Walking Around the Ponds

 

This morning there was a huge thunderstorm right at the time we were going to leave for Mass, so we didn't go. I'm terrified of lightning, and Travalon is terrified of the road flooding and causing his car to need expensive repairs again, like what happened last summer. About an hour later the rain died down, so we met Tiffy for brunch at the Venezuelan restaurant. We told her to be careful going home, since there was bad flooding in Milwaukee last night. True story: Travalon was thinking of going to see Lynyrd Skynyrd at the State Fair last night, but he decided the ticket prices were too high when there were no original members, so we listened to classical guitars and lutes at a coffee house. This morning we found out the State Fair was shut down and the concert was canceled, so he totally made the right call.

The weather continued to improve, so we met Jilly Moose for a walk around Stricker Pond. We saw a family of sandhill cranes.

We saw a lone mallard.

And we saw a green heron in a tree.

We also met lots of friendly dogs. We then walked around Tiedemann's Pond, which had just as many friendly dogs, no interesting birds that we could see, but way more wildflowers. This is obedience plant.

This is common rue.

I took both of those with my phone. Travalon took some photos of hibiscus and lotus blossoms with his good camera.

He also took a photo of this "blossom" on the ground. I assume it fell off of some little girl's jewelry.

There was a creek we didn't remember seeing before.

By then we had just enough time to get to the big A-frame church on that side of town.

The music was better than at the parish we usually go to, but there isn't the same sense of joy. I wonder why that is? It was a lovely Mass, and the young priest chanted a lot of it, but the vibe is definitely that people are there out of a sense of duty. The people at our church seem happy to be there.

So that was our day. I skipped band practice, since they were practicing for a gig I can't attend next week, so I'll probably hear about that. Our leader thinks I go to the Irish sessions too often and that we should practice more often as a band rather than going to the sessions, but I feel like the sessions make us better musicians. And believe me, we all could use that!

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