From Brazilian to Bluegrass

 

I forgot to mention that on Wednesday, as Travalon drove me to work, I put on Brazilian music and then we were talking about the Alan Parsons Project having an upcoming concert nearby... and Spotify suddenly played a song that sounded like Alan Parsons in Portuguese. We continued to listen to Brazilian music... and on campus we saw a guy wearing a shirt with a map of Brazil colored like their flag. It was like someone was bending reality based on what we were doing.

Today I worked from home and had meetings all morning. In the afternoon I felt really frustrated because a simple expense report that would have taken a few minutes in the old system took me an hour, partly because I messed something up and had to figure out how to call it back. Plus I've been added to numerous chats and am constantly getting notifications of new messages, but I will say that the FART 5 chat is so helpful - I put a couple of questions in there, and people quickly answered them. Our FART 5 meeting this morning was like that too, very collegial. I never expected to feel so warmly about coworkers, but right now we all have a common enemy in the New System, so we're battle buddies.

When Travalon came home, he wanted to go sit on a lawn chair in the one shady spot in our neighborhood. I joined him, but I had no wifi out there and couldn't work, so I had to go back into the house. After work we sat out there some more, and the condo board president came over and talked to us. He had really fascinating stories of how in college he dated a girl who was a reporter for the college paper, and she could get him backstage at all the concerts. He said Willie Nelson and the Grateful Dead were a lot of fun, but David Crosby was a jerk. He also used to be quite a singer, with a four-octave range. Who'd a thunk? He used to play the banjo but hasn't done it in years. I really enjoyed his stories.

Speaking of the banjo, there was bluegrass music on the roof of the Lone Girl (I completely forgot that I could have gone to the ukulele strum there on Wednesday once the Shamrock Club picnic was canceled), on the terrace at the Edgewater, and at State Line Distillery, a place we had never been to. I was most interested in that last option because one of my drum teachers was playing with a bluegrass band there tonight, and it was his fortieth birthday. We had dinner at the new Turkish restaurant on our side of town, then we went to the distillery. The band consisted of my drum teacher on one of those drums you sit on to play, a guy playing standup bass, a woman playing fiddle, and the guy who plays the little ukulele-like instrument in the Brazilian band on the banjo. It was kind of crazy how he was playing Brazilian music last night like he grew up in Sao Paolo, and tonight he was playing bluegrass like he grew up on the back porch somewhere in Arkansas. The band was so good, and the cocktails were delicious, and the couple sitting across from us were really friendly. At one point someone brought the birthday boy a cake, and much later I discovered there was a secret back room where the leftover cake was stashed, but I was never invited to that private birthday party. Still, I enjoyed the public birthday party/concert. What a fun thing to do for a big birthday!

We saw this cool tree as we walked from our parking spot to the distillery.

I've never seen a tree like this before! Can you see the yellow flowers in the high branches? My phone says this is a lilac; it does look a little like a Japanese lilac tree, but it's not. The plant identification app says it's a golden rain tree, which sounds more likely. I've never heard of that before.

Famous Hat