Sunday Morning on the South Pier

 

This morning Travalon felt really rotten, so we were glad we didn't have to go to Mass. Neither of us slept very well in the hotel room. However, we did want to see the lakeshore while we were in Sheboygan, and we needed coffee, so we went to the South Pier and stopped at an ice cream shop that served coffee as well. Man, was it some delicious coffee! They had a train running around the edge of the ceiling.

Then we walked along the pier and discovered the coffee shop Travalon had originally been aiming for, but it was extremely busy, and our coffee was so good. Also, the smell of the baking waffle cones was heavenly. It was very beautiful on the pier and made me think of mornings in Florida. We saw a pink firetruck across the river.

We saw a restored boat from the 1930's.

We saw a blue heron.

It flew away as we got closer.

Here is the lighthouse at the end of the North Pier.

In this photo Travalon took of some ducks, on the horizon you can see the two mysterious things we saw in the distance. Travalon thought they were boats, but they didn't move.

We also passed a very cute church called St. Vincent's on the way to the pier, and I thought we could have gone after all, since we could no longer do the errand we were planning to do this morning on account of Travalon's cold. However, he said he was too miserable to sit through Mass this morning, but after the walk he did feel a little better. He said it was the fresh air, although as you can see from the photos, there was plenty of haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke.

On the drive home, we saw this water tower with a picture of a water tower on it. So meta!

Today was my last Brazilian drumming class; it wasn't originally scheduled to go this long, but we missed one when one teacher was out of town and the other was sick, so they kindly had a make-up one. I brought Miss Mandy with me because there was an Irish slow session after that, and the guy who plays the cute little instrument in the Brazilian band asked to see her, then he asked to play her. Now I don't let just anyone play my antique mandolin, but as I said to him, "Of course! You can probably play it better than I can," and I was right about that. He played a little bluegrass. He and some other experienced drummers joined us for this class, where we all played really heavy drums, and afterwards we had delicious chocolate cake made by one of my fellow students. She and the other two ladies in the class and I chatted for a bit afterwards - I think we kind of bonded over being so outnumbered by the guys. One thing that surprised me was that they had said this lesson would be jersey-friendly, but only one other guy wore his besides me. Another thing that surprised me was that they said these jerseys are a secret and shouldn't be worn in public until a performance on the 23rd, and don't post photos on social media before then. Too late - I had already worn mine to the Irish session the day I got it, and I already posted a photo on this blog.

Travalon had been listening to a really great band at the East Side Club, but we figured when he came to pick me up that there wasn't time for me to go hear them before the Irish session. We went to Garver Mill and had a slice of pizza, but oddly the people right before us had ordered the same two flavors (drunken ravioli for me, sausage and pepperoni for Travalon), so there was some confusion over whose pizza was set out. This isn't the first time our weirdly specific order was the same as someone else's; longtime readers will remember when we got someone else's pizza because we both ordered a large with one side vegetarian and one side sausage. What are the odds? The Edgerton Little League team came in to get ice cream, and I said they probably didn't care about the drumming jersey, and since five people read my blog, that didn't seem like a high-risk activity either. Even though everyone at the Irish session already had seen this jersey, I did ask if Travalon had anything else sitting around in the car for me to wear, and guess what? He had an Irish rugby jersey he was going to wear to the Shamrock Club picnic that was postponed due to weather. So I put that on once I got to the music club. I said, "You aren't supposed to see this jersey I'm wearing so I have to change," and they all thought that was pretty funny. What are the odds that I'd change into something so apropos?

The Irish session went really well. My Irish teacher and the red-headed flute player were both there, and we all talked about the upcoming Irish Fest courses. I am enrolled in an "Intro to Irish Fiddling" course which said "No beginners," which seems weird for an intro course, but I assume they mean no people who have never picked up a fiddle before. I am also taking Intermediate Irish because my Irish teacher assured me that I'm too advanced for Beginning Irish. "That's for people who don't know the language at all," she said. She did try to talk me into taking the advanced Irish class she's taking, but I don't think I'm ready for that. Speaking of languages, this morning DuoLingo finally figured out that I know some Spanish, so it kept giving me placement tests. I got the following stickers all within ten minutes.

Crazy, huh? Usually it takes me about half a week to go up an increment of one, and today I went up forty units in ten minutes! 

When Travalon and I got home, we went out on the dock to watch the sunset. It was beautiful and strange because of all the smoke in the air.

Travalon brought his good camera.

The lotuses are blooming now.

They probably smell good, but we can't smell them over the smoke in the air. For some reason in our neighborhood it smells very smoky. I didn't notice it elsewhere in town, or in Sheboygan. It must have something to do with the lay of the land around here.

Famous Hat

Not Even a Beer Pop at the Wedding

 

OK, so I am blogging twice in one day because we have enough time this evening, although it was a challenge to get on the WiFi here for me. Travalon had no problem, but my computer kept saying it was encountering an error, and even my hotspot wasn't working... until suddenly it was, so now you will be blessed with a second blog post in one day.

After I blogged this morning, we hit the road and had lunch at a Jimmy John's in Waupun. We drove until getting to Sheboygan Falls, where we took a walk at Riverside Park. We still had a little time before Travalon's high school buddy's daughter's wedding, so we went to find the actual falls. Here they are!

The wedding was at a Lutheran church, and it wasn't part of a service, like the Lutheran weddings I remember going to before, or all the Catholic weddings I've attended. I hadn't counted on it being so short, so I said to Travalon that there was a 4 pm Mass three minutes away, and he thought that sounded like a great idea. However, there was a visiting priest from Myanmar who spent the homily time droning on about the political situation there, and while I'm very sympathetic, we are not currently in such a fabulous political situation ourselves. (Do we even still have a democracy? I guess we'll find out the next time we're supposed to have elections.) Also, Saturday evening Masses are usually short, but because of the guest priest, this one was running long, and when we left, the two bathrooms were both full. I thought, no problem, I'll go downstairs... and they had locked the downstairs!! What?? What a very strange church.

It was all good, because when we got to the reception at a converted loft in Sheboygan, it was still cocktail hour. We saw another high school buddy of Travalon's and his family, who had sat right in front of us at the wedding, and they told us we should take a Polaroid photo of ourselves to put in a scrapbook for the bride and groom. I took a photo of them, then they took a photo of us, and I took a photo of the photo.

This isn't a great photo, but Polaroids never are - the fun is watching the photo develop. As you can see, we dressed all Hawaiian. Nobody else did, but you know what? Who cares? We found our table, and it was right by the DJ, who was blasting music and then adjusted his speaker so it was blasting right at us. Since all of us at our table were of a certain vintage (and I was by far the newest vintage), it seemed odd to put us right by the loud music that the kids love. At least we were near the windows and right in front of the bridal party table, as if we were VIPs. I was plugging my ears, so a guy at our table said he could go to his car and get me some earplugs. I assumed he meant he had a bag of cheap earplugs, but he came back with a really fancy pair and washed them off for me. They were AMAZING: I could hear people talking, but the music seemed really faint. I ended up talking to the woman next to me a lot (her husband was an old friend of the bride's father, Travalon's buddy), and she said she liked every kind of music except country. I said me too, except old country like Johnny Cash and stuff like that, and she concurred. She said, "I don't know why," so I said, "I do - because I like my music minor key and syncopated, and country music is almost always major key with a straight beat," and she thought about that and said it makes sense, that's probably why she feels the same way. 

Travalon and I both had the baked cod for dinner, which had an amazing sauce on it but twice as much potato and half as much vegetal matter as I would have liked. One woman at our table was a vegan, and she had ordered the vegetarian lasagna, but it had cheese on it, so she couldn't eat any dinner. She and her husband (another old friend of the bride's father) had another party to go to anyway, so they didn't stay long. I hope there was something there for her to eat... We bid them adieu, and then ten minutes later I remembered her husband was the one who had lent me the earplugs, and I have no idea who he is. Guess they're my earplugs now. I assume he forgot, but honestly he may not want them back after I've used them, and he did mention that he never used them because he had an even better (!) pair he always used.

The woman next to me and I were confounded by the first dance song, the groom and his mother dance song, and the bride and her father dance song, which were all slow, sappy country songs we neither knew nor liked. However, partway through that last one, the DJ suddenly switched to "Low Rider" by War, and while it's not my very favorite song by War (that would be "Cisco Kid"), any War is excellent funk music, so the whole crowd cheered. The DJ announced the floor was now open for dancing, so Travalon (who has caught my cold and had been suffering since during Mass), suddenly felt energized enough to dance. The DJ played some Whitney Houston, then one of my favorite songs of all time, "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire (why no Oxford comma??), and a couple of ABBA songs, and we were amazed to see all these young kids who loved and sang along with these old songs from our youth. One young guy was an amazing dancer - he moved like he had no bones! But after the obligatory "All the married couples get on the dance floor! Now sit down if you've been married less than X years" dance, to "Falling in Love with You" by Elvis (which was weirdly the processional at the wedding), the music changed back to country - peppier country, that you could dance to, but still not my jam at all. Travalon was feeling worse, so we decided to call it a night. And one odd touch was that there was no cake, just Culver's frozen custard, several flavors that were unlabeled so I took reliable old chocolate. Travalon had some swirly thing with graham cracker crumbs in it.

Poor Travalon is really ailing now - he seems to be even sicker than I was on Thursday - but he did help me come up with a title for this blog post. Because he was loaded up with cold medication, he didn't indulge in any of the free beer, soda, or wine available at the bar. (Neither did I, but that was more for the sake of calories.) He remembered a story I told when, years ago, Tiffy and I were visiting our old college friend at her parents' house in Sheboygan, and her father, who spoke Sheboyganese, asked us, "You girls want a beer pop?" It took Tiffy and me a few moments to decipher that he was asking if we wanted a beer or a soda, not a beer-flavored soda. In Sheboygan for some reason they eschew conjunctions - at Mass I once heard a priest say, "The body blood of Christ." No idea why. And they have such a heavy accent that I struggle to understand them, like once at a previous job someone called to have me mail him something, and he said he lived on "Tent Street." I asked him to spell it, to be sure, and he said, "Tent! It's spelled Tent!" so I tried to verify: "T-E-N-T?" and he got very angry and hollered, "No! Tent! Eight! Nynt! Tent!" True story.

Famous Hat

Tropical Night at the Outdoor Theater

 

I am doing something unusual - blogging in the morning - but I probably won't blog tonight and didn't want to get too far behind. Thursday I didn't blog because there was nothing to say. I was too sick to go to the funeral for the woman who was a pillar of our parish, and I took the afternoon off of work (I was working from home) and just rested. In the evening I didn't go to the Quebecois jam at the leftist brewery either, which I had been looking forward to. The air quality was terrible due to smoke from Canadian wildfires, but I put on an N95 mask (the one Hardingfele gave me a few weeks ago) and walked very slowly outside, but due to the virus my heart rate was so elevated that yesterday my FitBit said I had really overdone it and should take it easy.

Yesterday I worked from home and kept pounding the Mucinex, so I had a productive day since that really helped keep the virus symptoms at bay. Now I have to give some exposition to explain the evening: the Dairyman's Daughter, as my regular readers may remember, can get cheap tickets to the outdoor theater if we go on a particular Friday evening. When the list came out, Tiffy and I discussed it and felt like going so late on a Friday was too much, and the only one we wanted to see happened to be a night that Travalon and I had already purchased Mallards tickets for, so she and I got full-price tickets to a matinee on a Saturday later this month. There was one other play I was a bit interested in, called Anna in the Tropics, about a Cuban family, but Tiffy wasn't really interested. Very recently the Dairyman's Daughter reminded us that she could get tickets for the remaining shows, and only Jilly Moose was going to Anna in the Tropics, so I asked Travalon if he would want to go, and he said sure, it's not Shakespeare and it's about Cuba. Meanwhile Rich, Luxuli, and Prairie Man said they were going too, so it was going to be a big crowd. The Dairyman's Daughter knows someone who works at the outdoor theater, so he said he could get her ticket for free... and then he got all our tickets for free! I feel very bad that Tiffy didn't get in on this deal, but it all happened very rapidly, and she was on a road trip out west so I didn't want to bother her, and I had no idea the tickets would be FREE.

So yesterday evening we all met at Grandma Mary's Cafe in Arena for fish fry, except for Luxuli, who was stuck in traffic in Michigan and couldn't get back in time. I thought about calling Tiffy, but Rich offered the ticket to Kathbert, who turned it down, and then another woman from our old church, who took it. She couldn't join us until the play, and she was wearing a perfect tropical print dress so I complimented her on her sartorial choice, and she seemed annoyed and said that was just what she had worn to work, she had no idea she'd be coming to the play. Now she is a socially awkward person and maybe didn't mean to come across that abruptly, but I mean, that's an even better story, so why not play it up? "I know, isn't it crazy? I had no idea I'd be coming to a play about Cuba tonight!" As it turned out, the play was not set in Cuba but in Tampa, Florida, where the Cuban family had a cigar factory in the 1920's and had hired a lector to read novels to the workers as they did their monotonous jobs. He started with Anna Karenina, and there was a lot of drama involving adultery and a shocking ending. If I had read the novel, I would have liked it even better, but I did enjoy it, although I think some of the group didn't. 

Going up the hill at the outdoor theater is part of the experience, but I was a little afraid of going into a fib with my weird heart rate issues, so the Dairyman's Daughter and I took the shuttle up the hill for the first time. I then ran into one of our faculty members, who was there alone because her wife had to run back to Russia to care for her ailing mother, and she had never been to the outdoor theater before. She teaches a course on Anna Karenina, so she was really looking forward to the play. Things worked out well in that I had to go to the bathroom about three minutes into the play but managed to hold it until intermission, when I made a mad sprint to the bathroom and then couldn't find the group. As I stood there alone and bewildered, our faculty member found me, so we had a great conversation about the play, and then she didn't have to stand around all alone during intermission herself, so it all worked out perfectly. Best of all, since Travalon drove, I didn't have to make that long drive back in the dark. That is always my least favorite part of going to the outdoor theater.

When we got home, look who we found on our front door!

And here he is from the other side.

Isn't he just totes adorbs?

Famous Hat