festival we always play at doesn’t want us this year. I have been in this band nineteen years, and we have always played at that festival! Was it something one of us said? Our leader doesn’t seem super eager to have practices if we don’t have an upcoming gig, so maybe my days as a semi-professional musician are over. Hey, that leaves me more time to try to learn how to play the sitar.

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Mardi Gras North of the Bayou

I hope my readers all have a very spiritual Lent. Travalon says that he is going to give up buying books for Lent, so in that spirit I will add buying plants to the list of things I give up, like desserts. Yesterday I did sort of acquire some new plants – maybe – because I went to the Horticulture greenhouses and picked up a couple of leaves that had fallen off of pink-tinted plants that I loved, a peperomia and a crassula. We’ll see if they actually grow…Maybe the fact that they had fallen off of their own accord does not bode well for their viability.

Last night Travalon and I went to North of the Bayou for our Mardi Gras dinner. When I asked the hostess what the wait was for a table for two, she said, “Thirty minutes – you came on the busiest day of the year!” As if we wouldn’t have expected that a Cajun place would be busy on Mardi Gras, just like an Irish pub would be busy on St. Patrick’s Day. We ended up sitting at the bar, right in front of a band called Cajun Spice which was all women except for the accordion player. I really enjoyed them. I had gator gumbo for dinner, but I don’t think there was any okra in it, so can it really be called “gumbo”? It was very tasty. For dessert we got these decadent things called king cake stuffed beignets, which were a little like a beignet, not really much like a king cake, full of custard, and covered with powdered sugar and little yellow, green, and purple sprinkles. After two of those, I will not need anything sweet for the next forty days! Our bartender was very friendly and animated, draped in an Abita Beer banner like a cape (“Super Abita Man”), and he gave us beads. The restaurant itself looks like Mardi Gras, with a bright pink exterior and an interior wall painted like tie-dye, plus lots of neon signs. I will post a couple of pictures soon. It was a fantastic sendoff for our Lenten voyage!

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Skunk Cabbage Walk

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Friday evening Travalon and I just hung out with our houseguest, taking her on a couple of walks, and then we actually went to bed at a reasonable hour instead of staying up just because it was the weekend. That meant Saturday morning we woke up fairly early and took Doggo for another good walk, and she played in the snow. I had registered for an all-day garden symposium, but the day was gorgeous, and the first session I went to was not helpful, so I bailed and had Travalon come pick me up, then we went to Sauk and took a long walk with the dog. We didn’t see any eagles, probably because it was such a gorgeous day. In the evening we met a bunch of Slow Food people at Working Draft Brewery, which was a lot of fun. Travalon and I had the chocolate and strawberry sour beer – yum! The food was really good too. Then he and I went to Bierock and tried a peanut butter beer and a s’mores beer and a “white stout” – you can get little tasters there. The bartender was really entertaining, telling us about sailing trips he took to Bimini and the bar there where women staple their bras to the ceiling. He saw the horrified look on my face, and I said, “Bras are way too expensive to staple to a ceiling in a bar!” Then we went to bed at our normal weekday time again.

Sunday I had no problem getting up for church due to getting to bed at a reasonable time. Maybe I’ll keep doing this! The FitBit likes it because it says I get enough sleep. Travalon and I drove separately, then we went to brunch with Rich before he went to the Badger basketball game. I went for a walk in the Arboretum with Kathbert to check out the skunk cabbages. Some were starting to come up, but they aren’t really in full bloom yet. It was an even lovelier day than the one before, very sunny and warm. In the evening Rich had us over for dinner, and Travalon came down in his own car, so he could leave when our talk got too nerdy. We did spend some time researching how plants can create their own heat. Most of the plants that do so are in the arum family, like the skunk cabbage, but most are tropical so they aren’t melting the snow around them. We also talked about how when something comes up in conversation, then we start getting email ads for something related, and are our cell phones listening to us? For example, a friend of ours is living with a Polish lady and speaking in Polish, and now she gets emails in Polish. And how does spam email know I am dog sitting? But suddenly I am getting spam about dogs. Kind of creepy…

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Going to the Greenhouse

Our house guest is back, and yesterday I took her for a long walk as the sun was setting. How fun is it to walk a sunset-colored dog in the light of the sunset? Although for the first part of the “walk,” it was actually a “run.” I am still bringing my phone along with me on these excursions, to get credit for all my steps, but now I have a second device to count my steps. As part of a weight-loss research study, I got a FitBit, and it counts steps that my phone can’t, like when I’m getting into the shower. Right now it says I have over 5000 steps, while my phone only says I have 4400. Also, this morning it told me that I had slept for seven hours and twelve minutes. Good to know!

Our university emails us a newsletter every Tuesday and Thursday, and this week there was a story about the Botany greenhouse where I used to work back when I was in school. My colleague read the story and asked if I wanted to see the greenhouse, so today we went there over lunch. I go there now and then to enjoy how little it has changed in the quarter century since I got paid to water the plants, but my colleague had no idea it existed, and she was amazed by it. There are eight greenhouses with different kinds of plants, like one with cycads and ferns and water plants, one with deciduous plants that is a lot cooler than the others, and my favorite, the cactus house. We saw a student in there watering the cacti, and my colleague said it looked like a fun job. He said it was, and I said I used to do it, and it was the best job I ever had. Lots of exercise and sunshine, even in the middle of February! How does it get any better than that?

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Buying the Election

Last night Travalon and I watched the presidential candidates’ debate, and like a lot of the candidates onstage, I am amazed that a billionaire who was a Republican until about ten minutes ago thinks he can just buy the Democratic nomination. He’s like Trump without the entertainment value, so I’m not sure why anyone is planning to vote for him. All the pundits this morning were amazed at how shocked he seemed when the other candidates attacked him for his misogyny and racism, and they speculated that he has been so surrounded by yes-men that he has no idea there are people who disagree with him. That sounds like a horrible person to lead the country! I would prefer that my leaders have at least a modicum of empathy, probably because they have also struggled, but at the very least that they would have the imagination to picture how life might be if you have to work at three minimum-wage jobs. That is one of my biggest objections to the current occupant of the White House, and it’s not like the real billionaire in the race would be any improvement in that regard. What sort of banana republic do we want to live in? Or have we lost the idea that all people are equal? Are we as a society starting to buy into the idea that some people are more valuable than others and consequently should have more power/less punishment? This is a dangerous road to go down, and I hope we all come to our senses sooner rather than later.

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Can We PLEASE Cancel Daylight Saving Time This Year?

One of the worst days of the year is just around the corner: the day when we start Daylight Saving Time. What evil supervillain thought up this crime against humanity? It’s finally starting to get light in the morning, not when I wake up yet, but at least by the time I leave for work, but in a couple of weeks I will be plunged back into darkness once again when I leave the house. And what do we get out of it? Some daylight at the end of the day? Why do I want it then? I want it in the morning, when I am trying to wake up. If only I lived in the tropics, then the sun would be coming up just about the time I wake up every morning, and I wouldn’t have to rely on my alarm clock to wrest me out of sleep in the cozy darkness. And why do we start Daylight Saving Time so early?? It used to be in April when I was young, and I hated it then, but now that it is mid-March, I hate it with a special passion. Mornings are already so tough – why do we have to make them an hour more difficult? How about we just move everything back an hour during Daylight Savings Time, so that I don’t have to wake up until 7 am? There! Problem solved. But I somehow doubt they would allow me to come into work an hour later for more than half the year. When will this insanity end??? It's like time has no meaning anymore!

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Rich's Atomic Birthday Party

I hope my readers had a good weekend. (I also hope this post makes sense, since I've had a LOT of sugar today!) First are some pictures from earlier last week. This currently empty storefront suddenly has this ornate decoration on it. I don't know what it means.

Also, last Tuesday the moon looked enormous. I tried to take a picture of it. Here are two that kind of turned out.

Friday for Valentine's Day, Travalon and I had a romantic dinner from the Culver's drive-thru. This was because we were going to see Banana Wind, a Jimmy Buffett cover band, at the East Side Club. Here's a short video:

I also stood inside a giant margarita with Travalon and rode a banana. Here's photographic proof:

Yesterday I met Tiffy and we tried to go to lunch at Himal Chuli, but it was too crowded so we went to the Globe. Then I asked what she would like to do next, and to my surprise she said she would like to help me with Rich's birthday cake. (I had been awakened that morning with a terrible headache, but once it subsided, I baked the cakes.) Meanwhile, Hardingfele texted me that Olbrich had its production greenhouses open, but she did this just before they closed. Here are some cool photos she took.

I would like to note that Travalon helped me a lot while I baked the cake by getting stuff down from high shelves. Tiffy and I went to the co-op to find some extra stuff to decorate the cake, and we found pink chocolate candy bars on a ridiculous post-Valentine's Day sale, so we bought some and added them to the frosting (along with Bailey's) that went in the middle to hold the two cakes together. Since the theme of Rich's birthday party was Atomic/Radiation, we decorated the cake with the international Radiation symbol.

Then we went out to Sauk to see eagles, and we saw one fly right past us. We went to a Baroque music concert, and this is a photo of the inside of the harpsichord. Isn't it exquisite?

Rich's birthday party was supposed to be yesterday, but we had to postpone it to today because of the funeral for his old roommate's 15-year-old son. (A very tragic story - he had pneumonia and was getting better when he suddenly had a massive stroke. They don't yet know why.) Anyway, Kathbert took charge of getting the big group present, and also wrapping it.

She put a picture of Rich in front of a nuclear reactor on campus on top of the present.

Did you know Rich is an incredible piano player? Check out this video!

Ha ha, just kidding - that is a family heirloom player piano he recently acquired. We also sang him a song about how he's too young and needs some more birthdays from the songbook Cecil Markovitch gave me for my birthday. Then we had cake. Here it is with the candle we could find:

And here you can see the inside layer of frosting. I was originally going for a retinal-damaging riot of color, but putting food coloring into the pink chocolate made it looked like industrial sludge, so I just went with that.

And then Rich opened his present, and you can see why Kathbert chose the theme: we got him a brand-new microwave! He wasn't too surprised, since we have all been complaining about how his old one took ten minutes to heat up something that would take a normal one two minutes to heat, plus it had lost its handle so opening it was a unique challenge.

I told Rich to wear his "nuclear" shirt and his "nuclear" socks. Someone gave him a supplemental gift of a mug that says: "It's all fun and games until someone loses an i," because the equation on it results in an imaginary number.

Just as we were leaving, Prairie Man came with another Slow Food person, and he gave Rich another shirt (he gave him the shirt pictured above too) that says: "There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary systems, and those that don't." That's my second-favorite shirt after the one that says: "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets." Anyway, Rich said he really enjoyed his birthday party.

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Watching an Out-of-Date Packers Game

Sorry that I haven’t written in so long – I don’t have much to say lately. Yesterday I watched an old Packers game (from October) where they were playing the Cowboys in Dallas, and I tended to fast-forward over the parts of the game where Dallas had the ball. Not the really fast-forward I use for ads, but a slightly faster than normal speed, so for instance I could clearly see a couple of interceptions. The game started a little late on our recording because the previous game had run long, so we only had the game recorded through the third quarter. Why we didn’t record the show after it, or indeed watch it right away, I don’t remember. At that point the Packers had 31 points and the Cowboys had 10, so it seemed like a good bet that they won. A quick internet search told me that the final score was 34-24, so Dallas had quite a run there in the final quarter, while all I missed on the Packers side was a field goal. I really didn’t need to see Dallas come to life like that, so I was perfectly satisfied with what I saw, and deleting it from our DVR freed up a healthy amount of space. Now I only have one game from the past (when they played the Redskins) to watch, and I’ll be caught up with the season. Once again, when I said something to Travalon about how crazy it was for them to run on first down when a penalty had sent them back to 20 yards, he quipped, “Yeah, it might hurt their chances of getting into the playoffs.” A good reminder that there is no need to get worked up about things when we already know the outcome was favorable.

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Had I Gotten a Doctorate...

It can be annoying when the faculty return after having basically the whole month of January off, and they say, "Oh! I have to get used to setting the alarm for 7:30 again!" Here I am thinking, I had to work the whole month of January and set my alarm for 6:00 a.m., but I make half of what you make. But honestly, I would have been a lot worse off if I had actually finished graduate school and gotten a Ph.D. Let's face it, I was not the most attractive candidate and couldn't even get funding, so I had to take out massive loans to go to grad school. A couple of years in I realized I couldn't play the academia game, so I cut my losses and dropped out. If I had stayed in six years or whatever to get that Ph.D., I would have been far deeper in debt, and I probably would not have gotten a tenure-track position. Then I would have ended up in Adjunct Professor Hell, like so many people with Ph.D.s have over the years. They make half my annual salary, and they don't have retirement plans or even benefits in some cases. They have to have lengthy curriculum vitae proving that they have published and taught just to get one-year, non-renewable positions, while I could get another position like my current one with my two-page resume. I may never make a lot of money, but I am so much better off than a lot of Ph.D.s I know. So I should quit griping and just keep setting my alarm for 6:00 a.m., because at least it is very likely that I will still have this job next year.

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Black Light Friday

It is snowing hard today, so Travalon and I just went to Mass nearby and then to the co-op for groceries, and now we are holed up at home. We did have a fun time on Friday and Saturday, so we don't mind having a relaxing Sunday.

I did finish the puzzle, but one piece is missing. See if you can find it.

Friday night Travalon and I met Jilly Moose and OK Cap for dinner at Dubai, then we went to Adult Swim at the Children's Museum. The theme this month was black lights, and I brought a shirt and decorated it there. They had a screen print to make a heart, and then paints of various neon colors to fill it in. Also, a girl who was leaving as we were coming in gave me her light-up headband.

Here are the shirts OK Cap and Jilly Moose made.

Travalon made himself a necklace that glows in black light!

And this is what I looked like in the dark, with the light-up headband and the light-up pin I made (they were out of headbands by the time we got there, so we just made pins), and the necklace I got from someone.

And this is what my shirt looks like in regular light.

That was so much fun! Then Saturday I got up a bit late and forgot about the "rainforest drums" concert at Olbrich Gardens until seeing a reminder on social media, so we rushed over there and caught the second half. I asked if we could pay half price for half the concert, so they charged us the kids' rate of $3 each. For some reason I thought it would be Amazon natives drumming, but it was people from Ghana - well, that's in the rainforest too! And I love those "Satanic" African rhythms. Check it out:

We got free admission to the greenhouse with our concert admission, and they were having a special orchid display. I took some photos:

They also had half-price memberships, so we are now members. Then we drove to Milwaukee to meet Tiffy, and the three of us had lunch at Shorewood Bakery. Travalon went to a bookstore and to the lakefront and to Miller Stadium to check out historical plaques, while Tiffy and I walked to the University campus for Early Music Now's silent auction and a concert of French Baroque music based on the story of the Odyssey. Like last year, I bid on a sailboat ride on Lake Michigan, and like last year, nobody outbid me. Tiffy bid on tickets to the Early Music Festival, but she got outbid. Then Travalon picked us up, and we went to a Chinese restaurant that was shockingly unpopular - nobody else came in the entire time we were there. It is an old, well-known restaurant, so we wondered what was going on until it occurred to Tiffy after we left that maybe people are afraid of the coronavirus from Wuhan. How sad if all the Chinese restaurants go out of business because of the virus! Hopefully people get over their fear soon and go back to eating there.

And I realized that I had never made a video of the little delivery robots rolling around, so here are two for you. The first one was when it came by as I was waiting at the bus stop.

Oh no! It's coming for me!

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Racism and Christianity

I cannot believe I need to say this, but being racist is incompatible with being a Christian. It seems to have something to do with people thinking other people who are not like them are not fully human, so what they do is unholy. I feel like it boils up from the idea that animals are so much less than we are that they don’t have a place in Heaven. Our houseguest went home last night, but while she was with us, the love she showed us was so pure that it was hard to imagine she wouldn’t be there in Heaven. Wherever she ends up, I’d rather be there than with these “pro-life” “Christians” who are so self-righteous. Not that I wish they would go to Hell, but I certainly hope they are in some part of Heaven where I don’t ever have to see them! They can be there with all the other holier-than-thou types who think there are no animals there, and I’ll be in the section with the sinners who knew they weren’t perfect, the animals, and the plants.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed about racists: they never think they are racist, and they think you are nasty for calling them on it. It’s just a descriptor, like if someone said I am short, except I can’t choose to stop being short and they can certainly choose to be racist or not. It’s like they want to be able to go on acting racist without anyone calling them that, because they realize it’s a bad label. It’s more than using epithets, although that is a terrible thing to do. If you use the N word, you are literally saying you think that person is less than human. But it’s also saying that the only culture that is worthwhile and holy is white European culture. This doesn’t even make sense, because the original Christian culture was not European but Mideastern, so if European-style Christianity is okay, then other flavors of Christianity should be acceptable too. I don’t mind saying something is really wrong in a culture, like cannibalism or headhunting, but aesthetics? How can those be judged to be less holy than European ones? And what is “European” culture, anyway? People used to think the Irish were less than human, but now some Irish symbols are unfortunately being used by white supremacists to imply that they are more fully human than other groups. In my mind, you cannot be a follower of Christ if you think that any group of humans is less than you are, so it is extremely perplexing that so many of these people claim to be Christians. When I went to Confession yesterday, the priest said maybe I should stay off of social media so that I don’t see the worst side of people, but it feels like sticking your head in the sand to pretend that people who are sitting next to you in church don’t have this vile side to them. I admit that I feel a little like a Power Puff girl sometimes, calling people out on social media, but aren’t we supposed to be held to a higher standard as Christians? One person said, “It’s just satire!” but traditionally satire is done by the oppressed to make fun of the oppressors. It’s very cruel to punch downward. Society is a delicate thing, held together by the supposition that those in power will be kind to those beneath them, but lately that balance has gone out the window as the most powerful have made no attempts to even pretend they will not take advantage of their positions. I am not sure where we are headed, but how can it be anywhere good?

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Evil Beats

So the implicit racism I opined about in yesterday’s post? Nope, it’s explicit. I got into a social media fight with one of these so-called Christians who are huge hypocrites, especially when they’re all, “Anyone who votes for a pro-abortion politician is complicit in their policies, but I’m not complicit in the evil policies of the guy I voted for who is the living embodiment of all seven deadly sins.” Then she said she didn’t say that, so I just copied and pasted where she did say it, and I said, “This is why people are leaving the Church.” So then she took things to private messaging with some ridiculous conspiracy theory about how one of the Super Bowl halftime performers was sliding down a pole that was lit up pink, which shows her support for late-term abortion, and you should have seen the comments under this post! What really got me is how many of them said African beats are Satanic. So if syncopated beats are pure evil, I must be the spawn of Satan, since I prefer them. I would say this is people straining at gnats, except that it does have a much darker aspect. If you are saying something as innocuous as rhythms (not lyrics, mind you, but RHYTHMS) are evil if they come from another race, then what are you saying about your thoughts on members of that race? These were, of course, all “devout” and “pro-life” “Catholics” commenting on the post. I am so aghast that I am going to confession tonight, because right now I hate (and I mean HATE) a huge chunk of my fellow churchgoers. Fortunately most of the worst offenders have left my parish for “Tradistan,” where the doily-heads go to Latin Mass because they consider the Novus Ordo invalid. That is what the person I had the original argument with does. Still, I can’t help feeling that a lot of people in the pews next to me might think “Catholic” means, not universal, but white and European, and anything else is evil. And that is, in fact, the real evil: considering those different from ourselves not human.

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Those with No Moral Authority

So some people I know on social media have been posting about how horrible the Super Bowl halftime show was, and they are shocked by the reaction they have gotten. I think this isn’t surprising, because they are the same Christians who don’t have a problem with the current president’s behavior, either in the sexual realm or in other realms (or at least they don’t condemn it and even go so far as to say he was chosen by God), and then they condemn a couple of dancers for dancing. I agree that the dancing was a bit over the top, but some of it was from Latin and black cultures, so then I wonder if there could be a touch of racism too. Anyway, the point is, if you give the president a pass for his behavior, then you have no moral authority to be clutching your pearls over something that has so little consequence. You may think Hunter Biden’s job at Burisma was shady (like I do), but if you are not saying anything about Trump’s children profiting off their own name, then you have no moral authority. If you denounce black athletes for kneeling during the National Anthem but then have nothing to say about the president goofing around during it, you have no moral authority. And if you act like you do, the rest of us are going to call you a hypocrite and tell you to sit down and shut up. Seriously, it has gotten to the point where I am ashamed to call myself a Christian – not because I am ashamed of Christ, but because I do not want to be associated with these people who claim to be his followers. If you think the Pope has no moral authority but Trump is God’s Chosen One, then we are not the same religion. As Light Bright said, “I feel bad, but I am starting to hate the sound of the word ‘Jesus’ because of the people who throw it around.” I told her just think of him as Yeshua, as I do, and this “Jesus” guy the so-called Christians say they follow, who the heck knows what he is? But he’s not the Christ.

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Milwaukee Art Museum with Tiffy

I am sort of watching the Super Bowl, but I really want Kansas City to win, and right now San Francisco looks poised to completely destroy them, so I've sort of lost interest. Even the ads aren't holding my attention tonight, so I am blogging.

When Travalon and I went to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, we saw this beautiful sunset:

A few days later, we were on the Capitol Square, and this fire hydrant covered with snow looked like a curly-haired dog to me.

Then I was waiting for the bus after work one day, and look what came to the bus stop! But they didn't let me get on board. The license plate says: "Yummy."

Our house guest is back! Isn't she adorable?

Friday Travalon and I had a quiet evening. He made fish, I finished the puzzle, and we hung out with the dog. Saturday he hung out with the dog more and went to a college and a high school basketball game (and the Badgers beat Michigan State), while I drove to Milwaukee and met Tiffy at the State Fair Park and Ride. She is a member of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and she got me in free. We had lunch at their cafe (with the member discount), and as you can see, we had a beautiful view.

The view from upstairs in the museum was even better.

For some reason in all the bathrooms they had this odd sticker on the mirror that says: "What inspires you?" and has an icon that seems to be a camera. I took them up on this and took a picture, and it turned out kind of okay because you can see my colorful jacket that I got at a fair trade shop in Galena, Illinois.

Tiffy wanted to see a display of prints, and this one made me laugh. The title was something along the lines of, "He Subsequently Pursued a Career in Photography."

Right outside of the print display was a bunch of glass figurines I really loved.

And I liked this glass sculpture too.

There was another display of paintings owned by a renowned collector, and I really loved this Van Gogh painting of the public garden in Arles, France.

Outside the art gallery there was this little bright yellow fake house. Art?

Then we walked downtown and saw this beautiful building.

We rode the Hop, which is a free streetcar, and then we went to an Ethiopian restaurant. We ended the evening with a trip to Purple Door Ice Cream, where I had lemon cardamom and raspberry chocolate chip ice cream. What a wonderful day in Milwaukee!

Today Travalon, Michaela, and I drove to Sauk, where we saw lots of eagles and went on a lovely walk, then we went to the park in Merrimac, but there was a big sign that said no dogs allowed in the park. We drove up one side of Lake Wisconsin and down the other, and we stopped to see the two small islands and the one large island. We also saw the Merrimac Ferry hibernating for the winter:

It was ironic, in my view, that it was a beautiful, sunny day on Groundhog's Day. We had thirteen straight overcast days, but the day you don't want the groundhog to see his shadow, of course he does.  Six more weeks of winter... Still, it was wonderful to see the sun again, and it was an unseasonably warm day, so we really enjoyed it.

Here are some short videos of things in Milwaukee cycling through color changes. The first is a group of glass globes at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, with a surprise ending. (There was a very boring art film showing at the museum, of three views of things in Milwaukee like smokestacks and streets in an industrial area of town, and the description said: "The protagonist of the film is time," which struck us as terribly pretentious.)

This is a building in downtown Milwaukee. Travalon thinks it is part of Marquette University.

And this is a clock outside of the swanky Pfister Hotel.

Hey! Kansas City came back to life and won the Super Bowl!! Yay!!

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