Happy Halloween 2024

Every day for the last fortnight my FitBit has given me a score of Readiness on a scale of 0-100, and usually I'm in the 60's, but I'd been as high as the 70's and as low as the 20's. This is all based on my sleep quality the night before and my resting heart rate. To my surprise, yesterday I had a perfect score, so I was expecting to feel twenty years younger, but in fact I just felt good... for my age. Today - another perfect score! Let's see if I can make it three in a row tomorrow... Yesterday evening as I waited for the shuttle, I glanced at my FitBit to see the time, and it said it was 5:11 and I'd gone 5.11 miles. I have no idea how to do a screenshot of it, so I pulled out my phone to take a photo... and then it was 5:12, so the moment was ruined.

Today was very strange. There were cops just hanging out all along the shuttle's route to campus, but that was probably because a presidential candidate had come to town and was heading for the airport soon. Then on the chalkboard speech bubbles on my floor, someone had written a joke in German, which my coworker and I figured out said, "What does a clown do in the office? Faxes!" Ha ha? I said maybe it's a terrible pun in German, so I asked a grad student (whose first language is English), and he said, "That's just the German sense of humor - the anti-joke. Like, 'How do you make a clown cry? You shoot him.'" I said, "But that's funny! Of course, I have a very dark sense of humor..." and he said, "They would say, 'What does a vampire do in the office? Make copies!'" I was not convinced, so I asked another grad student who is a native speaker, and she said it's a pun because "faxen" can mean sending a fax or clowning around. Now I can't decide which interpretation is worse, because they're both so bad.

Meanwhile, Travalon was going through the stuff that has been in the storage shed for the last decade, and he found some paintings I had done many years ago. Here is "Cat with a Saxophone," featuring Dr. Thelonius Mingus:

I did that one when I was nineteen. Here is one I did when I was twenty, based on a poem that I had pretentiously titled "Untitled" and had written in high school:

Aimless I wander through fields of silk,

The honey-touched zephyrs are flowing with milk

As midnight-black mountains shed petal-soft tears,

The sweet scent of ivory rings in my ears.

Golden the evening and silver the night

As I gaze at the world with song-colored sight;

Velvet and gauze are her jewel-strewn skies,

Their unknown eternities burn in my eyes.

Up a steep valley a waterfall climbs

To a temple all lit with the laughter of chimes,

Where fountains of flowers dance through the days,

And waves of bright Aprils blossom to Mays.

I stand here this moment in wonder and bliss,

My memory lingers with thoughts of your kiss,

And of God and His angels I ask only this:

That I spend forever with you.

I told Travalon that he must be the dragon in that painting, because I wrote the poem for a short-lived high school romance, but at the time I painted the painting, I had no idea who the man would be, so I just painted a dragon. He seemed pleased with that. 

Okay, so not much about this post has to do with Halloween. I guess you can imagine Travalon in a dragon costume or something. My outfit in the painting is, in fact, based on a Halloween costume of a sexy devil that I had back in the day. So there you go - a Halloween connection.

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Hannibal O'Leary Loves Jazz

 

Tonight Travalon and I were going to go to a free concert on campus: the Afro-Cuban Jazz Ensemble and the Jazz Orchestra. However, as I was waiting for the shuttle home, it began to sprinkle, and while I was on the shuttle it turned into a full-blown storm. It never stopped raining (it's still raining now), and Travalon said he didn't want to go down to campus, but fortunately the concert is streamed lived on YouTube, so we were able to watch it on Travalon's TV. I made Hannibal O'Leary, the green lion from Mardi Gras, dance to the music, then I made Jerry the Kraken dance, and Travalon made Rodrigo the Rhinoceros dance with him. He got into the spirit and made some of the other stuffies dance together too. That is something we couldn't have done if we'd gone in person!

This rain is unbelievable. It's like all the rain we were supposed to get over the last two months just came tonight. Hopefully there's no flooding...

Here are some more photos of the trees around campus.

Here is what a tree near my building looks like to everyone else.

And here is what it looks like through my sunglasses. They make everything redder.

This is a little jack-o-lantern made out of what appears to be a couple of grapefruit.

Another comparison shot: what everyone else sees.

What I see through my sunglasses.

This morning's sunrise through my very dirty office window.

And here are a couple of crystals I bought recently. The one on the left has little pieces of ruby in it, and the one on the right is turquoise and malachite.

The ruby flecks glow under blacklight.

I don't know if I'll ever have a good photo of a fata morgana to post on here, but there are some pretty cool ones online. Apparently people sometimes see the Toronto skyline from Buffalo. It may be time for a road trip...

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Photos of Lapham Peak, Milwaukee Lakefront, and Lodi Marsh

 

As promised, here are photos from this past weekend. First, from the Lapham Peak segment of the Ice Age Trail, which I posted photos of last year when it was at peak. By this past Saturday, it was a little past its prime.

Here are some photos from the Milwaukee Lakefront:

And here are photos from the Lodi Marsh segment of the Ice Age Trail:

It was our fifth Mammoth Hike Challenge on the Ice Age Trail. I'm sure you can see why we enjoy it so much!

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