Swans and More Model Trains

 

I took the day off of work in case I needed to recover from the Brazilian drum extravaganza on Saturday, and Travalon and I set off to see swans. It was very cold this morning, and I wore an outfit that a neighbor said frightened him. Maybe it is kind of weird.

We went to Cherokee Marsh, Tenney Park, and Governor Nelson State Park, and we did see swans at each place. We didn't have time to check out Picnic Point, another place we have seen them in the past, before Travalon had to leave for work. Here are some photos.

In these next few photos, you can see a male merganser with his bright red bill.

And here is the island that doesn't seem to have a name.

This is a family of two adult swans and two juveniles that are gray.

After Travalon left for work, I did a lot of cleaning and felt tired and out of breath... but my FitBit said I had only had two active minutes. What? So since it had warmed up to the high 20's F, I went outside and took a long walk going as fast as I could... and only got two more active minutes. Since I only got seven minutes yesterday, that is eleven for the week so far, and I'm supposed to get 150. Saturday I got 144, so if it were averaged into this week, I'd be fine, but how is my lived experience so different than what FitBit tells me? The walk is especially shocking - how could it be so little active time? It's based on heart rates, and there are some days I just can't get my heart rate up no matter what I do, and others where it's high without me doing anything, just from caffeine or dread or something. Hopefully I get enough this week...

Here are more photos from the model train expo. These are the ones Travalon took.

The next few photos are of a scene with a lot of detail, like the four Beatles walking in the crosswalk on the cover of Abbey Road.

For some reason Jesus was huge in this little world - like literally, he looks about seven feet tall.

And here is the A-Team! Remember them?

And an abominable snowman by the side of a house.

This looks like fields of radishes and cotton.

And here we have a group of hippies.

There were even a couple of trains you could ride, but we didn't. Here is one of them.

Check out the skating rink!

And the Mobile station!

And circus giraffes poking their heads out of a train car.

This is a photo I took and forgot to post yesterday, of a dinosaur snacking on a Prussian soldier.

This set had a whole backstory about how the Prussians were fighting someone else and blew a hole in the time-space continuum so dinosaurs came out and attacked them, and how the museum got some very "well-preserved" dinosaur skeletons during the skirmish, and even today German universities teach about this event as the Wurst Case Scenario.

Here is a video with a lot going on.

Travalon made a number of other videos too. Maybe tomorrow I will try to collect them all, make a big video, and throw it onto YouTube.

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Wednesday: Cleaning and Riding the Bus

 

Today I worked on campus, and our boss had asked us to each take several cleaning chores in the common areas now that things are a bit quieter, so everyone else hopped on the easier chores right away while things were most definitely not quiet for me. Today I cleaned a sink, a toaster oven, and a microwave, and it was hard work, but they were pretty spotless afterwards. I was trying to channel Tiffy's aunt who is legendary for her cleaning prowess, so that I wouldn't give up if it was "good enough." That gave me a lot of active minutes, and I was too tired to walk very fast with my colleague during lunch.

My big adventure today was to take the B bus home. My regular readers may remember that I usually take the D2 bus, but I leave my car in a place that is Ground Zero for Mallards game day parking, and today was a home game. I parked by the gardens where I used to have a plot, since that would be well past the Mallards traffic, and I scoped out what seemed to be the closest bus stop. In the evening I took the B bus, but there are a lot more crazy people on it than there are on the D2, which seems to be working stiffs going home for the day. The woman across from me was hollering at a young woman further up in the bus about how she liked her boots, and when that woman thanked her, the loud woman decided they were best friends and started recounting her life story. The young woman was uncomfortable and turned toward her friend, but the loud woman kept going... until the really crazy young woman sitting behind her decided she was "Ava," someone she already knew, who had to help her find her phone and her ticket. The crazy woman was freaking out the loud woman ("Ava"), who went and sat by the woman with the snazzy boots... and then the crazy woman went and sat by "Ava." Snazzy Boots tried to help Crazy Woman while "Ava" was relieved to get off at the stop for the Mallards game. Crazy Woman had long since passed her stop, and I was concerned that she was going to ask me for help, although she seemed pretty focused on Snazzy Boots (though she didn't make up a new name for her and act like she knew her from before), so I got off at the stop I had scoped out this morning and walked a couple of blocks... just to find that there was a stop right in front of the gardens. At least it was a sunny day.

Just now I went to do my ten minutes of cleaning, after watering my plants a day late (blame the Chancellor's party)... and some of them were letting me know they weren't happy about the delay. I still keep watering the dead ones because I've had not one, not two, but at least four come back from the dead. Anyway, I opened the clock app on my phone and started cleaning the bathroom, but it felt like a really long ten minutes so finally I checked my phone... and I had never actually started the stopwatch. And now it's raining again, for what feels like the thirty-sixth day in a row. Making up for last year, I guess.

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Fire at Our Church and Forward Match

 

Yesterday Travalon and I met Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, OK Cap, and Richard Bonomo for brunch at La Brioche, and my cafe breve had a heart in the foam.

I went home west around the lake to log into work in time for a 1:00 meeting. Had I gone east, I would have been caught in traffic caused by a fire at my church. What's going on?? First someone sabotages the parking gate, and then lightning strikes the steeple and sets it on fire! I didn't know until getting home and seeing a text from Hardingfele: "Hey! Your church is on fire!" with a link to an article on a local news station's website, showing flames around one face of the clock. I immediately called Rich, but of course he was already there in person. I tried to save the photo from the website, but it would only save in some weird file format, so I can't post it here. Maybe Rich has photos he can share with me.

Since there wasn't anything I could do for my church, I logged into work, attended the meeting, and worked the rest of the afternoon. It stormed on and off all day long, so I had to walk around the house. In the evening I talked to Tiffy, and then it was too late to blog.

Today we met Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, OK Cap, and Richard Bonomo for lunch at Amber Indian Restaurant, but no churches got set on fire during our meal... as far as I know. Afterwards, since we were so close, Travalon and I took a brisk walk around Tiedeman Pond. We saw some gulls, and one heron flying overhead, and mallards.

We also saw boat-tailed grackles with their beautiful, iridescent heads.

We saw purple martins, which are also beautiful and iridescent.

A song sparrow posed for us, so Travalon got a couple of good photos.

We had cleaned a bit before lunch, and we cleaned a bit after our walk. The place is really starting to look so much better. Travalon thinks by December we will have it in the sort of shape where the ten minutes a day is just picking up anything random that got out of place the day before, so I'm looking forward to that. Maybe we will even have people over! And there will be places for them to sit!

In the evening we went to the Forward soccer match. I was all done up with my Forward hat, Forward shirt, Forward scarf, Forward earrings, and Niko. In this photo you can also see I'm wearing a flower as a bracelet. I'll get to that.

The Forward were working very smoothly as a team the first half, and they scored a goal relatively early in the game. I started screaming without realizing a toddler was passing right by me, and boy did she look terrified! Maybe people shouldn't bring toddlers to soccer matches...? Fortunately her mom seemed to successfully distract her with the pretty pink smoke they always send up when the Forward score a goal. The rest of the game they seemed to lose some cohesion and never scored another goal, but they didn't let Knoxville score either, so they won the game, and then there was a lot of pink smoke. We were sitting far from the Flock, but we could faintly hear their constant singing and drumming, which is one of my favorite parts of a Forward match. For some reason random women had pink roses, and I wasn't sure if someone were selling them or just giving them away. Then suddenly the kids next to us all had big bouquets of all sorts of flowers, and every kid that passed by seemed to be carrying a flower. We couldn't figure it out - if they were giving them to children, then why did some women without children have flowers? Were they selling them? But it looked like a woman was just handing them out to children. Nobody offered me a flower, but as we were leaving, I did see a small pink one on the ground that someone had made into a bracelet, so I wore it on the long walk back to the car. My favorites were the pink carnations with blue edges on their petals, like the Forward colors. I saw several kids with those. Flowers at a Forward match in the lusty month of May seem appropriate, even if their distribution did seem a bit mysterious. And somehow I did get my own beat-up miniature pink rose that smells wonderful.

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Travalon's World Tour T-Shirts

 

Here are some photos of the baby cranes my neighbor took when she and I were out walking yesterday.

Speaking of birds, Tiffy sent me this photo of what looks like a goldfinch looking in her window.

Today we had an "emergency departmental meeting," which seems odd since we just had one last week, and we usually only have them once a month. However, this was good news - the university is letting us hire some more faculty, so the discussion was about how to focus the search.

Since Travalon and I have started doing ten minutes of cleaning (each) per day, he began cleaning out the closet in his man cave and was surprised to find shirts from his world travels that he had forgotten about. He said I should blog about that sometime, so today is that time. Behold Travalon's World Tour T-Shirts! Let's start in beautiful Brazil.

Then we can travel to the Soviet Socialist Republic.

How about a stop at the Galapagos Islands?

Here is one place I have also been to - Greece!

And I have also been to Scotland.

I hope you have enjoyed this world tour via T-shirt. If Travalon finds any more destinations, I'll be sure to post photos on this blog.

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Typical Tuesday

 

Today I worked from home and went to adoration, which isn't that exciting except that I had the secret code to open the back gate on our church's parking lot... but the person who told me forgot a crucial piece of information. So I frantically called Rich, who helped me. I did take a picture of Chelveston, whose name I had not settled on, but Travalon said, "What? I thought we decided that was his name!" So here is what he looks like in non-black light.

Pretty cute, huh? He's like that riddle: which is Chelveston, the chicken or the egg? Speaking of cute, the cranes have two colts (that has always struck me as weird - I want to call them chicks), and while I was out walking with my neighbor, she took a bunch of photos of them. She said she would send me the best one, but perhaps they were all bad, because she sent nary a one. She did send this photo of an iris.

And you know what else? It's always a good time for some DuoLingo bragging!

Speaking of which, it's getting late so I should get off the computer and do my DuoLingo for the evening. It got so late because I had to water the plants and do my ten minutes of cleaning, which is making a real difference. Good news! Both my purple oxalis and my polka-dot plant, which both seemed to be dead for quite a while but I still kept watering them, are coming back to life. No sign of life from my big ficus that seems to have died, but I watered it today just in case.

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