This morning Travalon and I went to Mass at the far east side church again, then we met Tiffy downtown, and we went to a coffee shop for a light lunch. We walked back up to the Capitol and this time looked at the State Christmas Tree from various levels. Here is the second level up, at least in the Capitol, where they use the European system of ground floor, first floor, second floor, etc.
And here is the nativity scene on that level.
There was also a Freedom From Religion display, but it was somehow simultaneously bizarre and boring, so I didn't bother taking a photo of it. It's probably better to describe it and let your imagination take over: picture Benjamin Franklin hugging the Statue of Liberty while George Washington kneels reverently before the Constitution. Maybe the problem is that it wasn't well-executed, and if a talented artist had done it, I might have been intrigued enough to take a photo. It honestly looked like the art project of a not-too-talented middle-school kid who was asked to portray reverence for the State.
After we bid adieu to Tiffy, we went to Little Luxuries to see about an advertised Cookie Walk. It turns out you had to sign up in advance, but we did see a cuddly campfire, and Travalon immediately thought of two terrible puns involving Premier league teams, so we got it to make a video of Get Kraken with Jerry. So look for that soon.
In the evening before my band practice, which is right across from the zoo, we went to Zoo Lights. We took some photos.
Then I walked to band practice, and I passed a house with a dinosaur kind of like the Sinclair one.
I think I forgot to tell this story from band practice a couple of weeks ago: I began singing one of the Christmas carols without looking at the music, and then I glanced at the music and said, "Oh, I am in the wrong key!" Hardingfele, who had been noodling along, said, "You were singing it in G," and I said, "That makes sense - it's my factory default." A lot of the carols we are singing for our gig on Friday are in G. This reminds me that last weekend in Milwaukee, one of the pieces was a Mystery Sonata by Biber, which has the violin tuned to a B minor chord, but the notes you are looking at on the page are what you would play if the violin had the standard tuning of G-D-A-E. This would drive me crazy, to look at one note and play a different one. Years ago in the OTHER choir the director would once in a while change the key of the piece without saying anything, and I had the hardest time singing an F while looking at a G, or whatever. I went to him and said I'm not good enough to be in the choir, I can't transpose in my head as fast as everyone else, and he said, "No, they don't even notice." (After that, if I realized he had changed the key of a piece, I'd look around and see Kathbert and another woman looking around in confusion too, and we'd all look at each other and nod: "Yup, he did it again!") The Mystery Sonatas by Biber are based on the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary (we didn't have 20 until 2000), and each has a different tuning, so performers tend to just have violins set to each weird tuning so they don't have to retune for each piece. This just goes to show that some composers were as dead-set on being a pain in the ass in the 17th Century as they are today, although at least the Mystery Sonatas do sound lovely. A lot of the pain-in-the-ass music composed by contemporary people doesn't even sound like music.
A weird thing from the Shamrock Club Christmas party that I didn't notice until looking at photos: my name tag had my correct first and both last names, but Travalon's had his correct first name... and then his last name was my email address. What??? How did they make that mistake?? Fortunately we found the name tag in the car, so it is preserved on Mariah Fifty-Three (?) for posterity.
Famous Hat
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