Today I worked on campus, and a colleague came and talked to me so long that by the time I was able to message the colleague I'd walked with last week, she was already gone for a walk, so I just took a short walk by myself. Then I took the crowded 28 bus down to Adoration, and once again I was one of the last people the driver let board the bus, and at the next stop he just blew by everyone because we were so packed. What are those other people supposed to do?? They really need a big bendy bus, or a second 28 bus, or something. I've seen that in the past, a 28X bus, and if I knew one was coming, I'd wait because then there would be tons of room, but the bus driver had no idea if there would be another one coming.
Travalon picked me up from Adoration, and we went to Leopold's to check out the Django Jam (which I think should be spelled Django Djam). I am a big fan of Django Reinhardt, so when that woman from Moldy Jam said she went to this jam, I googled it and found out it was Tuesday evenings at Leopold's. However, Travalon and I saw no sign of musicians, plus there was nowhere to sit. I asked a barista, who said the jam was next door at Fabiola's, the Italian restaurant they also own. We went over there and did indeed hear gypsy jazz swing, and I saw the woman from Moldy Jam playing the mandolin. There was a guy with a violin, a person with an accordion, a guy with a trumpet, a guy playing upright bass, and lots of guitars, and later a young guy played the piano. They were so good! One of the guitarists had set his guitar case on the table behind us, so when he went back there to get something, I asked if it was an open jam, and he said it was. Still, I am not good enough for this jam.
Fabiola's is not open on Tuesday nights, so we couldn't get any food, but fortunately it was Taco Tuesday at Leopold's, so Travalon went over there and got us some tacos. It was a little cold where we were sitting, so he got me a warm (decaf) pandan latte. (If they forgot to make it decaf, I am in for a very long night!)
Isn't it beautiful? While Travalon was in line, he ran into Cecil Markovitch and the Single B-Boy, so they came to sit with us - good thing I took the table for four and not one of the two-seaters! I thought it was a coincidence that they were there, but Cecil reminded me that I had mentioned this jam on Sunday. He and I were singing along to "Bye Bye Blackbird" as the group played it, and the B-Boy wondered how we all knew the song, which seemed to horrify Cecil. "It's a standard!" he said. "What did your parents listen to when you were growing up?" and the B-Boy said, "Not much." He is not a music-driven individual. I'm the opposite, I totally want to master gypsy jazz swing, but I also want to master Irish fiddling, and also Brazilian drumming... I will never get good at any one thing because I want to do EVERYTHING. I'm just a professional dilettante, well maybe not professional since I'm not getting paid to be a Jackie of all trades and a master of none. Still, I may bring the violin to this jam at some point. Not next week - no jam.
Cecil asked what I gave Travalon for his birthday, so that got us started on a conversation about how wombats poop cubes and honey badgers are fierce. Here is Travalon's wombat from a couple of angles.
Travalon looked up Australian names for pets and found Migaloo, which is the word in some Aborigine language for "white fella," so say hello to Migaloo the Wombat. He can be buddies with Kizi the Honey Badger.
Today is Travalon's 60th birthday, and he wanted to call this blog post what I have titled it, so why not? You're only 60 once. I worked from home today so that he could have a relaxing morning, and then I took a long lunch so we could go to the Journey, his favorite Chinese buffet. Then in the evening we went to Lola's for dinner. It was decorated so beautifully.
Here's Travalon!
And here are our drinks.
(We had already started drinking them but I loved the colors.) I'm having a nonalcoholic infused black currant spritzer, and he's having a non-ice cream grasshopper. Here's what they looked like when they were full.
Here's a better view of all the Christmas records on the wall.
Travalon got to spin the wheel at Lola's for free for his birthday, but he didn't win anything. As we were walking through the parking lot, I heard the train, and the tracks run right near there, so we walked over to them but saw nothing. When we got in the car and drove over the tracks, we could see a train coming, so we found a really good vantage point to watch it. The train came closer and closer, and the crossing arms sounded and came down... but then the train backed up out of sight. We gave up and went to look at Christmas lights.
These next few are all of the same house, but it's so impressive that one photo can't do it justice.
Here's the guy near us with a million snowmen:
These next three shots are all of the same house, with the Christmas Pelican:
Even our neighbors across the way are getting into the spirit of Christmas.
And the moon has a rainbow around it. Sorry - this isn't the best photo.
And here is a photo I meant to post several days ago. I stole it from the social media page of my old boss when I worked in the private sector. He was/is in Thailand, and this is a hill called Din Dang Doi:
The name is almost even better than the cool photo of the hill at sunrise. Unless Din Dang Doi is the name of the hill my old boss climbed to get to this view, and not the fascinating hill in the photo. Could one even climb that hill? It looks very, very steep.
Today I didn't even change out of church clothes - I wore them downtown as Travalon and I tried to make up for missing Small Business Saturday. Our first stop was to Fontana the outdoors shop so I could replace my gloves that were older than most undergrads. I was hoping to find another pair of Spyder gloves, but they don't carry them, so I bought another brand that also seemed good. Next we went to the crystal shop, where everything was on sale. Travalon bought tea, and I bought two crystals, a selenite triangle and some amber.
The amber was supposed to glow under blacklight. Here it is glowing.
And here it is under the blacklight that has a different wavelength.
And here are two other crystals that glowed under the special wavelength.
They still glow under regular blacklight, but not as well.
Travalon tried a couple of T-shirt shops, but they didn't have his size. We stopped by the Info booth to talk to my old neighbor who always volunteers there, and she gave us gift bags with coupons and other stuff. She said they don't do the Holiday Trolley down State Street anymore because Badger Bus sold the trolleys. Bummer!
You can barely see it in this photo, but under the bright green tree stage left was a lit-up doghouse with a stuffed Snoopy in it. Maybe if you zoom in.
The steeple is on our old church now, but the scaffolding will stay there until February (per Rich) as they do work inside the steeple. Look how shiny and new it looks!
We had a little time before we were meeting others at Baked Wings for Travalon's 60th birthday party, so we went to Little Luxuries, and Travalon and I got Stella:
Isn't she cute? Then we met Rich, Prairie Man, and eventually Kathbert at Baked Wings. Cecil always gives gag gifts, so we were all waiting in anticipation to see his gift to Travalon, but it was actually a very nice one: a Manna Cafe cookbook. The Manna Cafe is long closed, since the owners moved out East to be closer to grandkids, but Travalon loved their chicken paprikash, so hopefully that recipe is in there. Kathbert had asked me what T-shirt she should get for Travalon out of several rock group choices, and I said AC/DC since he's going to see them next summer. And he loved it! Prairie Man showed us photos of his recent trip to Patagonia (penguins!) with a side trip to Iguazu Falls, and Travalon had his own photos of Iguazu Falls from when he traveled there before any of us knew him. Wow! I've been to Niagara Falls, which was impressive enough, but this looks way more impressive. We joked about crashing Kathbert's house to have grasshoppers, or maybe going to Leopold's for ice cream drinks, but Cecil still had to go to Mass, so eventually the party had to end.
I felt bad about not having taken photos of how beautiful our Shamrock Club ceili was, with the East Side Club all decorated with balloons, so I stole some photos off the Shamrock Club social media website.
I still have a bunch of these balloons in my house; they have long since ceased to float, but they are still plump, not shriveling up as fast as our poor panda balloon animal did. I wonder why?
Today it has been snowing all day, and everything we were going to do has been canceled, so we just sat at home. I did join the Irish Conversation Circle, since what else is there to do when you're snowed in? It was enjoyable to hear other people talk in Irish, but it was a real struggle to do it myself. All day I've been in a hoodie and pajama bottoms and, best of all, no bra, except for putting on jeans and boots (and my big white coat and third eye toque) when we took a vigorous walk outside in the falling snow. Despite the title of this blog post, Travalon's birthday wasn't yesterday, or even today, but this coming Monday, but our big adventure yesterday was part of his birthday festivities. Since he is having a landmark birthday, he gets several days to celebrate.
Yesterday we had lunch at the Beefaroo on the south end of Rockford, then we drove south to Rochelle to go to the Railroad Park. On a previous trip down to Florida we remembered seeing the nuclear power plant not too far from Rochelle from the highway, but the last few times maybe it was too warm and we didn't see the steam pouring off the two cooling towers, because we could never find it off to the west. However, yesterday we were on a smaller road that went closer to it, and the temperature was very low, so we easily spotted the steam and the two cooling towers. Just as we were about to pull into the Railroad Park, we were stopped by two trains going in opposite directions. Finally we got into the park and hopped out into the cold, listening for another train to come as we walked around the park to get some exercise. The gift shop was closed because of the holiday, but fortunately the restrooms were open. We saw one train go by on the southside tracks, heading east, then we saw another one on the southside tracks heading west, and finally we got cold and sat in the car, where we had a great view in comfort of one heading west on the northside tracks. Here are some photos.
Travalon made videos, which I have compiled for your viewing pleasure. A guy who was photographing the trains told us that the big train cars, which we thought were for transporting cattle, are actually for transporting automobiles.
The Domes lit up! And on the far upper left of the first photo, you can see the flame that's on top of a building in downtown Milwaukee.
I loved this ice castle and campfire.
Then we took a magical ride on a trolley through a display of Christmas lights. There were genuine ads on the trolley from back in the day.
Some of the trains were decorated. Here are photos I took with my phone.
And here are photos from Travalon's good camera.
We walked around outside after getting off the trolley and found more lights.
Our main purpose for coming to the Museum was to ride the train on the Happy Holiday Railway. As we waited to get on the train, we watched a fireworks display.
We rode in old railcars that were decorated inside, while holiday music played and the lit-up pine trees sang along. Here are a couple of photos.
Teenagers dressed as elves served us hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies, and toward the end of the ride Santa appeared to give each child a carefully wrapped jingle bell on a string. I loved the cheerful sound they made when all the kids were shaking them. Lest you think Santa forgot the adults, we each got a beautiful pin.
Here are photos of the outside of the train.
The train cars were double-decker, but nobody was allowed to go into the upper levels because that's where the wiring was for the lights inside. And here is a photo of the trolley we rode.
Our next adventure was going into one of the barns containing old train cars, where there were stuffed animals pretending to ride them. Here are photos from my phone:
And here are photos from Travalon's camera:
Here are a collection of signals outside.
Then we saw a barn with an arrow on it:
So we went inside and had our minds blown. Except for the first two, these photos are from Travalon's good camera.
This weird snowman head said things like, "I know I'm a little round, but it's just water weight."
It was very cold in the barn, so I thought I was going to get frostbite while making a video of the whole thing. There was another barn open and lit up, but it just had undecorated street cars in it.
They even had a little pop-up coffee shop, so I had a latte (decaf at that hour). We did see more decorations as we were leaving.
And even the guardhouse was done up for the season. Check out my shadow in the foreground.
I took videos that Travalon and I had made and created a longer video of our whole visit. Enjoy!
What a magical trip! And even as Travalon is days away from becoming an "old man," we felt like children because we were so full of wonder at everything. I can't imagine how magical it must be for the actual children!
I am a third-hand gift, a straw hat with a wide brim. I used to have natural and navy stripes, but after much time in the sun, the navy ones have faded to a sort of chocolatey tone. The big blue flower around the brim was my wearer's own touch.
