Sorry for the silence the last couple of days. Friday I crawled into bed at exactly 2 am, and yesterday I just wasted too much time and ran out of time to blog, so now you'll get a very long blog post. It starts with Friday, when I worked from home in the morning and then logged out and took a walk at Governor's Island with Travalon. I drove down to Cecil Markovitch's house, and then he, the Dairyman's Daughter, Richard Bonomo, and I drove to Chicago. It was a fine drive until we hit the Chicago traffic, then yikes! We went to Tutto Fresco, the same Italian restaurant we went to last time we'd gone to a show at the Athaeneum, and I ordered a half-order of seafood linguine but still had to put half in the cooler Cecil keeps in his car. (Unlike Travalon and me, who keep buying coolers because we keep forgetting to bring one with us... but this did come in handy when our fridge died, plus I wrote an article about our dead fridge that got published in Guidepost, which was a bucket list item of mine. But I digress.) Cecil was texting the Single B-Boy, saying he got a Caesar salad with three anchovies on it, and the B-Boy said, "That's three anchovies too many." Then Cecil tried to order an espresso after dinner, but they said the machine was broken, and Cecil said that was a running joke between him and the B-Boy, that half the places said their espresso machines were broken, so he texted him about that. Only it autocorrected a word, so he tried to correct it but sent the text and accidentally turned on voice-to-text, so it was writing a text that said, "Oh shoot! It's writing everything I say! Good thing I said shoot. What if it did this while I was at confession and then sent my sins to all my contacts?" And then he decided, what the hey, he'd send that text to the B-Boy too. Which reminds me, earlier in the day I was emailing a faculty member, and for some reason Outlook changed haven't to 'aven't, so apparently my email program thinks I'm Cockney.
We thought we were going to see a concert put on by the Sistine Chapel Choir, but it was actually part lecture given by a woman who writes art commentary for Magnificat magazine about the art in the Sistine Chapel, and part concert of music sung in the Sistine Chapel by a small subset of the choir, about five guys. (I know, this just happened, but for the life of me I can't remember if there were five or six.) The last piece was the Allegri "Miserere," the setting of Psalm 51 that was only sung in the Sistine Chapel until a teenage Mozart transcribed it. The lecturer said the punishment for transcribing it was excommunication, but the Pope was so fascinated that a 14-year-old had done it that instead he wanted to meet Mozart, "and that," she quipped, "is one way to get a papal audience." (She was very funny.) After that, the piece was out in the world, and I've sung it myself, but I've only ever heard women or boys hit the high C. To my surprise, one of the grown men in this group was able to do it. It's a breathtaking moment. They could have left things there, but they said they didn't want to leave us on a somber note, so they were going to sing "O Sacrum Convivium." They didn't say by whom, so of course my mind immediately went to the Tallis version that I love so much... and in this I was to be deeply disappointed. Whatever they sang, it was... fine, but it wasn't Tallis. Then we drove home from Chicago, and I got into bed at exactly 2 am.
Yesterday Travalon (who had gone to a high school football game Friday night) and I met Cecil at Greek Fest, at the local Greek Orthodox church. I will say that I am Orthodox-curious and just love the St. John Chrysostom liturgy, which I know you can get at an actual Catholic church, but not around here. My goals were simple: eat tripita and galactoboureko and drink Greek coffee. We weren't going to eat lunch because we were meeting Tiffy in New Glarus for her (early) birthday lunch, but Cecil was planning to have a whole meal at the Fest. However, when we went to get the tripita (which is basically feta cheese in phyllo dough in little triangles), the guy said only one tripita comes per order, so we ordered two. Then they gave us one order of tripita and one of spanakopita, so we had to return that and get another tripita... and then they had four little triangles in each order, which was way more than we needed. When Cecil arrived, we offered him tripita, and then we all went downstairs to get "galactic burritos" and Greek coffee, and he also got the thing that looks like baklava but shredded, and then he was too full for lunch. They also had a little market downstairs, and I couldn't decide between the big prayer beads for $20 or the little ones for $10, but then I saw a Niko bag for $10, so the little prayer beads it was.
After all that tripita, I ate two bites of "galactic burrito" and was done, but then I couldn't close the container. A woman was going by with a whole cart full of galactic burritos, so I figured she could help me, but she couldn't either. She put it in a bag and tied it tightly so it wouldn't open. I will say that they had SO MANY galactic burritos there because that must be what people want. I mean, you can get baklava all over, but Greek Fest (and the church's bake sale in November) is the only place I've seen galactic burritos. My Greek coworker says they're easy to make: "Just make a simple custard and then use frozen phyllo dough." I understand the second part, but that first part... what?? She might as well have told me, "It's so simple, you just build a nuclear reactor." And what is that opposed to, a complex custard? The mind boggles.
Then Travalon and I drove down to New Glarus, and I was so full of sugar and caffeine and fat that I was making up random songs and babbling about any random thing that popped into my head. We met Tiffy at Glarner Stube, a Swiss restaurant that Cecil said has the largest urinal in the Midwest. Whether that's true, I can't say, but the place does have two bathrooms that are marked unisex, and the one I went into did have a very large urinal in it. Here is a photo, courtesy of Travalon.
I was too full to eat a lot, so I had a cup of mushroom soup and then a couple bites of Travalon's savory puff pastry dish and a couple bites of Tiffy's schnitzel and a couple bites of the roesti, which is basically hash browns with Swiss cheese, and a couple bites of red cabbage. So really a great Swiss sampler platter. After lunch we went to Tiffy's sister's house in Monroe, which was shockingly nostalgic for me, because I remembered playing with her nieces there when they were little girls, and now they're pushing thirty. They were not there, but Karl the Chocolate Lab was (Tiffy was dog sitting), so we played with him. He's old and graying now, but he still loves playing fetch. Then Travalon and I went to Baumgartner's for cheese sandwiches, and I tried Limburger cheese for the first time. It was not nearly as stinky as I'd been led to believe. We couldn't talk Tiffy into joining us.
Today at Mass we sang a hymn to the tune of "Slane" for our opening hymn, then Travalon and I stopped by the coffee shop on North Street, as is becoming our habit after Mass. Because of the Iron Man Triathlon, we didn't want to go anywhere near downtown, so we headed north of town, to the boardwalk in DeForest. To our surprise, the path into the woods is closed off now, so that's a disappointment. Then we went to the East Side Club to hear the Prairie Flowers at three... only the email had the time wrong, and they had started at one, so they were just packing up when we got there. Inside there was a Packer watch party, but it was too nice out, so we just sat by the lake. I do still love the Packers, but I always take a while to adjust to football season. Anyway, they beat the Lions.
You will be shocked to hear that there was more band drama. I wanted to go to the Irish slow session, but our leader wasn't happy about this. She said I was only allowed to go to the second Irish slow session in the month, not the first one. That annoyed me, and anyway I didn't want to fight with Iron Man road closures on the way to the other end of town, so I said forget it, I'm going to the Irish session. Our bass player came too, but at first neither my Irish teacher Famie nor the red-headed flute player were there, and then I thought hmm, maybe I skipped band practice for nothing. They mentioned the flute player was sick with possibly COVID, so while she didn't feel that bad, she decided to stay home and not infect us, and then Famie arrived a little late. During the break, she, the bass player, and I were chatting when Hardingfele sent me a text that she was skipping band practice, so that means there were only the guitarist and two fiddles, which is enough for practice but we'll probably get a pissed-off email about how we need to take practice more seriously. The flute player had prepared a playlist for us of tunes commonly played at sessions, and I noticed "Slane" was on it, but we didn't play it. However, I did sing it for the hymn during Night Prayer, because it was the evening hymn in Magnificat for Thursday, and I was going to sing it then, but someone else had a hymn they wanted to sing. Tonight they asked me to pick a hymn, so I said sure and sang "Slane." I sure do love that tune.
This has nothing to do with anything else, but my aunt who lives in Colorado sent this photo.
I can see why they live in Colorado!
Man, that was a lot of words. You'd think I was still hopped up on Greek coffee, tripita, and galactic burritos.
Famous Hat
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