Today Travalon and I went our separate ways. He went to Oconomowoc to visit his family, then he went to Mass out there and took in two baseball games. He wanted to buy me a hat for one of the teams, but they were all sold out. He also went swimming in Rock Lake.
Meanwhile, I went to Mass downtown, and then a bunch of us went to brunch at the Daisy Cafe. They have their parking lot blocked off and have outdoor seating there, so we sat outside. Later in the afternoon, Rich and Kathbert came over, and the three of us went for a walk in the woods across from the bluff in a nearby neighborhood. I didn't have much time, because I had Irish class. There were four of us there besides the teacher, and one guy said he flew into the Shannon airport and it was much nicer than the Dublin one, so the teacher asked the other two if they had flown into Dublin or Shannon (answer: Dublin), but she never asked me. We did fly into Dublin when we went to Ireland nine years ago, but I was starting to feel like I did in college, when one of our French assignments was to write an essay about our favorite memory of France, and I had to admit I had never been there, so my assignment was to write about what I thought France was like. I felt so uncool.
At band practice our leader said our Make Music Madison gig hadn't gone that well, because a bunch of her friends had come, but none of them had said how good we sounded, and some of them left early. She said she didn't want me playing melody anymore unless I was playing fiddle, and I should have played fiddle at the gig. I asked if I was the weak link, and she said, "No," so I think what she means is our weak fiddler was at the gig but Hardingfele wasn't, and the weak one follows her so she would have followed me. I still feel like I should play melody on Irish tunes and maybe rags, because when we heard the Irish bands at Irish Fest in May, the mandolin (and even the banjo!) doubled the fiddle on melody. I said the video from Make Music Madison where we were playing "Metsakukkia" sounded good to me, but nobody else had seen the video, even our leader, and it was her own partner who posted it! Anyway, our leader thought there was no point in having different kinds of instruments if we all played the same thing, so I guess she likes my harmonies and chords and stuff, and honestly they're easier for me to play than the melodies. I guess I'll continue doing my random mandolin thing. That's what they pay me the big bucks to do.
Travalon took me to band practice, then he went to Leopold's and got a fancy drink called a Bali High-C. Look at the cool glass they served it in!
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