Nephew's Visitation

 

Yesterday I worked from home and walked with my neighbor, then Travalon and I left work early to drive to Pewaukee for his nephew's visitation. There was no funeral, just a ton of flowers around the urn, and people stopping in to give their condolences. Afterwards we helped clean up, and we ended up with a huge basket full of all sorts of plants. There was even a hydrangea tree someone had given to the parents, which they will plant in their yard.

When we got back to Madison, we went to Mariner's Inn with our neighbor for a late fish fry. After dinner we had brandy Alexanders in honor of our nephew, and wow were they potent! A lot more brandy than Alexander! When Travalon and I came home, we watched the episode of Dr. Who about the Oods in our nephew's honor, since he dressed as an Ood for a comic con he had gone to with Travalon. I thought I had seen parts of this episode before, because some of the plot seemed familiar. It was a really moving metaphor about the evils of race-based slavery.

Today Travalon and I adulted in the morning, running some errands and cleaning a bit, then Tiffy came to visit, and the three of us got lunch at the nearby Mexican restaurant, sitting outside. Travalon left to join a friend at a blues festival, while we ladies joined the biking pub crawl for the birthday of the Daughter of Denni already in progress. We met up with them in the backyard of another person's house, which was wonderfully shady. On the walk there, we passed this tree with interesting fruit.

My phone says it is a type of dogwood, but it doesn't say if the fruits are edible. We hung out in the yard quite a while, until the rest of the group decided to bike to the McPike Park Sessions, while Tiffy and I headed to Monroe Street to have sushi at a new restaurant there called Sequoia and then walk to St. Andrew's Episcopal Church for a Baroque concert. It was interesting how the first half was composers we had never heard of, while the second half was not just Handel, Vivaldi, and Bach, but some of their best-known works (an aria from Messiah, the La Folia variations, and an aria from St. Matthews Passion). Tiffy was excited to see that the singer was a countertenor, and I said, "Maybe he's a bargain counter tenor," which I believe is a PDQ Bach joke, but she had never heard it before. When I was a kid, Ma and Pa Hat loved to listen to PDQ Bach records, and I thought they were hilarious, but when I would try to tell my third grade classmates about these jokes, they never got them. Was I ever a dork of a kid! But am I ever glad that Ma and Pa Hat introduced me to PDQ Bach. I still think he's hilarious!

Bonus photo: Travalon drew a Florida panther at work.

In another sign of our impending mortality, today we found out a college buddy has been diagnosed with cancer. I guess we're getting old, and these things will keep happening. Prayers for this person are appreciated.

Famous Hat