Stay Tuned for the Screenplay

 

Today I got up early to go to campus, but I felt sniffly and also remembered I am working on campus on Friday, so I worked from home. That loss of sleep this morning was for naught. One of my big tasks today was something I had done in the test environment several times, so I felt ready... but of course it was totally different in the real system. Worse, a step I'd had to take in the test environment was totally unnecessary in the real system, so I wasted a lot of time and effort doing that for nothing. This system really is the gift that keeps on giving.

In the evening I went to a Moldy Jam jam at the music club, and I felt very on point tonight. The first time through a song I'd be so lost, but then I'd figure out a few key notes, and by the third time through I was playing it like I'd known it all my life. At one point someone started playing a song, and someone else asked if it was in G, but I blurted out, "It's in A," just because I could hear it was in A. Toward the end I was getting tired and started cheating by sight-reading the songs on a nearby iPad, and on the last song I gave up and played chords. My request tonight was "Rakes of Mallow," which I haven't played in like forty years, and I remember it being in C, but they play it in G in this group. I said. "I'm a mandolin player - our motto is, 'If it's in G, we can play it,'" and afterwards people said they liked some flourish I put into it. Also, there was a wonderful sequence where every time we finished a slip jig in E Dorian, someone else would start another slip jig in E Dorian. I imagine that's what Heaven is like. I sat by some fiddlers, and I confessed how I'm out of practice on the fiddle because of devoting my time to the mandolin. They said, "But you sound so good on it!" One guitarist said, "That mandolin looks like it has been around!" and I thought maybe the guy who played it yesterday was right when he said, "I would never play out with this!" but I mean, isn't that what an instrument is for? 

Here is a paraphrase of an email I sent to Tiffy this morning: 

"Something to (maybe?) brighten your Monday morning: Yesterday was our final Brazilian drumming class, and over the course of ten sessions, the four of us women have kind of bonded over being so outnumbered. After class the subject of birthdays somehow came up, and I thought we sounded like characters in a cheesy sitcom:

The Elder Stateswoman: a Taurus who has taken the course before, she is the voice of reassurance and the bringer of delicious treats.

The Can-Do Chick: a Scorpio who looks like she would survive for at least three years in the wilderness with no help, her motivations for learning percussion remain mysterious.

The Hot Young Thing: a Virgo who is very young, very beautiful, and very Latina, she dances to samba wearing more on her head than her body (much to Travalon's delight), and now she wants to learn to play the drums she always dances to.

The Nutjob: a Capricorn who always wears the club jersey like some kind of brown noser but really it’s because she secretly thinks the colors look fabulous on her, she is studying percussion in hopes of learning to play a ukulele-like Brazilian instrument, like that makes any sense.

(I'm sure you can figure out which one I am!)

At the Irish slow session right after that I sat next to my Irish teacher, who is also named Famous but goes by Famie. She plays the concertina (little accordion), and the leader introduced us to a new person as “the Famie Section.” Sigh. She did note that the Famie Section speaks Irish, which is not something you can say about every Famie section for sure. In case you are wondering, the other half of the Famie section is a Scorpio."

Tiffy's reply: "I look forward to your screenplay."

Famous Hat

Not Even a Beer Pop at the Wedding

 

OK, so I am blogging twice in one day because we have enough time this evening, although it was a challenge to get on the WiFi here for me. Travalon had no problem, but my computer kept saying it was encountering an error, and even my hotspot wasn't working... until suddenly it was, so now you will be blessed with a second blog post in one day.

After I blogged this morning, we hit the road and had lunch at a Jimmy John's in Waupun. We drove until getting to Sheboygan Falls, where we took a walk at Riverside Park. We still had a little time before Travalon's high school buddy's daughter's wedding, so we went to find the actual falls. Here they are!

The wedding was at a Lutheran church, and it wasn't part of a service, like the Lutheran weddings I remember going to before, or all the Catholic weddings I've attended. I hadn't counted on it being so short, so I said to Travalon that there was a 4 pm Mass three minutes away, and he thought that sounded like a great idea. However, there was a visiting priest from Myanmar who spent the homily time droning on about the political situation there, and while I'm very sympathetic, we are not currently in such a fabulous political situation ourselves. (Do we even still have a democracy? I guess we'll find out the next time we're supposed to have elections.) Also, Saturday evening Masses are usually short, but because of the guest priest, this one was running long, and when we left, the two bathrooms were both full. I thought, no problem, I'll go downstairs... and they had locked the downstairs!! What?? What a very strange church.

It was all good, because when we got to the reception at a converted loft in Sheboygan, it was still cocktail hour. We saw another high school buddy of Travalon's and his family, who had sat right in front of us at the wedding, and they told us we should take a Polaroid photo of ourselves to put in a scrapbook for the bride and groom. I took a photo of them, then they took a photo of us, and I took a photo of the photo.

This isn't a great photo, but Polaroids never are - the fun is watching the photo develop. As you can see, we dressed all Hawaiian. Nobody else did, but you know what? Who cares? We found our table, and it was right by the DJ, who was blasting music and then adjusted his speaker so it was blasting right at us. Since all of us at our table were of a certain vintage (and I was by far the newest vintage), it seemed odd to put us right by the loud music that the kids love. At least we were near the windows and right in front of the bridal party table, as if we were VIPs. I was plugging my ears, so a guy at our table said he could go to his car and get me some earplugs. I assumed he meant he had a bag of cheap earplugs, but he came back with a really fancy pair and washed them off for me. They were AMAZING: I could hear people talking, but the music seemed really faint. I ended up talking to the woman next to me a lot (her husband was an old friend of the bride's father, Travalon's buddy), and she said she liked every kind of music except country. I said me too, except old country like Johnny Cash and stuff like that, and she concurred. She said, "I don't know why," so I said, "I do - because I like my music minor key and syncopated, and country music is almost always major key with a straight beat," and she thought about that and said it makes sense, that's probably why she feels the same way. 

Travalon and I both had the baked cod for dinner, which had an amazing sauce on it but twice as much potato and half as much vegetal matter as I would have liked. One woman at our table was a vegan, and she had ordered the vegetarian lasagna, but it had cheese on it, so she couldn't eat any dinner. She and her husband (another old friend of the bride's father) had another party to go to anyway, so they didn't stay long. I hope there was something there for her to eat... We bid them adieu, and then ten minutes later I remembered her husband was the one who had lent me the earplugs, and I have no idea who he is. Guess they're my earplugs now. I assume he forgot, but honestly he may not want them back after I've used them, and he did mention that he never used them because he had an even better (!) pair he always used.

The woman next to me and I were confounded by the first dance song, the groom and his mother dance song, and the bride and her father dance song, which were all slow, sappy country songs we neither knew nor liked. However, partway through that last one, the DJ suddenly switched to "Low Rider" by War, and while it's not my very favorite song by War (that would be "Cisco Kid"), any War is excellent funk music, so the whole crowd cheered. The DJ announced the floor was now open for dancing, so Travalon (who has caught my cold and had been suffering since during Mass), suddenly felt energized enough to dance. The DJ played some Whitney Houston, then one of my favorite songs of all time, "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire (why no Oxford comma??), and a couple of ABBA songs, and we were amazed to see all these young kids who loved and sang along with these old songs from our youth. One young guy was an amazing dancer - he moved like he had no bones! But after the obligatory "All the married couples get on the dance floor! Now sit down if you've been married less than X years" dance, to "Falling in Love with You" by Elvis (which was weirdly the processional at the wedding), the music changed back to country - peppier country, that you could dance to, but still not my jam at all. Travalon was feeling worse, so we decided to call it a night. And one odd touch was that there was no cake, just Culver's frozen custard, several flavors that were unlabeled so I took reliable old chocolate. Travalon had some swirly thing with graham cracker crumbs in it.

Poor Travalon is really ailing now - he seems to be even sicker than I was on Thursday - but he did help me come up with a title for this blog post. Because he was loaded up with cold medication, he didn't indulge in any of the free beer, soda, or wine available at the bar. (Neither did I, but that was more for the sake of calories.) He remembered a story I told when, years ago, Tiffy and I were visiting our old college friend at her parents' house in Sheboygan, and her father, who spoke Sheboyganese, asked us, "You girls want a beer pop?" It took Tiffy and me a few moments to decipher that he was asking if we wanted a beer or a soda, not a beer-flavored soda. In Sheboygan for some reason they eschew conjunctions - at Mass I once heard a priest say, "The body blood of Christ." No idea why. And they have such a heavy accent that I struggle to understand them, like once at a previous job someone called to have me mail him something, and he said he lived on "Tent Street." I asked him to spell it, to be sure, and he said, "Tent! It's spelled Tent!" so I tried to verify: "T-E-N-T?" and he got very angry and hollered, "No! Tent! Eight! Nynt! Tent!" True story.

Famous Hat

Tropical Night at the Outdoor Theater

 

I am doing something unusual - blogging in the morning - but I probably won't blog tonight and didn't want to get too far behind. Thursday I didn't blog because there was nothing to say. I was too sick to go to the funeral for the woman who was a pillar of our parish, and I took the afternoon off of work (I was working from home) and just rested. In the evening I didn't go to the Quebecois jam at the leftist brewery either, which I had been looking forward to. The air quality was terrible due to smoke from Canadian wildfires, but I put on an N95 mask (the one Hardingfele gave me a few weeks ago) and walked very slowly outside, but due to the virus my heart rate was so elevated that yesterday my FitBit said I had really overdone it and should take it easy.

Yesterday I worked from home and kept pounding the Mucinex, so I had a productive day since that really helped keep the virus symptoms at bay. Now I have to give some exposition to explain the evening: the Dairyman's Daughter, as my regular readers may remember, can get cheap tickets to the outdoor theater if we go on a particular Friday evening. When the list came out, Tiffy and I discussed it and felt like going so late on a Friday was too much, and the only one we wanted to see happened to be a night that Travalon and I had already purchased Mallards tickets for, so she and I got full-price tickets to a matinee on a Saturday later this month. There was one other play I was a bit interested in, called Anna in the Tropics, about a Cuban family, but Tiffy wasn't really interested. Very recently the Dairyman's Daughter reminded us that she could get tickets for the remaining shows, and only Jilly Moose was going to Anna in the Tropics, so I asked Travalon if he would want to go, and he said sure, it's not Shakespeare and it's about Cuba. Meanwhile Rich, Luxuli, and Prairie Man said they were going too, so it was going to be a big crowd. The Dairyman's Daughter knows someone who works at the outdoor theater, so he said he could get her ticket for free... and then he got all our tickets for free! I feel very bad that Tiffy didn't get in on this deal, but it all happened very rapidly, and she was on a road trip out west so I didn't want to bother her, and I had no idea the tickets would be FREE.

So yesterday evening we all met at Grandma Mary's Cafe in Arena for fish fry, except for Luxuli, who was stuck in traffic in Michigan and couldn't get back in time. I thought about calling Tiffy, but Rich offered the ticket to Kathbert, who turned it down, and then another woman from our old church, who took it. She couldn't join us until the play, and she was wearing a perfect tropical print dress so I complimented her on her sartorial choice, and she seemed annoyed and said that was just what she had worn to work, she had no idea she'd be coming to the play. Now she is a socially awkward person and maybe didn't mean to come across that abruptly, but I mean, that's an even better story, so why not play it up? "I know, isn't it crazy? I had no idea I'd be coming to a play about Cuba tonight!" As it turned out, the play was not set in Cuba but in Tampa, Florida, where the Cuban family had a cigar factory in the 1920's and had hired a lector to read novels to the workers as they did their monotonous jobs. He started with Anna Karenina, and there was a lot of drama involving adultery and a shocking ending. If I had read the novel, I would have liked it even better, but I did enjoy it, although I think some of the group didn't. 

Going up the hill at the outdoor theater is part of the experience, but I was a little afraid of going into a fib with my weird heart rate issues, so the Dairyman's Daughter and I took the shuttle up the hill for the first time. I then ran into one of our faculty members, who was there alone because her wife had to run back to Russia to care for her ailing mother, and she had never been to the outdoor theater before. She teaches a course on Anna Karenina, so she was really looking forward to the play. Things worked out well in that I had to go to the bathroom about three minutes into the play but managed to hold it until intermission, when I made a mad sprint to the bathroom and then couldn't find the group. As I stood there alone and bewildered, our faculty member found me, so we had a great conversation about the play, and then she didn't have to stand around all alone during intermission herself, so it all worked out perfectly. Best of all, since Travalon drove, I didn't have to make that long drive back in the dark. That is always my least favorite part of going to the outdoor theater.

When we got home, look who we found on our front door!

And here he is from the other side.

Isn't he just totes adorbs?

Famous Hat

Limerick for Our New Work System

 

This morning my throat felt a bit scratchy and I was coughing a lot, but I went to work on campus because we were going to have our biweekly meeting on the Union Terrace. Only... it rained all day. I did go to a co-working meeting with some other FART 5 members, but the thing I was going to work on got sidelined because a whole bunch of summer positions didn't transfer over correctly from the old to the new system, so I had to update them quickly before the payroll calc tomorrow. I was so confused that my new boss came down and helped me. Then I tried to create a new customer in the system so I could pay a group in Germany, but the system said I could only have one primary address. I was confused, since I had only entered one address. Thinking it had accidentally duplicated somewhere, I deleted it... and then the system told me it required an address. What?!? 

By the time we were supposed to have our meeting, my former boss decided we would go to Union South, which is closer... but their big bar area was closed. So we went across the street to a bar called the Library, which was around even when I was in college. Our current chair as of the start of this month couldn't make it, but our former chair came, and when my former boss poured me a glass of Spotted Cow, she said she'd like to see me cut loose. I said, "Nobody wants to see that, since my basic mode is Poet." She wanted me to make up a poem, so I came up with a limerick about the new system:

        There once was a system that sucked,
        Into which some odd things had been tucked.
        We didn't understand it
        And asked who had planned it,
        Because now we're all royally... screwed.

This was a big hit with my coworkers, and my former boss said wasn't there a song where you expected the end of each line to be a bad word and it wasn't? So I started singing, "Miss Suzy had a steamboat," etc., and another coworker said she remembered that from the depths of her childhood, so we started talking about the folklore of children's songs. Eventually Travalon joined us, and he enjoyed some beer and chatting with my guy coworker. 

After we got home, I abruptly lost my voice. I was supposed to lead Night Prayer tonight, but even with no voice that would have been difficult, since I was blowing my nose constantly. Did I catch a Minnesota virus? Anna Banana II thinks it could be caused by the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. There was an air quality warning today, which I hadn't been aware of, and Seabird and I did take a brief walk at lunch, but it was pretty rainy so we cut it short. Anna Banana II kindly prayed the whole rosary aloud tonight, because I could not contribute, and I had to use the chat function in Zoom to communicate. Toward the end of the rosary, a very big great horned owl flew into a tree outside our window and stared at me. Travalon saw it too. It was huge!

Here's hoping tomorrow I feel well enough to go to a funeral. Nothing tragic, she was in her 90's, but she was a pillar of our old parish.

Famous Hat

Train Up Close

 

Yesterday I didn't blog because there was very little to say: I worked from home because of my cold and once again was unable to meet up with Mr. Icon. I did forget to mention that last Wednesday, as Hardingfele and I walked at lunch, we heard a train. Now if I hear a train while walking with Seabird, she doesn't get excited about it, but Hardingfele got just as excited as I did, so we hurried to where we could see the train pass by. This is somewhat relevant to today, because I did feel well enough to go into work and found a check waiting for me. This was the emergency invoice I had a few hours to create, and they sure paid it promptly. The check deposit for the university is way on the far side of campus, so I went to catch the campus bus, but I must have just missed it because the bus stops now have a screen informing you when the next bus will arrive, and it said not for thirteen more minutes. As far as I know, the buses come every fifteen minutes during the summer (every five during the school year), so I just walked. There is a walking/biking path that goes on a bridge over a major thoroughfare, and there are train tracks next to it on the bridge, so I have always thought it would be cool to be on the bridge when a train came by. I dropped off the check and was heading to the nearest campus bus stop when I heard a train horn, and I said to myself, "You'd be a fool to pass up this opportunity!" I went back up to the path on the bridge, and an engine with no cars soon came from the other direction. I didn't make a video, but wow, was it close to me! By then I had nearly all my steps for the day, so I continued on the path to another campus bus stop, which said the next bus would be there in five minutes. It's a loop, so I was hoping the bus driver didn't notice that I rode almost the whole loop, but really, would he even care?

Between that errand that took over an hour and a webinar about the new system in the afternoon, there wasn't a lot of time to get "real" work done. The good news is that things are much quieter now, so I've almost caught up. The webinar was scheduled for two hours, and I slept through most of the first hour, and then the second hour started with a question and answer session, but when they ran out of questions, they ended things about forty minutes early. Excellent, because I could use that time. I'm plant sitting for yet another faculty member this summer, so I had to check on her plants, and the big aloe plant in the TA office, and of course my own plants. One of her plants had fallen over, but it looks okay. Hopefully we all make it through the summer alive and well!

I have a very important announcement to make:

That's cuarenta for all you non-Spanish speakers out there. I am really enjoying Spanish. I might even like it better than French! Romance languages rock.

Famous Hat

Xavier Xing Writes in Business Blather

 

Today was not a terribly exciting day because I've caught Travalon's cold. I did work from home, and someone put a meeting on my calendar that didn't seem relevant to me, since it's about hiring people in the new system, and I was promised that I would never have to do any human resources stuff again. The only really entertaining thing is that I was going to meet Mr. Icon after adoration tonight, but I didn't go to adoration or meet Mr. Icon, who is in town for a few days. When I told Travalon, he said just as well, Mr. Icon wouldn't want a short meeting (he is notorious for wanting to converse past two in the morning), but Spellcheck kept changing Mr. Icon's name. Travalon got frustrated and made up a new name for him: Xavier Xing. Unsure if this was a famous person I should know, I googled "Xavier Xing" and found this fantastic piece of pure bull doodie on a "professional" social media website:

"A seasoned, results-producing management professional with extensive experience leading profit-generating operations through innovative merchandising, pricing and eventing, and focus on continuous product turnover. I am an effective leader skilled in developing highly productive, sales-driven teams by implementing customer-focused training and sales programs. I possess exceptional ability to establish rapport with clients, gain trust, and build strong repeat and referral business. I have a proven track record of effective short-and long-term tactical planning and improving operational processes to reduce shrink and achieve optimal profitability."

Wow. Tell me you are no fun at parties without telling me you are no fun at parties. Also, after reading this, I am no more enlightened as to Xavier Xing's skills than before I read it, except maybe at writing things in Business Blather. Is he a personnel manager or a salesperson or a project manager? Or has he just bounced around the private sector and done a bunch of jobs, so he squished it all together in this description? Let me try to translate this:

"I've been working for years at companies that sell things. I got lots of people to sign up for our corporate credit card. I also sold a lot of widgets. I found a place selling paper clips for less, which saved us tens of dollars every year in office supplies." There - I fixed it for you.

Famous Hat

Chillaxing on a Saturday

 

Yesterday I didn't blog because a) nothing too exciting happened (I worked from home and just frantically tried to get stuff done before the fiscal year-end deadlines), and b) Tiffy and I talked until pretty late. I needed a quiet day after running around every night this past week. Apparently we needed another quiet day today, because we were pretty slow getting going, and part of that is me. For example, I hadn't written to Mariah my diary in twelve days, so it took me about an hour to get caught up. (And yes, I do write in cursive in my diary. Millennials will never be able to decipher it!) And of course, DuoLingo. The Green Owl will not be denied.

Then I had to do some adulting. Travalon was not feeling well and was coughing a lot, and I had to go to the community pharmacy anyway for fish oil with Vitamin D, since that's the only place that carries it, so I said he should ask someone who works there for advice. She loaded him up with stuff, and also - this was the best part of the day - we bought little pieces of marzipan covered with dark chocolate. Oh my goodness, YUM!!! Then we went to Goodwill so I could get some new jeans, since the ones I got there some months ago are already getting holes in inopportune spots. I guess that is the danger of buying used. After all that adulting, we had lunch at Zippy Lube, sitting outside in the shade, and then we took gentle walks on Governor's Island and at Jackson's Landing. After that Travalon sat on our dock for a while, but that was too sunny for my Celtic complexion, so I sat on our porch.

I suggested that we go to 4 pm Mass so that we can get going right away tomorrow, and Travalon agreed that this was a good idea. As we drove to the church where we usually go, we passed a billboard I have seen a dozen times, and only this time did I notice anything amiss.

Did you see it? The word so nice they used it twice? Was that something missed in the proofing, or did they do it on purpose to get people's attention? It certainly got mine.

The one errand I didn't get done today was going to the musical instrument shop. I desperately need new strings for the mandolin, since I play the heck out of them. I also should get a new chin rest and shoulder pad for my good violin, because the old ones are somewhere, but I haven't located them yet. Plus it has some gut strings, but not all gut strings, and they are old, so I should just get metal strings for fiddling, and someone recommended a fine tuner for at least the E string. (I probably have that somewhere too, but I got rid of it back in the days of the Early Music Festival.) And then third, my neighbor who moved away gave me this tiny little bowed psaltry, and it's missing some strings, so I was hoping they could help me with that too. That's a lot, so I feel like I should make an appointment, if they even do that.

In the evening there were several things going on: a gypsy jazz band at Cafe Coda, a jazz band of some sort at the North Side Cabaret, a seven-string guitar showcase at Folklore Village, and a Forward soccer game. However, Travalon was really feeling under the weather, so we just stayed home, and he watched the Forward game on TV. I prayed the Rosary with my lava rosary, which is currently my favorite. Truly, all through Mass I was thinking about my lava rosary. It makes me feel connected with the ancient earth, and the tropics, although I know not all volcanoes are tropical. It's just so beautiful. So is the St. Michael Chaplet I got the same day, so I prayed that too. It may sound dorky, but I had a lovely Saturday evening praying on our porch. At my age, you don't need an exciting Saturday night on the town... especially when you spent Monday at a fiesta, Tuesday out (OK, that was praying too), Wednesday strumming the ukulele, and Thursday jamming on Quebecois music. Why not spend Saturday relaxing?

Famous Hat

Lake Wisconsin and Hauser Prairie

 

This morning Travalon still didn't feel too well, so we didn't head to the out-of-town funeral for his buddy's father-in-law. Instead, he watched Crystal Palace beat Bournemouth 3-0 with his posse.

We went to Stricker Pond, where we saw lots of scaups.

And a couple of buffleheads.

This is a really good photo of a male and a female scaup.

We stopped by the westside Willy Street Co-op and then, since it's right there, we had the buffet at Amber Indian Restaurant for lunch. After that we headed out to Sauk, and from the mountain bike path we could see pelicans gathered on a sandbar or just swimming around.

We also saw pelicans gathered around Sunset Island in Lake Wisconsin, and one swimming around.

At Whalen Grade we saw all sorts of waterfowl, like northern shovelers.

And more pelicans.

Also more scaups, but those photos were blurry because of the rain. (Did I mention that it rained all day?) And this male common merganser.

More northern shovelers.

And lots of coots too, which are not ducks but are actually more closely related to chickens.

Along Tipperary Road we saw a lot of red-breasted mergansers.

On the way home we stopped at Hauser Prairie to see if the pasqueflowers were blooming yet. It looked like they had just done a controlled burn, and all sorts of little green shoots were coming up, so we'll just have to check back later. I feel like this photo needs a trigger warning: what are these bones?? Did one of the volunteers at the burning not get out of the way of the flames fast enough??

I look like I'm surveying my realm.

It is a lovely view.

After that we came home and had a quiet evening. I had my leftovers from last night for dinner, and on Night Prayer we all had stuffies: Jilly Moose was hosting and she had Mr. Swanky, her most elegant moose; I had Jerry the Kraken; Anna Banana II had a bobcat; another woman had a lamb; and the one man on the Zoom meeting had Becky Badger, Bucky's girlfriend, who once had a cheerleading outfit but is now "naked." (She still has fur.) Meanwhile, Travalon relaxed. Hopefully he recovers quickly from this cold that he got from me. I'm almost back to normal but still can't sing, and I do have a lovely, nagging cough that sounds far worse than it is. Hopefully I'm done with viruses for a while.

Famous Hat 

The Singular of Gnocchi... With Googly Eyes!

 

Today Travalon was home sick with the cold I must have passed on to him, and I worked from home, so we took several walks together. The weather was so warm that it felt like summer. After work I went on a long rosary walk, hoping to see the train, but no train was to be seen. Then Travalon and I went to Mariner's for dinner because we had a gift certificate that was expiring soon. We could see a beautiful sunset from there.

None of that is too exciting, but I do have an after photo of the rock from the other day:

It looks like it got into something: "No, Mom, I have no idea what happened to your brownies. Why do you ask?" It kind of looks like a little potato, or whatever the singular of gnocchi is - a gnocco?

While I was doing my rosary walk, Travalon went down to the dock and took more photos of Tux Duck:

In the distance he could see a swan.

We were planning to go out of town tonight to attend a funeral tomorrow, so possibly we will go tomorrow if Travalon feels better. Otherwise, if we stay in town, we might take more bird photos. Stay tuned....

Famous Hat

Pelican Island

 

Today I woke up coughing, and Travalon said, "Do you really have to go in?" but I knew one coworker was working from home because of carpeting installation, another has a small child and all the uncertainty around that, and the third often calls in sick, and my boss is on vacation, so I figured I'd better be there... and there would be nobody around to cough on anyway. But of course they were ALL there (except my boss) because the carpet installation got delayed. I did walk with my colleague at lunch, and from now on I'm going to call her Seabird because that's what her name means. I didn't have time to ask Hardingfele, and since I still have this cold, she probably wouldn't have wanted to go anyway, although Seabird said I sounded a lot better than on Monday.

I finally got around to drawing my own blog monster:

Travalon and I both thought this could be Patches the Blog Monster, though I suppose an argument could be made for Tootles. Notice the Packer wheels. Meanwhile, at work today Travalon was watching a big tie-dyed peace bear smoosh a tiny Gumby. Or whatever that is under its paw.

When we got home, I saw a pink patch in the clouds.

And I found a rock with a big smile.

This is the "before" picture. I have teeny googly eyes to put on it, but we couldn't find any glue, so watch for an "after" picture soon.

We went down to the dock to see what was around. Of course Tux Duck was around. He is actually called a bibbed mallard, which is apparently a hybrid of a mallard and a domestic duck.

We also saw this mallard who lives in the neighborhood as well; his head seems more blue than green.

A couple more photos of Tux Duck.

Then we went to Cherokee Marsh, but at first we didn't see the pelicans. They weren't as close as on Sunday, but finally we did see them all hanging around the nameless island, so Travalon said we should call it Pelican Island.

Here are zoomed-in photos of them. You can see how much bigger than the geese they are.

In this photo, you can see some northern shovelers in the foreground.

Jilly Moose is already looking ahead to the next presidential election, and she made a poster for her moose Chambord. I had to figure out how to download it, and then find where it saved to, but I got it now.

I don't know how Chambord feels about either DEI hires or the DUI hires Dear Leader favors. I could go on and on about how the same people who never shut up about Hillary's emails now say the current group text fiasco is not a scandal, but they have no shame, so charges of hypocrisy don't even faze them. All I can say is that I'm very happy for the people I know who voted for Dear Leader that they were able to elect someone who agrees with their standards of morality, decency, and honor. Just know that if I leave the country, I'm not telling any of y'all where I'm going.

Famous Hat