Today I worked on campus, and I went for a walk at lunch with Hardingfele and her new employee, who is also Catholic so Hardingfele thought we should meet each other. Since this girl is young enough to be my daughter, I didn't think she'd be too excited to meet me, but we did all chat amicably during our walk. They know each other from Community Orchestra, and Hardingfele introduced me by saying I won't play in that orchestra (I think I did briefly years ago...?) because I don't like classical music after 1790, and I had to correct her: 1750.
The one weird thing that happened was while I was in a meeting this afternoon, the tornado siren started wailing, but only for a few seconds. We all looked at each other and said, "It's not noon on Wednesday!" but the weather was gorgeous today, so we weren't too concerned. I didn't think more about it until Rich said he'd had a power outage at his job, and it had messed some stuff up, and then I wondered if it had happened at the same moment. He said he could tell, but he never did say... This would have been between 1500 and 1600 hours, as Rich would say.
Here is a photo I didn't post yesterday, because there were already too many photos. It's one of the trees we saw just after we drove down from the bluff.
I didn't post this one yesterday, either. Rich tried to take a selfie with all of us, but the background is blurry, I'm missing completely, Travalon isn't looking at the camera, Kathbert is but she looks fed up, and you can only see three-fourths of Rich's face. So enjoy!
Here are some photos from around campus today. First, the oak outside the window, and the bird effigy sculpture beneath it.
Hardingfele, her new employee, and I went to Allen Centennial Gardens, and we saw this sumac that is vermillion like a sugar maple, not deep crimson like sumac usually is in October. It's a cultivar called "Tiger's Eye." Who knew people cultivated sumac?
This is also in the Allen Centennial Gardens. My phone calls it a "ballon plant." I thought that was a typo for balloon, but spellcheck doesn't have an issue with ballon, so it must be a word.
This is right outside our building. As my regular readers no doubt know, I work at the language building on campus, known as "The Tower of Babble."
This is just a pretty tree on the way to the bus stop.
Speaking of buses, they sent a survey about the new bus system today, and my boss encouraged us all to fill it out. "It was so therapeutic to complain about it," he said, and I agreed that it was cathartic. Almost everyone I know is annoyed by the new system. For me, it's fine for getting home, except that I have to sneak out of work early because the bus comes earlier, and it's always earlier than its scheduled time, and instead of the next one coming in fifteen minutes, it comes in like forty minutes. However, getting to campus is a challenge with the new system because that bus drops me off blocks from work and is always running late, so Travalon has just been taking me in every morning. I don't know why I can't take the same bus to and from work, but that's what their website suggests, the B bus there and the D2 home. Confusingly, there is still a 28 bus, like the one I used to take, and it even follows a lot of the same old route, but it doesn't come far enough north for my purposes. I have yet to meet anyone who says, "The new system works so much better for me!" But maybe that person exists.
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