Whatever Happened to Joey Banana?

 

This morning I still felt kind of off, but not as bad as yesterday. Fortunately I slept well last night, and it was my day to work from home anyway. Travalon didn't have to work today, so he walked with me at lunch on Governor's Island. That was about as exciting as my day got.

Travalon had a more exciting day. He had lunch at the bookstore in Watertown and then went to Oconomowoc. He fished but didn't catch anything. He met an old buddy to go swimming, and then they had a very late dinner. When he texted me that he was just leaving after dinner, I had already come home from Adoration and finished leading Night Prayer. I was a little short on steps, so I put on my high vis vest and went for a walk out in the dark. Now I am sitting on the porch, and a huge orange and brown moth is flying around outside. All day while I was working, hummingbirds came to our feeder. It was a good porch day.

Since I don't have anything else to say, I'll talk about my most popular written work, "Joey Banana." That's not the whole title, but offhand I can't remember what the whole title is, and anyway that's how people refer to it. I asked a couple of children years ago what I should write a story about, and one said multiple universes, and the other said a banana peel, so that was my inspiration. Joey keeps waking up and realizing he's in a parallel universe where bananas are round, where they live under water, etc., and then at one point all the Joeys converge. I think people just like the story because all the characters (including his brother Danny Banana) have Brooklyn accents. People would insist on doing dramatic readings of "Joey Banana" at Rich's house, and Tiffy's nieces, when they were little, said we should write a sequel where Joey goes to Banana Disney. That was a group effort, and my big contribution was that in the Enchanted Forest the birds don't sing, they play the saxophone. This story is old now; one of the little kids I originally wrote it for now has a little kid of her own. Maybe I should try to get it published. Which reminds me, the guy in Minneapolis who is so enamored of that choral work based on my poem "The Mystical Rose" sent me the sheet music he had prepared, and it looks great. Still, neither work will be the first thing of mine that was published, because I did have that article published in Guidepost magazine about our refrigerator. I even got paid! So no matter what happens with "Joey Banana" or "The Mystical Rose," I am a published author.

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God Only Knows

 

Today was a bad day to work at home, because they are redoing the siding on our condo, and it was very loud. Also, the workers were listening to loud ranchero music, and while I don't hate ranchero music, having to listen to it for hours is not conducive to concentrating. At least in the morning I got quite a bit done, before things got so loud. I need to do some training videos, but not with all that noise!

In the evening Travalon and I went with our neighbor to Mariner's for fish. This time I had the walleye, which is a bit more expensive but so worth it. Plus the portion is so generous that I will get to have more tomorrow. Our neighbor loves the dinner rolls there and says that is what she will miss most when she goes to Florida for the winter. On the other hand, we were talking about conch fritters, and you can get those in Florida but not up here. I said I felt bad because this morning I took down the hummingbird feeder so the workers wouldn't wreck it, thinking it wouldn't be a problem because I hadn't seen a hummingbird in over a week. Then, wouldn't you know a few minutes later one flew by looking for the feeder? So I put it out again, but the hummingbird never came back, and I took it down once the workers started pounding right around the porch. Our waitress said she has a plant that the hummingbirds love, and from her description we thought it might be a fuchsia. I said those have edible fruits, and that reminded me that on Wednesday I went around eating crabapples from the trees in our neighborhood. The one that had such wonderful fruit last year seems to have four very pale fruit, high up in the tree, and that's it. Makes sense, since it had hardly any blossoms on it this spring. But to my surprise, some of the other trees have the larger, delicious fruit. How did I not notice this before? I told our neighbor I'll eat practically anything, like one year we had a decorative sweet potato vine growing in a pot at the entrance to our condo association, and the president at the time told me to take it out in the fall. There were sweet potatoes in the roots, so Travalon fried them up, and we ate them. Delicious! And of course there was the spring when my neighbor and I found all those morel mushrooms in our neighborhood. They haven't come back.

Yesterday I didn't blog because the Packer game made me too grumpy. They didn't show it on TV, only on Amazon Prime, but Travalon has that so we were able to watch it. I'm kind of jealous of people who couldn't watch it - it was so bad! The first half they were very balanced: the offense stunk, the defense stunk, and special teams stunk too. Finally in the second half they started to play, but it was too late - the Lions were too far ahead. So they lost at home. 

The other day someone posted about people who say there must not be a god because bad things happen, and he argued about why this wasn't true. I said I think of it like taking a dog to the vet; the dog isn't able to understand why you are torturing it. Some guy responded to my comment by saying it was a bad analogy because dogs don't wonder, and because God could explain it to us if He chose. I found his arguments problematic because first of all he must never have been close to an animal, and secondly it's sheer hubris to think that we can understand at the same level as God. Just like I could have told Rodney that he needed a shot, but he wouldn't know what I was saying, God could try to explain His plan to us, but we don't have the capacity to understand it. I just loved that this guy really thought he was equal to God in understanding, and the problem is just that God isn't talking to him. Whatever, dude. You sit down with God and have that conversation, and let me know how it goes. I know from personal experience that it's better to just trust God to have a plan even when I don't know what He's up to. Could He explain it to me if He used small enough words? I doubt it. I'm not omniscient. What really kills me is that some of these same people think space aliens would be at a much higher level of understanding than we are, but then they think God would be equal to us. So do they really think space aliens know more than God? It boggles the mind.

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The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

 

This morning I was a tiny bit late for work because last night I forgot to refill the hummingbird feeder, and this morning I heard a hummingbird buzzing outside our window, so I quickly made some nectar. Only my easygoing coworker was on campus today, and he didn't care. When I went for my morning walk, I saw that the little tree that seemed to be dying the day I had the mystical experience last month has come back to life, so either the drought is over or the landscapers are finally watering it. I was very happy to see that.

Today we had a meeting of the leaders of the salaried and hourly shared governance, to talk about ageism at the university. We all agreed it was a problem, and that we need hard data to show it's a problem (for example, they didn't ask people's age ranges in a recent climate survey), but we aren't sure how to get the data we need to prove our point, or how we should approach administration once we have the data we need. We did agree this needs to be pursued further. One guy said an administrator actually said they don't bother giving raises to longtime workers because they're less likely to leave. Ouch!

Today was supposed to be horribly hot, and I had to walk to Adoration, but it really wasn't that bad. I planned to stop at Paul's Bookstore to get The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, since after reading about it I realized it was a summary of The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Western people unfamiliar with Buddhism. I was going to go to the Globe for dinner, but instead I went to Fair Trade for a chicken pesto sandwich and began reading the book, not from the start, but from a chapter that intrigued me. It said straight out what I had inferred from the original, ancient book - that these spiritual exercises can be done with a Christ-centric instead of Buddha-centric outlook. After Adoration I went to the Globe and had some kind of dessert that was small but expensive, but it was so exquisite that it was worth every penny. It was some sort of soft cheese flavored with pistachio, rose, and maybe saffron, in sweet milk. I savored it while sitting outside and continuing to read this book. It really brought me a lot of comfort, because I was wondering what I could do for our nephew during his bardo, and it said the best thing is to pray for him, which of course I'm already doing. When Travalon came to pick me up, I told him about the book, and how the spiritual exercises it suggested for the dead, like picturing them being surrounded by love, I had already instinctively done. I have no idea if our nephew is in Heaven or Purgatory, or if he's preparing for another incarnation, but I like to think we've done our part to aid his transition.

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Nikoheimer

 

Yesterday I worked from home, then my neighbor and I dressed in pink (and I wore Niko) to go to the Barbie movie. We wanted to go to the 6:00 showing, but it was sold out... and so was the 6:30 showing and the 7:00 showing. I think there was a really late showing, like 9:00, that we could have gotten into, but I had to work today. Instead, we went to Oppenheimer at 6:30, and that was so good. They even let us order off the children's menu, so I had a child-sized pizza, and it was perfect. Since I was wearing Niko, he got to watch the movie too, except when I had a napkin over him while I was eating. I don't want to get pizza sauce on my Niko! A lot of the other people in our theater were wearing pink, so they must also have been Barbie refugees. One woman said, "A lot of people are doing Barbenheimer, but we're doing Oppenbarbie because we watched Oppenheimer first." After the movie we bought tickets for Barbie for tomorrow.

I did take a couple of photos of lotuses blooming just off our dock.

Today I worked from home again, then I went to Adoration. While I was there, Travalon took photos of Squeaky the Hummingbird at our feeder.

After dinner I walked with my neighbor, and we saw this Barbie sunset. It was pinker in real life.

The other day I saw a faculty member who studies shamanism (he is Catholic himself), and I mentioned my thoughts about nonspiritual people having bad trips on psychedelic drugs. Not only did he tell me he thought I was totally right about that, he said at our university, if they are giving a person a dose of psychedelics and that person has no religious background, they are extra careful to guide their trip. I thought that was extraordinary: at a secular university, they tacitly acknowledge that a lack of religion in a person's life makes them vulnerable to having their mind blown by seeing the spiritual realm. Why is nobody talking about this?? I know I often mock people who want "instant enlightenment" without putting in the hard work, but if they try to take a pill to become enlightened without the knowledge first, it's not just cheating, it's downright dangerous for them! I have run into people now and then, usually from the hippie generation so about fifteen years older than I am, who scorn religion but seemed fascinated by me. I have often felt like I could sell them on some garbage to become "instantly enlightened," but of course I couldn't do that and live with myself, and when they hear the answer to my spiritual development is sooo boring (Mass and the Rosary), they tune out. But now I'm thinking I need to save these people from doing something that potentially blows their minds, and not in a good way.

Travalon wants me to note that he is "un-adulting" by listening to 80's music while making the stuffies dance. It's like their own little nightclub.

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Strangely Satisfying Day

 

I forgot to mention that last night Travalon and I played tennis, and my FitBit said we did seventeen minutes of "sport." The cranes, who usually don't stay in one place very long, stood there the whole time we played and watched us. I'd rather have modern dinosaurs watching us than actual humans, since I don't know what goes through their crane brains, but they probably aren't thinking about how much we suck. Even after Travalon lobbed the ball at the fence and missed so it went sailing over, which we took as our cue to pack it up for the night, the cranes continues to stand there, fascinated. I can't tell if they love tennis or are just so puzzled by it that they are trying to figure it out. Sometimes the neighbor I walk with and I will do sideways stepping, and that always gets the cranes' attention too. "Hey, wait a minute - humans aren't supposed to move like that!"

Speaking of the modern dinosaurs all around us in the avian realm, Squeaky the Hummingbird was really hitting the sauce tonight, and then I noticed that she seemed really fat. Sometimes Travalon calls her Squishy (she doesn't answer to either name), and I thought she actually is getting squishy. Was I feeding her so much that she was going to get too fat to fly? But then it occurred to me that maybe she is temporarily plump because she's full of eggs. That's an exciting thought! She does seem to have a nest nearby. One thing this world could use is more hummingbirds, even bossy ones like Squeaky.

Today I had to be on campus because I was the only staff person onsite, and our chair was hosting an all-day meeting. Panera was supposed to deliver breakfast at 8:30, so the chair and I were rushing to get there before that, but we both got stuck in traffic and were a couple of minutes late. But guess what? The Panera delivery person got stuck in the same traffic, so she got there at the same time. The chair had asked me to order for ten and then gave me an attendance list with twelve names, so I was sure there would be no leftovers, but she went and picked up half a dozen more pastries. For lunch they had a buffet from Banzo for ten, and there were plenty of leftovers from that too. I ate way too much and haven't eaten dinner yet, and it's now 10:10 pm. 

I have been helping Religious Studies out, and I had ordered some books from Amazon for a professor, so Amazon sent me an email that they had been delivered "to the mailroom." I didn't know which mailroom they meant (I think this was on Tuesday), but I emailed the professor, and she said it was the mailroom of the big building next door to her building. I emailed Hardingfele, who works in the big building, so she went to look for them, but in the interim someone had retrieved them for the professor, so Hardingfele didn't find them. I emailed her "nvr mnd" because the professor had the books, and I didn't think anything more about it until Hardingfele emailed me today that there was another package for this professor in her building's mailroom. She rescued it just in time, because the professor's room number in her own building is the same as Kinesthesiology (why does spellcheck not recognize this word??) in Hardingfele's building, so the student hourlies were about to take the package to Kinesthesiology. I went to Hardingfele's office, and we walked the book safely over to the professor's mailbox. Not all heroes wear capes! Sometimes we wear khakis.

I forgot to mention the mock oranges and these flowers in yesterday's post about the wave of fragrant trees:

My phone says it is a basswood tree. It smells so good!

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Squeaky's Back!

 

I meant to get our hummingbird feeder up last Thursday, and then Friday morning I saw Squeaky the Hummingbird flying around, looking for it. At least she didn't sit on the railing and glare at me like last year. I put it up, and she makes these squeaky sounds when she drinks out of it. To our human ears, it sounds very happy and cute, like she's saying, "I LOVE nectar!" But really, knowing her bossy personality (I've seen her chase away another hummingbird and even a wasp), I'm wondering if she's really saying, "Back off, beeyotches - it's all MINE!" We just think little things are cute, even if to other small things they are total Karens. According to scientists, elephants have the same reaction to us - they think humans are TOTES ADORBS. But in my case, I'm only partly adorbs.

Yesterday and today I was on campus because I had to participate in interviews. They were over the lunch hour, which bummed me out, but then I got an email: "Choose your lunch." Whoa, free lunch?!? So I did, and yesterday I got there way early because I'm not quite as slow as I think, and there was my lunch so I ate half of it before the others got there. (It was so big that I had to take the other half with me, but everyone else ate their whole lunch, and they're all thinner! What???) Today I got there early again, and I had chosen an Italian sandwich, but there were no Italian sandwiches, there were only ham sandwiches and tofu sandwiches. Since half the sandwiches were tofu but I doubted that half of us were vegetarians, judging by our lunches yesterday, I took one for the team and took a tofu sandwich. It wasn't that good. I do like participating in the interview process because it makes me feel kind of important, like I'm representing all the hourly employees with my presence, asking questions, and people care about my opinions. Plus, FREE LUNCH.

I love how the university landscapers plant trees and shrubs that flower in succession. First the magnolias, then the crabapples, then the lilacs, then the honey locusts, and now the Japanese lilac trees. They all smell so good! Right now should also be prime time for the tulip trees, which don't have a scent that I have noticed. Yesterday when I went to pick up my complimentary Forward tickets, I stopped to see the tulip trees by the math building, and they were covered in blossoms, but a lot were past their prime.

Is this because of the drought we're having? 

Time for some DuoLingo bragging!

The big excitement today was that, as I was going home, there was a lot of traffic around Warner Park for the Mallards game. Some pedestrians crossed the road in front of me, including a big black dog, then I turned the corner... and there was a cop pulling me over. I had no idea why, and he asked if I'd seen the pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said I'd seen a bunch of them, but he claims there was some other one in the crosswalk but that I just drove by them. He said this guy was wearing a red shirt and an orange backpack, so he sounds hard to miss, but I don't remember seeing anyone like that. The cop just gave me a warning, but he did say I was driving around with a license that expired on my last birthday. I was shocked: "Don't they send you a reminder?" and he said they probably did. So now I have to get a new license ASAP. At least the cop was nice to me. I haven't been pulled over in years, but the last one was a jerk. He was the only one who ever gave me a ticket. Hopefully it is many years before I next get pulled over!

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The "I'm Not a Virgo" Necklace

 

This weekend Travalon and I went our separate ways. He went with his buddy up to Hayward, where they went tubing for over three hours on the Namekagon River and stayed at a lodge right on beautiful Little Round Lake. This is his old college buddy who lives in Japan, the one whose wedding we went to in Hawaii. He misses Wisconsin fish fries, so they went to an excellent one on Saturday night at Long Lost Lake Lodge. Today they did a long hike on Rib Mountain on their way back south. He had a fantastic time.

Meanwhile, Saturday morning I sat on our porch, listening to the rain and watching the hummingbirds. When Tiffy came to town, we had lunch at a Mexican restaurant and then hiked on the boardwalks that are part of the Ice Age Trail out in Cross Plains before heading to the outdoor theater in Spring Green. We saw an adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility which was very enjoyable. We went to our hotel in Dodgeville, which seemed a little sketchy in that everyone who worked behind the desk always had a big, grim dog with them. However, it was a perfectly serviceable hotel.

Yesterday we went to Mass at St. Joseph's in Dodgeville, and it was a wonderfully short Mass because it seems the organist never showed up - they had hymns listed on the hymn board, but there was no music. The priest was young and lively. Then we had a light brunch at a cafe in town before heading to Galena. Tiffy really liked Galena; she had thought it would be a really bougie town like Kohler when I said there were a lot of boutiques there, but she loved how old and historical it was. The red brick buildings set into a hill overlooking the river really are very pretty. We shopped and bought crystals, then we sat on a balcony drinking chocolate avocado smoothies and listening to a woman folk singer do 80's pop songs. We had Tiffy's (early) birthday dinner at a Japanese restaurant, where we split a rainbow sushi roll and a hibachi for two and tempura green tea ice cream for dessert. We went back to the hotel and indulged in the hot tub (there was no pool), then we just talked for hours.

This morning we drove back to town and had brunch (and way too much Kona coffee) at the Pancake Cafe, then we took a two-hour hike at Cherokee Marsh with Rich and Kathbert. They were joking about the (imaginary) aboriginal marsh people, and Rich said, "They're Marshians!" (You might have to say that joke out loud to get it.) Tiffy and I recovered on my porch with bananas and sports drinks, and we watched the hummingbirds. One always makes happy squeaky noises, so I call her "Squeaky." There is another female one who never squeaks - at least I assume it is a different bird, because there are at least two that I have watched chasing each other. Now and then I see the male, who also makes no noise. Then we went to a Venezuelan restaurant for dinner, and then Tiffy headed home and Travalon returned and told me about his adventures. I got him a Yellow Submarine shirt at his favorite shop in Galena. One other thing I got worth noting: one shop had stone necklaces for each zodiac sign except Tiffy's, which she noted, and I said, "They're probably sold out because it's your birthday month," and she said, "Oh, yeah." I got the Capricorn one, which is snowflake obsidian (I'm wearing it now), and the proprietress asked if we needed anything, so I said, "My friend can't find the necklace for her sign." She said she had a secret stash, and Tiffy didn't like the carnelian necklaces, but I loved one and bought it, even though I am not a Virgo and in fact have no Virgo in my chart whatsoever. The proprietress said she could barely keep carnelian in stock because of a TikTok craze, so later I looked it up, and the TikTokers claim carnelian makes you irresistible to the opposite gender. I said, "Are you sure you don't want this necklace, Tiffy? I already have a husband. Besides, it has a Virgo symbol on it," but she doesn't like the color. She said, "Take the symbol off and wear it yourself. I don't like it." So maybe at some point I'll model my "I'm not a Virgo" necklace for my gentle readers.

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Beach Boys Hawaiian Shirt

 

Today was crazy as I prepared for my vacation, but I did get to work from home, so I saw the hummingbirds. One kept having a fight with a wasp, and then two of them were chasing each other, and several times I saw the male with his beautiful dark red throat. They are so much fun.

Travalon had the day off of work, and he went swimming, hiking, and fishing and actually caught a couple of fish, but he didn't keep them. He also went antiquing. At the antiques mall in Columbus I had seen a very cute little doll, but it was in a case with some weird racist stuff, so I was afraid it was racist too. Then I saw the same sorts of dolls at Africa Fest - they are African dolls made by Africans for their children, so not racist at all. They are made by the Ndebele people of South Africa. Travalon actually found two at the antiques mall, and he sent me photos to make sure they were what I wanted.

Yes! I wanted them! Here they are together at my house.

An exciting thing came in the mail today - Travalon's Beach Boys Hawaiian shirt! We went to a fish fry with a couple of neighbors, and one took this photo of us. (They both LOVED the shirt!)

Poor Travalon was the only man in the group, but he said he had a pretty good time. Then he and I went to Capitol Brewery to see the Red Hot Horn Dawgs. They were so good!

Here we are, listening to them.

They played a bunch of tropical songs in their last set, so we danced. Maybe that worked off a fraction of the fish fry... When we came home, I did DuoLingo, and here are some weird sentences.

There are weirder ones. Stay tuned... And here are some shots of fungus in the North Woods. First are some impressive yellow mushrooms on a tree on Mount Zion in Ironwood.

And here are some cute mushrooms we saw near the waterfalls.

I hope that you enjoyed this blog post, because it might be the last one for a few days. Tiffy and I are going to Galena for the long weekend, and after that Anna Banana II is coming to town, so it's hard to say when I will next get a chance to blog.

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Wausau River Walk

I forgot to mention yesterday that, before we saw the hummingbird sitting outside our porch, we went to the nearby bluff with our neighbor for a walk. She really loved it, so we took her by the little pond, and there we saw a great blue heron. But we didn't have our good cameras with us. I do have a couple more photos of the little hummingbird. (It was hard to find everything while Blogspot was acting so wonky about putting photos onto my posts, but today it is back to behaving.)

On our way back home from up north on Monday, Travalon had wanted to stop into Wausau and walk along "the River Walk." I asked if he knew where it was, and he said no, he just assumed there was one since the Wisconsin River flows through the middle of the city, so I said let's leave that for another time and just get home. Once we were back home, I did some research and discovered there is a wonderful River Walk in Wausau that even goes onto three islands. Islands?! I was sold!

We drove there and had lunch at Subway, which isn't that notable except that the building was so crazy-looking.

Then we went to Oak Island Park and took a hike on the Isle of Ferns. Here is a view from the bridge to the island.

And here is the sign welcoming you to the island.

There are lots of fun bridges on the island.

And lots of ferns - hence the name.

And beautiful views of the river.

And a creek with red water.

Then we walked north along the River Walk.

We passed a really cool railroad bridge.

We passed one spot where there were three churches.

We could see downtown from the bridge to Barker-Stewart Island.

We saw a momma duck with a bunch of babies.

On the island are the ruins of the Barker and Stewart Mill, founded in 1880.

Back on the River Walk, we had to cross a fun bridge spanning a tributary of the Wisconsin River.

When we looked to the east, we could see another bridge spanning the tributary, and it had waterfalls!

We passed a plaza with a lot of flags.

And an incredibly beautiful rose.

We went all the way to the north end of the River Walk, and we saw lots of wild roses.

We also saw this cute island. There is no bridge to it.

On the way back, I took a picture of these red-tinted flowering grasses.

Travalon took a picture of this goose family.

He also took a picture of the old railroad station. He says there was a drawing of it in an ad for Wausau Insurance years ago, where they asked people to try to pronounce "Wausau." I vaguely remember the ad, but not the railroad station.

We saw this duck swimming, and as Travalon took a picture of it, it flew away. I'm not sure what it is, but it seems to have a crest, so definitely not a mallard.

Travalon took this beautiful picture of the River Walk path.

By then we had walked about seven miles, so we took a break from walking to go to an antiques store where everything is jumbled together randomly and there are no prices listed - you have to ask the guy. He ended up just giving me a stuffed goose and a plastic rosary that is turquoise and black. We did buy an old high school basketball calendar for Travalon and some paintbrushes for me that were just the size I was looking for.

After that, we went to Riverside Park and walked out to Picnic Island.

We found this brave little flower that had somehow escaped the mower.

Finally, we went to a park on a small peninsula in Lake Wausau. We saw a great blue heron fly overhead, and Travalon managed to get a picture of it. (We also saw a young bald eagle fly overhead on Barker-Stewart Island, but we didn't get a picture of that.)

Here I am with Lake Wausau and Rib Mountain behind me.

And speaking of mountains, here is our own neighborhood "mountain," Mount Wank, at sunset.

So that was our island-filled day today. We walked over nine miles altogether!

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