House Concert and Local Owl

 

This morning Travalon left for Oconomowoc about the same time as I left for Mass. He saw his mother and two of his brothers, and then he went to Milwaukee. He attended Mass in Spanish at the Cathedral and walked around by the lake. He had a picnic by the lake for lunch. He really enjoyed his day.

After Mass I went to brunch with Richard Bonomo and Tiffy, and I did succeed in making Rich laugh by saying, "On the way to Mass, they were playing different chant settings of 'Salve Regina' on the radio. Medieval Christians must have had no problem with astrology, because they kept singing about Virgo." Then Tiffy and I got bubble tea and walked down to the Union Terrace, where we sat and watched sailboats. Then we went to the Edgewater Hotel, but I didn't think we had time to get a drink at the Boathouse, their restaurant on the lake. We went to their coffee shop, but neither of us wanted coffee so we just got overpriced water with supposedly all this fancy stuff in it that was good for you. It tasted wet, and that's what I cared about. We went down and sat by the water, then we had a bit of an adventure in the elevator, since we didn't want to climb all those stairs back up to street level. The confusion was that in one tower, the street level is on the seventh floor, but in the other tower it's on the fifth floor. So we figured it out... and ended up in the spa. The woman at the spa saw how confused we looked, and she said, "Are you looking for the exit? It's that way. Are you guests in the hotel, or were you at the Boathouse?" so we quickly replied, "The Boathouse!" I mean, it's not like we weren't paying customers of the hotel in some capacity, even if it was just to buy overpriced water.

Then we went to a house concert put on by the local harpsichord player. I was a bit surprised that he didn't forewarn us that he had two cats, since some of us are allergic, and then when one cat leapt into my lap, I discovered they also have their claws. Yipe! The concert was as much telling amusing stories about Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach as playing their music, but it did make me realize that as much as I enjoy all Baroque music, there is something special about Bach's music for me. It feels like he's speaking directly to me. Afterwards there were drinks in the garden, but Tiffy wanted to get going since she had a long drive home. We did go to a Thai restaurant for a quick dinner, and I brought an order of red curry duck home for Travalon, who really enjoyed it. It's a lot of food - neither he nor I could finish our order, so maybe we could have split one...? Ah well, now we have leftovers.

As Travalon was eating his Thai food and I was eating some grapes, I noticed a very large bird in the tree outside our window. We tried to take a picture of it, but it didn't really turn out, so after dinner we went outside. The first thing we saw was the sunset reflecting beautifully off the tennis court.

We went around the side of the garage, and we could see the large bird was a great horned owl! I think it is the young one that screeches all evening because it can't hoot yet. While Travalon took pictures, I flapped my hands and talked to it to try to get it to look at us. Those photos didn't turn out as well, but these two where the owl is looking away from us aren't too bad.

I also thought the sunset shining through the fake lighthouse at Mariner's was beautiful, so I asked Travalon to take a picture of that too.

Then we went out on the dock, and he took a picture of the sunset.

Here you can see the patch of lotuses to the left in the river channel.

On the dock we ran into a neighbor, and I told her we were being bird paparazzi, and that somehow led to a conversation about what a great method for learning music the Suzuki method is - I give it all the credit for how musically adept I am today. Then Travalon went inside, and I stayed outside to both pray a rosary and get five miles of walking in, and I could hear the owl screeching as it seemed to follow me around. I can still hear it screeching out there. It's an annoying sound, but not as creepy as the hooting from the full-grown owls. For some reason that sound really frightens me. Good thing there are no owls big enough to carry me away!

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