Today I worked on campus, and two very odd things happened. The first was that there was a big plant in the mailroom with the name of a professor who is on sabbatical this semester, and who also has a pretty new baby. I thought it was a gift, so I mentioned it to her husband, who also works in our department. He said, "Oh yeah, that's a long story." I said the plant can't stay in the mailroom, there's no window in there and it will die, but he said, "It's going to stay there a while." I said, "I could put it in my office," and he said, "That's a good idea." So I put it in the window of my office, and then I was nosy and read the note, and the person just wanted the professor to babysit the plant for three months. Who asks a professor to babysit their plant over the summer?? So I'm babysitting it. Here it is.
The second thing that happened was that we have these painted speech bubbles that we can write things on (mostly bad puns) with chalk markers, and I didn't notice anything this morning, but just before lunch I saw some incredibly mature individual had written the bad F-word, the juvenile F-word, and a drawing of the male anatomy in giant, bright yellow letters. I was too short to reach it, so a coworker had to clean it up. I did take a photo first, in case we needed it for evidence, but no need to post it. It's just a burp out the other end and the act of lovemaking. None of us saw anyone wandering around, so it will remain a mystery. To me, the funniest thing is that the chair had to look at it and decide it wasn't protected speech so we could erase it. This is because two people put rude comments on a departmental Instagram post about a Yiddish song class, and one could be removed because it was deemed hate speech, but the other wasn't specifically hate speech so we weren't allowed to delete it due to freedom of speech. I'm not sure "Fart" and "F--k" are really hate speech, and I actually found the drawing more offensive, but we pointed out that ANYTHING on a blackboard, no matter how anodyne, has to be assumed to be ephemeral. Though to be fair, everything else has been there so long that we can't get it to come off. The F-words came right off because they were so fresh.
Travalon had a weird day too. He went all the way to Watertown to see an old steam engine go by; he got there about ten, and it wasn't supposed to come for another half an hour, so he started to take a walk... and then it went by so quickly that he could only get this photo.
It had a bunch of passenger cars behind it. He said it is the Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific train, like the Holiday Train, and that it is out for some kind of anniversary run, so happy birthday to this Taurus train. He said a bunch of people were sitting with cameras set up when he got there, so he should have asked them if it was running early. When we go to see the Holiday train, there's always some train nerd who can listen in to the conversations between the engineers and whoever, so they know exactly when the train is getting in and when it's leaving. It could have been worse: Travalon saw a woman post on social media that she got her kids out of school to see the train, and they had already missed it completely even though the school is not even a mile away. What a bummer for them. Here is a YouTube video someone took of it in Minnesota a few days ago.
As we were watching videos on YouTube of the train, we heard a horn outside because a train was going by in real life. Crazy!
After that, since he had his good camera with him, he went to Dunn's Marsh down near his job and took pictures of egrets and great blue herons.
Famous Hat
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