Yesterday I was feeling a lot better, so I worked on campus. Seabird was going home at noon, so she and I were going to walk on our morning break, but when we went to go outside, we could see the snow was blowing sideways, so we chickened out and went back upstairs to talk to another member of FART 5. Then this colleague and I went on a walk at lunch, talking about good hiking spots and snakes and other random outdoorsy stuff. I can't remember if I mentioned that we got a new fridge at work and that I suggested naming it Nat King Cool, which was the winning (and only) entry in the naming contest, so our chair asked me to print out a photo of Nat King Cole and stick it on the fridge.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!
(I hope I don't get sued out of existence for using that image.) Travalon and I had a quiet morning at home, and I noticed something shocking: my dragon bunnies have 6 7 on their ears!
OK, technically they have 7 6, and if you don't work around kids, this may mean nothing to you anyway, but I've had these stuffies long before 6 7 was a thing. Teachers have to listen to kids say, "Six seven!" all day long, and this includes Travalon. We finally looked up the "song" this comes from a few weeks ago, and to say it's a rap song is unfair to rap, and especially to songs. As one person commented, "At least this monstrosity will never get stuck in my head!" I don't remember ever hearing the song on the radio - was it a huge hit? How do the kids all know it? Why do they like it? It is (and I say this in a world full of Kardashians) The Stupidest Thing Ever.
Then we watched the Packers beat the Lions in a very exciting game. Speaking of Nat King Cole, we wrote this song (you know the tune):
L is for the way he launched that ball,
O is how he threw it over them all,
V is very, very extraordinary,
E is even more points you know that he could score.
Love is the greatest quarterback of all,
Love has the launch codes for that ball.
That's about as far as we got, and I stole that line about Love having the launch codes from a tweet after one of his amazing touchdowns. We composed it while strolling around the neighborhood after the game and meeting a new neighbor who had moved from Travalon's hometown of Pewaukee.
As usual, we went to Rich's house for Thanksgiving dinner. We usually supply the turkey, but someone from Night Prayer got a free turkey at work and donated it, so I thought of making a pumpkin pie, but the guy who always brings four desserts was coming, so I was going to make cranberry sauce since Kathbert wasn't coming... and then someone else was bringing that. Travalon and I brought a bunch of leftover containers we had accumulated around the house, but wouldn't you know that someone brought a whole bunch of those professional-looking cardboard ones like you get at restaurants? So we were basically moochers. The turkey was delicious and juicy, and Cecil Markovitch brought a bean salad, the Dairyman's Daughter brought cheese curds and some cranberry sauce left over from her family dinner, Luxuli and Prairie Man made mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and brought rolls and asparagus that someone else prepared who couldn't come at the last minute, and the family with three boys brought chocolate truffles made by the middle son and cranberry sauce. Other people were there too, like Hockey Girl (I feel like she brought something but I can't remember what - oh yeah, eggnog, and so did the Dairyman's Daughter), and the retired astronomy professor, and a guy from the Night Prayer group. And, of course, the man who makes all the desserts and his son; today he made a cannoli cake, a cranberry no-bake cheesecake, a maple chess pie, and a pecan pie, with two flavors of whipped cream: coffee and maple. And lest you think we didn't have my very favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner - stuffing - Rich made that too. I tried tiny bites of everything, except Rich gave me a generous slice of turkey and a generous scoop of stuffing from inside the bird, and I couldn't hack any dessert so I took a piece of each in one of those fancy leftover containers.
The boys were so entertaining. The youngest is six, and when we told a few child-friendly jokes, he decided to try his hand at writing jokes, so they were like this: "Knock knock! (Who's there?) Chicken pushing eggs off your head onto the ground!" and "How do cows drink? Moo moo suck through a straw!" He was also fascinated with a planetary handheld pinball game, my Mardi Gras beads, and the piano action I had built a quarter of a century ago when I was studying piano tuning. (I believe Rich called my action a "motion," but he also called the piano "the typewriter.") The oldest is a teenager, and he has actually learned about the concept of equal temperament, plus he got Rich's gyroscope to work. The middle one is a preteen who wore a jaunty cowboy hat, and when he asked my favorite cartoon character and I said, "Honestly, I love the Coyote and Roadrunner," he said, "Those are also my favorites!" Both the older boys are studying German with Hockey Girl, and they both played Rich's badly out of tune "typewriter." I'm afraid that I remember so little about piano tuning that if I tried to do it now, I'd just make it worse, and besides, I never learned how to do it in anything but the dreaded equal temperament. Also, Rich has three "typewriters" in his house; this one in the living room used to be a player piano, but the equipment inside has long since been lost, then there is a functional player piano in the dining room, and there is a third one from Kathbert's mom's house in the family room. Maybe those are in better tune, if anything in equal temperament can truly be called "better." Better than totally out of tune? That's fair.
Famous Hat
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