Yesterday was the last day of class on campus, so there were so many treats left over, plus one of my colleagues in FART 5 brought in shortbread with mint frosting, as I discovered when I went up to talk to Seabird. At lunch I went to an early music concert. In the evening I was originally going to meet with my two Union peeps at the Labor Temple, taking the 202 shuttle down, but one couldn't do it so we canceled. Instead, I went to the music club for their Wednesday singalong. The last time I took the 38 bus, it was a big bendy bus, which are second most comfortable after the shuttles. (Which are long-distance buses so it's hilarious that we take them around town.) This time it was a regular city bus, plus it was packed so I had to stand and hang onto the straps from the ceiling. I knew I had to get off at Atwood and Winnebago, but the screen announcing the next stop was malfunctioning and spewing nonsense, and the voice announcement was so quiet that I could barely hear it. When the bus had thinned out a bit, I asked the bus driver if she could let me know when we reached my stop, and she said, "I don't go that far." Say WHAT?? She said there are different 38 buses, some go here and some go there, which seems like a design flaw in the system, but nonetheless I was promised by the online schedule that the bus coming at her time would indeed go to my stop. When I told her that, she said, "I'm 40 minutes behind schedule." So she let me off, but sometimes I lead a slightly charmed life, and not five minutes later another 38 came and picked me up. However, that bus driver said he was new on that route and had no idea if he went to my stop, plus we had to stop on Jenifer Street for all the people who also needed to go further on the first 38 bus when it abruptly stopped... including a woman in a wheelchair, so that was quite a delay.
Finally I got to the music club and rushed into the bathroom to powder my nose, but when I tried to unzip my big, ancient, and very warm coat, the zipper broke. I figured I'd deal with it later, so I sat in the back of the room and kind of half sang until the break, when we all ate cheese and the club owner talked me into playing a mandolin hanging on the wall. Only it wasn't a mandolin, it was a mandola, tuned an octave down and with such a huge stretch between frets that it broke my brain trying to make the simplest of chords. Eventually I was mostly able to make chords that sounded right, and by then I was deep into the song circle, so when Travalon arrived, I had to crawl over walkers and wheelchairs (many singers are not young) and managed to kick over someone's water despite trying to be careful. Oops! I still couldn't fix my zipper and panicked about waiting in the cold with an unzipped coat, so Travalon brought me to Goodwill (after a quick dinner at Subway), where I immediately found a perfectly good winter coat that fit for only $10. (Again with the slightly charmed life.) Despite that emergency errand, we got up to Columbus with time to spare and went looking at Christmas lights in town. Here are some photos.
We went to our usual spot where the tracks cross a road just east of the train station, and this year only one other intrepid guy joined us. Usually there are tons of people waiting to see the
Holiday Train. I spotted the colorful train in the distance not too long after we got there, then we heard the horn, and soon it came into view as all three of us made videos of it. A couple of cars pulled up just in the nick of time to see it, but the people never got out. The guy who was out in the cold with us was very friendly, and we talked to him as we walked back to our car. We ran to
Kwik Trip so I could powder my nose (being out in the cold sure makes me have to pee!), and Travalon got a warm beverage, then we took our positions on the bridge over the tracks just to the west of the station. We could hear the, let's say not my style, music coming from the band riding on the Holiday Train, then a guy talked, and we knew the train would be coming soon. It was so cool having it pass under us, not just the lights, but the sheer power of it. We got videos of that too, and soon I will edit them and throw the finished product on YouTube and put a link in a forthcoming post.
On the way home we saw more Christmas lights in
Sun Prairie.
I'm a very lazy person who never gets around to decorating for the holidays, but I sure do appreciate other peoples' efforts!
Today at work there were even more treats, and I went way over my calorie budget. What if you can't decide between gingerbread and marzipan? Why, just have some gingerbread stuffed with marzipan! And so much chocolate, like letters made of chocolate (those were Dutch), and
Russian chocolate, and
German chocolate. Over lunch I had an interview for an
autism study, and on the way there the free
80 bus came at a good time with just a short walk, but afterwards I wasn't sure when any buses were coming. I went to the nearest stop, and it has a screen showing when the next buses are coming, but then it flipped to the next round of buses just as I got there. I pressed a button on the bottom, thinking it would bring the first screen back, but it brought up a screen saying this was a solar-powered screen, yada yada, and in 30 seconds it would go back to the bus schedules, but don't press it again or it would be delayed. I waited well over 30 seconds and the message never went away, so I was about to walk to the next bus stop when the
204 shuttle pulled up at my stop. Now the
206 shuttle is the one to my park and ride parking lot on the north side, and I've taken the 202 to the south park and ride at the Labor Temple, but I'd never taken the 204. It does a reverse loop of campus from the other two and then goes to a park and ride on the west side, I think right near where my old "single gal" condo was. I got on it, and it took me to the bus stop across the street from where my own shuttle picks up, and from there it was not even a block to walk to my building. Just another example of my slightly charmed life.
In the late afternoon there was a Nordic party, and two grad students were playing
Nordic music on their violins. It was so beautiful! They were standing by the elevators, and I could hear it down on my floor five floors below them, so I went up and listened to them for a bit before having some Nordic treats, because if there was one thing I needed more of today, it was treats. I couldn't stay for the whole party, because the woman bringing my
ukulele shirt was coming at six, so I had to catch the shuttle that picks up at five... only today for some reason he was ten minutes late. I got to my place just as the woman was trying to figure out where she was, but then she saw my license plate and recognized it as my email address, so it has already come in handy. Here's the shirt:
She insisted I take an XL instead of a 2XL - "you're not that big!" she said - and maybe she's right because it seems to fit just fine. Must be because I've lost weight, although today won't help that cause... Then I had to log on a bit late to my
Union meeting. We were having elections for officers, and I'm relieved that the Treasurer for the local we merged with still wants the job, so I declined a nomination for Treasurer and threw my hat in the ring for Trustee, which is a job that takes ten minutes per year when we do an audit of the finances. There were three Trustee positions, and three of us nominated, so there won't be an election for that position. The president of our old local, the guy who looks like a leprechaun and has the most Irish name you can imagine, is now the president of the merged local, but the vice president is also a Trustee like me - I guess we'd had enough of being officers. Not long after the meeting Travalon came home, and he told me the kids had a coloring contest involving "six seven."
Not quite as fun as blog monsters, and really, will this ridiculous fad ever die? I feel like a grumpy old person, but this whole thing has outlasted its fifteen minutes of fame, and it's completely meaningless. If you ask a kid what "six seven" means, they can't tell you, because it doesn't mean anything. But it has hand gestures that go with it, and last Friday when I asked Tiffy if she knew about "Six seven," she did the gestures, so even she knows about it, and I didn't think she was ever around kids. There's even a Wikipedia entry with a video of someone doing the gestures. The song this came from wasn't a big hit, so how does everyone know about it? How can something be so mysterious and yet so uninteresting? It's like a mystery I don't want to solve.
Famous Hat
No comments:
Post a Comment