A Day in the Life of a Basketball Widow

 

Today Travalon was at State Tournament for boys' basketball all day with his high school buddy and the buddy's oldest daughter, so I had big plans for myself. I was going to get a haircut and then get lunch, but I was running a bit early and was very hungry, so I went to Ian's Pizza first because the Red Cross had given me a coupon for one free slice of pizza the last time I gave blood. It was a gorgeous day, so I walked to the other side of Capitol Square for my haircut and then went back to my old church, where I had parked. There was a bit of time before my next activity, so I went into the Adoration Chapel and prayed a rosary. Usually I'm afraid to do that on Saturday afternoons because I used to get stuck in there when everyone else would leave, but now they have little curtains you can draw around the Host if you are alone and have to leave, and wouldn't you know that this time there were a number of other people in there, and they didn't leave the moment I arrived. There had been a cheap little plastic rosary on the windowsill when I was there on Tuesday for my Adoration hour, and someone had put it on the rosary hook in the chapel, so I prayed with it. I also tested it to see if it would glow in the dark, since it looked like it would. Answer: yes, it does.

My next stop was the Chazen Museum for a demonstration of rosemaling hosted by our department and some other departments. The artist painted an enormous canvas while a band of three fiddles, a mandolin, and a guitar played Norwegian music. Here is the canvas just after she had started.

Here she has added more detail.

At intermission it looked like this.

I was dying of thirst and had a yuzu iced tea because there is a little cafe in the museum now, but it only helped somewhat, so at intermission I headed home. Sorry, I cannot show you the finished painting. Usually rosemaling is done on much smaller objects, like plates or hardanger fiddles. It was very soothing to watch this woman paint, but I can only stand Norwegian music for so long, and besides, I needed some time to get ready for the fast Irish session tonight.

I got to my car right at the start of La Junta, the salsa program on the community radio every Saturday afternoon. I'd given up listening to music in the car for Lent, having to drive in contemplative silence, but since Saturday afternoon kind of counts as Sunday (at least for Mass), I figured I could listen. Usually when I'm in Travalon's car, they play all sorts of weird Latin music, but today they played straight-up salsa, and it was fantastic. Back home I went out on our porch and streamed the station on my laptop as I did Wordle and crossword puzzles. Travalon had brought some Indian food home for me, grilled lamb and spicy rice and plantains, and it was so good! I also drank a Bai and lots of water.

Famie my Irish teacher and I said we would try to get to the Irish session at Lakeside early to get chairs, but of course we were both running late and had to drag chairs in from the back room. It was so crowded! Not just with musicians but also with people listening. It was very hot in there, so I was glad to be wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt because it had been so warm out. We sat beside a very friendly woman, and the three of us tried to remember the names of the tunes we were playing. Sometimes you hear a tune and find you can play it, but you can't remember what it's called for anything. That's what's handy about the Ballydesmond Polkas - they say their own name. I didn't claim my free drink tonight, since I was still feeling a bit dehydrated, but they have free water there so I drank plenty of that. People also gave us pistachio fudge that was amazing and chocolate chip cookies that were just meh - I think they were store-bought, not homemade. Since Saturday night is basically Sunday, I indulged in both even though I have given up sweets for Lent. We played Irish tunes well into the night, but I still beat Travalon home. This is one of his favorite weekends of the year, and he had a fabulous time... and so did I!

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Morgridge Building Tour

 

Today was a surprisingly fun day on campus, but I don't feel like a lot of work got done. I was working in the morning and then got so hungry at 10:30 that I ate the slice of pizza that Travalon got for me last night. Then Seabird and I went on a tour of the new Morgridge Building, which involved going up six flights of stairs (according to my phone), and some of them were very scary so I gave up and took the elevator up. However, that had a strange squeak that was wigging out the students in it, so it wasn't much less scary than the crazy staircases. I should have taken a photo of the stairs so you could see what I mean. There were terraces out on the third and seventh floor, and those were cool. Here are some photos.

On the sixth floor was a room with little robots that play soccer.

Later in the day a faculty member came to my office with a donut for me, so I ate it. Then a colleague said her coworker's birthday was today, so Seabird and I went up there, and I sang him "Happy Birthday" in Basque. He had one sweet potato donut left, so Seabird and I split it. From our colleague's office window, you could see lots of fall colors on campus.

After work we had a sort-of Union meeting, because our local was just merged with another local so we can't do real business anymore. We had pizza, so what a day of nutrition for me: pizza for lunch, pizza for dinner, and a donut and a half for snacks. I also brought some to Travalon because the only ones eating it were me and the guy who looks like a leprechaun; only one other officer showed up, and she can't eat pizza because she's allergic to garlic. We already share an office with the other local, so it's not like we have to move anything. The weird thing is the international said we have to clear out our bank account, send it to them, and they will send it to the other local. We thought we would just write the other local a check. Also, we have three CDs and will get penalties if we cash them out, so obviously that isn't ideal. We're waiting to hear if those can be handled another way. It seemed like a good idea a couple of years ago to stretch our thin resources, but now it's becoming an issue.

Across town, Jilly Moose also has fall colors where she lives.

I don't think this year will be as colorful as other years because of the drought conditions, but things are finally starting to get going with the fall colors. I hope we can get to Devil's Lake soon to check out how the trees are doing there.

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So Much Band Drama

 

Today I worked on campus, had two meetings, and went to an early music concert. One of the fiddlers from my band was there, so I was talking to her about our band drama (more on that in a second), and then I saw that three rows ahead of us there was someone who looked very much like our guitarist. Was it? I've never known her to have any interest in the music of Bach. If it was her, did she even hear me? 

After working a whole day in my still under-the-weather state, I was just going to go home and relax, but an email arrived reminding me that the East Side Club was having an emergency meeting to discuss replacing the awning over the front entrance, and there would be free pizza and beer. You could also log in on Zoom, so I was thinking I'd just go home and do that, but then I thought, "I've been on a computer all day. Time to interact with people in real life." So I went and got my free glass of Spotted Cow, but all that was left of the pizza were some tiny scraps of very cold cheese pizza. I sat at a table, and nobody sat with me. The meeting took about ten minutes, so I could have just gone home if I hadn't had that beer. The club director said she'd be making some more pizza, so I convinced Travalon to come after work, and one woman did come over and talk to me for a bit. They brought out a fresh pizza just before Travalon arrived, so I snagged a piece for him and took a teeny piece for myself. It was really good, with bacon on it and kind of spicy. Everyone else wanted some pizza too, so I didn't take any more. By then they were out of Spotted Cow, so Travalon had to have Moon Man, which is an IPA, and he doesn't like those, but it was that or Bud Light. Then they brought out a sausage pizza, so I had one more teeny piece, and Travalon took a few pieces. It was cut into tons of square pieces, not the usual slices. We did have some more dinner at home after that, since dribs and drabs of pizza wasn't quite enough.

So... the band drama. On Sunday I thought we had a great practice, where our bass player had gone through our online database of tunes and picked out about twenty that worked with the dances she wanted to do and put them into medleys. She said we needed to learn to play them a bit faster, like 108/110 beats per minute. Our guitarist objected that we didn't know all these tunes, so the bassist seemed puzzled: why were they in our database? The fiddler who also likes early music said they are tunes we hope to learn someday. Well, it was two months until our gig, so why not learn them now? I thought all of this seemed very reasonable, and it seemed that our bass player was going to be our caller and rehabilitate our image, maybe get us off the blacklist. However, on Monday our guitarist highlighted the tunes we didn't know yet in our bassist's email and said it was too many tunes for the length of the gig, so we shouldn't bother with the ones we didn't know. This made the bassist so mad that she said she was done with us, so take her image off our social media page. Hardingfelde emailed someone about calling for us instead, but that person forwarded our message to the caller who originally got mad at us, and she apparently forwarded it to the bassist, who said we will never find another caller who wants to work with us, so just let her take over the gig because she can find some musicians who would be willing to do what she wants. Hardingfele emailed us, taking off the bass player, and I replied that I couldn't blame her for being mad at us. So far the guitarist hasn't weighed in, but the fiddler thinks we can still salvage things. I just went to our social media page, and I see that the guitarist has not updated the post saying we'd be playing this gig, and the cover photo prominently features the bassist. Denial ain't just a river. We will never get another dance gig, or maybe any gig other than playing for Make Music Madison, when anyone can say they're playing in public. Will this finally be the end of our band?

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Research Jam Session

 

Yesterday I worked on campus because we had a co-working session for FART 5, and I love those. I walked with Hardingfele at lunch and tried to ask if any of my novel is salvageable, since she is the only other person who has ever read it, and she couldn't remember anything but the protagonist's name. Fair enough, it's been many years. Then I took the bus to adoration, and Travalon came to meet me so we could go to the baked wings place on State Street that he waited so patiently for. Seriously, it took that place years to open - you'd see the sign "Baked Wings," but it was empty. Always giving false hope, but now it gives real hope, or at least baked wings.

Today Travalon drove me to work again, and I had a meeting with the head of one section about what funds they have for the coming year. There was no time to walk with Seabird between that meeting and our department staff meeting at one, and Wednesday is the only day we are both on campus nowadays. However, soon she will be moving to my building, so it would be easy to see her even if we only had fifteen minutes to walk, like today.

The fun thing I did today was go to a research study on community-building using music improv. We aren't supposed to discuss the session, which I get, since it's part of the guy's thesis research, but I will say that we were supposed to improvise on a four-note repeating phrase, and I thought it sounded like flamenco. I said, "It's E Phrygian with a raised third, like they use in flamenco," and another person said, "You are really overthinking this." Maybe I do, and maybe that's because for years I did music by instinct, and then I found out there were words for all these things I noticed, so now I'm all excited to use my words. The problem is that a lot of other people don't understand them.

Afterwards Travalon and I met at the Union Terrace, as we used to do on Wednesdays in the summer. On Wednesdays the sailboats are out racing with their spinnakers up, and it's so relaxing to watch the colorful triangles gliding across the water. Wednesdays are also Open Mic Night on the Terrace, and tonight they started with the Raging Grannies, a protest choir of old ladies in crazy hats. Since I'm getting up there in age, and I love to sing, protest, and wear crazy hats, I may have to consider joining them. Art Paul Schlosser also sang some of his silly songs with the kazoo solos, and a girl with a pretty good voice sang who I swear sang last week, even the same songs. We ordered a pizza for dinner, and it was taking so long for our buzzer to go off that I went in to ask about it. First the guy told me they made the wrong pizza and they were going to remake it. I asked, "What kind of pizza did they make?" and he said, "They put every topping on it but one." While Travalon wouldn't have eaten that, it sounded good to me, so I figured he could just pick the veggies off, and I asked if we could have it anyway. The guy left and came back with a pizza, and this time he said it was the right pizza but they had burned it a little, so they were going to remake it. I was too hungry to bother with that, and only a little bit was burned, so I took it. When we took the burned part off, it wasn't even a whole slice worth, and we both had enough for dinner tonight plus some leftovers. It was much cooler at the Terrace than last week, but we had come prepared with jackets, so we had a fine time. I kept seeing people who looked familiar, even a woman from my improv just a couple of hours earlier. I guess everyone ends up at the Terrace sooner or later.

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Possible Stand-Up Routine?

 

The weather was beautiful again today, and I walked with Hardingfele. (My colleague is back in the country, after her flight was canceled and she had to take an arduous three-stop flight back, but she worked from home today.) It's fun to have someone to commiserate (or, to use a technical term, bitch) with about politics, bandmates, and the stupid new systems they are always coming up with at work. She is a grant administrator, so she has to use the new system for that, while I was told that with the three grants I was doing a year I'd never learn the new system so pre-award was taken off my plate. (Can't say I'm sorry about that.) Also, we have no federal grants while she deals with plenty of them. I am frustrated that the "training" for the new financial system we will go to in July consists of videos and absolutely no hands-on training in a test environment. My current boss and I have already identified ways this new system is set up for failure, and who knows how many more will come to light once I can actually use it?

After work I had to miss a free lesson in Irish dancing at the Monona Terrace for our Union meeting, because we were going to have elections at this meeting... only we were one person short of quorum. D'oh! So it wouldn't have mattered if I had skipped the meeting - what difference does it make if you're one or two people short of quorum?

At least I was well-caffeinated today: I had my usual cup of coffee in the morning before heading to work, then late morning our chair made a strong cup of coffee for me, and then a grad student bought me a latte midafternoon. I was also well pizza'd because I had leftover pizza for lunch... and then I went to grab my falafel and hummus sandwich for dinner before the Union meeting, but there was leftover pizza in the fridge from the grad student recruitment lunch, so I had that instead. That's okay, the sandwich will be perfect for lunch tomorrow - no meat on Fridays in Lent!

The craziest thing is that this morning I felt extra witty chatting with my shuttle buddy, and then I thought, "If you only take my side of the conversation, it could almost be a standup comedy routine." So I tried it out on Travalon, and he laughed. Here it is, more or less (I'm not quoting myself exactly - my memory is no longer good enough for that):

I've been getting these emails lately saying, "Take this quiz to find out when you will die." Who wants to know that? Who would actually take that quiz? I just deleted it the first time, but they keep sending it! If they send it to me one more time, I can tell them exactly when they're going to die! It makes me long for the good, old days when annoying mail meant credit card offers that actually came in the snail mail. Did you used to get those? Most of them were boring, "Sign up now and get 3.5% introductory interest," but I remember I got one for baseball fans, where you could use your points for baseball-related stuff, and then I got one for extreme sports, where you could use your points to buy extreme sport equipment. Extreme sports? Have they seen me?? I'm terrified of heights! What if your parachute didn't open? You'd have all that time to think about it before hitting the ground! If they sent me that email quiz to find out when I was going to die, I'd be like, "Yeah, in 5.3 seconds!" I did think about hang-gliding once, but I talked to a hang-gliding instructor, and he said, "You never die the first time. There's what we call the Coffin Stage when you think you know what you're doing, and you forget a step. That's when it happens." Oh, and the weirdest credit card offer I got was for the Astro-Card, where you could get your sign of the zodiac on your credit card, and your monthly statement would come with a horoscope. So what mailing list was I on that they thought I was interested in baseball, extreme sports, and astrology? Does this person exist? I'd love to meet them. Maybe they sent them to me because of that time I went hang-gliding into Wrigley Stadium, hollering, "I'm a Capricorn!" Thank you so much, I'm here all week.

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Romantic Valentine's Day Dinner (Two Days Late)

 

This morning after Mass, Travalon said we could go to Half-Priced Books to look for a book that the Shamrock Club will discuss at their book study. I have never gone to their book study, but everyone says how fun it is, and this particular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, intrigued me. We went to the east side store, but they didn't have it; however, the west side store did, so we drove there, and as we listened to R&B music while driving the Beltline, I drifted off a bit. Travalon also found some books, and a Dudley Do-Right Funko Pop. There was a book about astrology there that I didn't get, but I did turn to the section on "The Sagittarius Spouse," and it said they wouldn't be home much because they are so ambitious in their careers. That doesn't sound anything like Travalon, who (like me) works to live. He doesn't live to work.

It was a cold day, but sunny, so we went for a walk along the canal at Tenney Park. Tons of people were ice skating at the park, and when I used the bathroom, it smelled like the hot chocolate they sell at the concession stand. We went home and made our own hot chocolate, and I checked my email as I drank it... and saw we had missed a Members Social at the East Side Club, with free pizza and some sort of trivia contest. So bummed! It's our fault for not putting it on the calendar, but why send a reminder email two hours before the event? Why not a day or two ahead of time? If they hadn't sent the reminder email at all, then I wouldn't have felt bad because I would have completely forgotten that we missed it.

We did see some mallards and red-headed ducks at Tenney Park.

They kept diving under the water - maybe it was warmer than the air!

Since it was such a sunny day, we hoped there might be a spectacular sunset, but it was kind of meh.

Since we had missed the free pizza for lunch, we went to It's Good for You Pizza for dinner, which is Neapolitan style and way better than the frozen pizzas they have at the East Side Club. They make your pizza right there in front of you in a big pizza oven labeled "microwave." They also had these cute cakes for the Valentine's Day holiday, and since we hadn't been able to go out on the actual day, we each had one.

It was a chocolate cake with cherry filling in a white chocolate shell, with cocoa powder sprinkled beneath it and a bit of cayenne powder sprinkled on the top. We hadn't realized it was cayenne powder, so the kick came as a bit of a surprise. They even gave us a tiny wooden hammer to crack the white chocolate shell, although it was totally ineffective. We just ended up biting into them - not elegant, but effective. 

Travalon drove me to band practice, since the roads are still pretty bad, and then he went to a video arcade. He played "Mike Tyson's Punch Out" and still can't get past Bald Bull, just like when he was a kid.

He said there are instructions online for beating him in the modern game, but this is the original game from 1984. Travalon knocked him down a few times, but Bald Bull still knocks him out every time.

Our practice was much better than some of the recent ones have been, which is good, since it's the last one before our gig. Now it turns out our bass player can't make the gig, and Hardingfele (who arranged the gig for us) is going to be late because of a work function. And then we just found out about an emerita member's 90th birthday party the same day as the Shamrock Club St. Patrick's Day Party, so I will have to come late, and Hardingfele will have to leave early, but the band will play there too. I guess we are all very busy ladies! I thought Hardingfele was going to invite Crochet Girl, who plays violin, to join our band, but either Crochet Girl said no or (more likely) Hardingfele hasn't gotten around to it yet. I was happy that Travalon arrived while we were playing "Elizabeta," a cumbia in E minor that is one of my favorite songs that we do. He agreed that it is a fun song. It's the closest to playing in a salsa band that I may get in this life.

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These Lyrics Really Speak to Me

 

Yesterday was very cold, but I could work from home and was hoping I wouldn't have to leave the house. Travalon didn't have to work because there was no school due to the cold, so he was home with me, coloring in his Beatles coloring book as I worked. I kept checking to see if the Adoration Chapel had been closed due to the cold, but it hadn't, so I had to go. Travalon decided he would take me, and he had fun hanging out on State Street. I was surprised because there was a loud gathering in the church hall, and then they all went upstairs. It's lovely that events are happening at my church again, but they're never anything that I am privy to. 

Today I worked on campus, and not only was it cold, but it was snowing as well. I had to meet the pizza delivery driver to get the food for a meeting that I wasn't part of, but then my colleague didn't want to walk outside, so I took a short walk outside and then got back in time to have some leftover pizza. Fetalicious, my favorite! It has feta and spinach. 

Coming home was scary with the falling snow. The shuttle that usually takes half an hour took over forty minutes, and then my drive home was even slower. To my surprise, Travalon had beaten me home even though I caught the shuttle before my usual one. We headed to Mamastep's birthday party at the Nitty Gritty in Sun Prairie, and we sat by the couple we had sat by last year. I got along with the woman so well that she friended me on social media, but we haven't seen them since then. Mamastep said we should all wear crazy hats or crowns, so a lot of the women had tiaras, and one had a very impressive crown. I wore my silver hat that kind of looks like a crown. One woman had what looked like an ancient Egyptian headdress. The men had less interesting hats, if they wore them at all, but Travalon did wear the Croatian sausage baseball hat that Cecil Markovitch had given him. (Cecil and I have matching ones.) We talked about social media reels, like the guy who bakes old recipes and the woman who critiques fashion, and I showed them my latest obsession: Adam Rose doing a duet with a person playing a chord progression. The original video has the letters of the notes being played, and Adam Rose said, "These lyrics really spoke to me, so I had to do a duet." He has a really good voice, but it's the way he interprets the "lyrics" that kills me. Here it is:

Someone pointed out in the comments under the video that this is a stealth Rick Roll, because the chord progression (which is lovely) is from "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. All I know is that I could watch this video one hundred times and never get sick of it. The lyrics really speak to me too!

I did forget to bring up Philomena Crunk while we were talking about videos. She's my other obsession lately.

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Jammin' in Colorado

 

Most of today was driving. It takes a long time to get through Kansas, but we did stop for a short hike at the Flagler Reservoir in eastern Colorado. We saw one peak in the distance, and Travalon wondered if it was a fata morgana, since we were too far east to see the Rockies, but it was Pike's Peak. Finally we did see the Rockies in the distance, just as the sun was going down. We hit Denver right at rush hour, but once we got to our hotel and unpacked a bit, my aunt and uncle came and picked us up. I brought the mandolin so we could jam.

My cousins made us pizzas - they were so tasty! We all sat around talking until we were done eating, then my uncle and I jammed. I had two songs I wanted to do, "Fat Man" by Jethro Tull (since it has a mandolin part) and "John Barleycorn" by Traffic, which is actually an old folk song. Travalon really wanted us to do "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, since we had done an okay job on it back in May when my aunt and uncle came to our town. I had not practiced any of these songs, but this is what I gleaned from this jam session:

"Fat Man" is in C minor. Why would a mandolin player write anything in that key? It's got flats! But he isn't playing chords, so I just played the riff he keeps playing over and over.

"The Ballad of Curtis Loew" is in E, which has too many sharps, but at least it doesn't have flats. I figured out where to play the E, the B7, and the A (1, 4, and 5 chords), but there was some chord in the bridge that I never got right. We looked it up, and turns out it's an F#. This is not a hard chord to play, but somehow I never figured it out. 

"John Barleycorn" is by far my favorite of the three. I love the slightly creepy words about how everyone is torturing John Barleycorn, as if he were a person and not barley. I read about the song on Wikipedia, and it's a very old English/Scottish folk song, the point being that people are cruel to the plant when creating beer, but the plant gets its revenge by getting people drunk. One woman speculated that it was based on some pagan myth about the plant being killed by people, resurrecting (i.e., the seed germinates), and then people drink its blood. Huh... is Jesus actually a plant who was incarnated as a human? I could see God being a tree. That's no weirder than his being an old white guy with a beard. Anyway, the song is in E minor, which is super easy to play on the mandolin because it's basically G, only minor. However, some of the chords didn't seem straightforward, so I'm wondering if it's actually in the Dorian mode. Old tunes often are.

Feel free to correct me in the comments if I am off-base about any of these songs. Or feel free to suggest other songs my uncle could play on the flute while I play on the mandolin.

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Amnicon Falls and Pattison State Parks

 

So here I am blogging a second time today. After I blogged this morning, Travalon and I went to a coffee place called Coffee Cabin that was so cute inside, like a rustic cabin, that I wanted to take a photo, but there were too many people who would be in the photo. Then we set out for Amnicon Falls State Park to see waterfalls. And did we ever see waterfalls!

In these two photos, you can see the covered bridge in the background from which you can see the waterfall above.

We drove over the bridge in this photo:

There is a lot of iron in the water, which is why it appears reddish-brown.

We went to the nearby Rapids Riverside Bar and Grill for lunch: street corn and pizza, both delicious. We could only eat half the pizza, so we had to buy a cooler and ice for the other half. Of course I have several coolers at home from other times I haven't been able to finish lunch on the road...

Our next stop was Pattison State Park to see Big Manitou Falls, the highest falls in the state. Here are some photos of it. First, an island on the Black River.

We had to cross this bridge on the way to the falls.

And here are various views of the falls.

We went down to the river and then climbed back up hurriedly as we heard thunder in the distance. It sounded very close just as we got to our car. We drove to Eau Claire, stopping at a beautiful wayside that was also a veterans' memorial, and playing The Game. Spotify seemed to pick up that we were picking songs that had to do with time, so it would start playing a song that had to do with time. We wanted to see how clever the AI was, so we played "Straight to Your Heart" by Sting (in 7/4 time), "Living in the Past" by Jethro Tull (in 5/4 time), "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel (in 7/4 time), and "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, which is of course in 5/4 time. However, the AI behind Spotify didn't seem to pick up what we were putting down, because it didn't then suggest songs in weird time signatures. However, that kept us entertained until we got to our hotel, where we checked in, ate the rest of the pizza, and relaxed. Adult Swim at this hotel, like the last one, starts at ten, so we will head down there very soon. When we first arrived, the pool was full of kids.

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Glow in the Dark Rock Art

 

Yesterday there was a snowstorm again, and the schools were closed again. I can't remember them ever being closed twice in one week! Travalon was home from work, and we tried to take a walk but couldn't even get a block because it was so windy and snowy. When we got up this morning, we were buried under the snow. It was also very cold with the windchill. Travalon said today was the birthday of the Wolverhampton team, and I said, "So they're a Capricorn?" and he said, "Just like my favorite wife and my favorite mother!" We thought about going to the Badger basketball game, but Travalon's friend said the roads were treacherous, so we watched it at home. I also ran around the house because I'm trying to get eleven minutes of vigorous activity every day. This is because I took a test that is supposed to tell you your biological age, as opposed to your chronological age, and mine was a couple of decades older, which was a shock. After just half a week of running around the house, I have lost three pounds and my resting pulse has gotten a lot lower, and when I took the test again, I'd shaved over a decade off my biological age. It's amazing to see how quickly exercise works!

We went to dig out Travalon's car from at least a foot of snow, and then we drove to Ancora to warm it up, where we got a bag of coffee and a couple of lattes. The roads really were quite bad. When we got home, Travalon watched the Texans playing the Browns in the playoffs while I used the rock painting kit he had given me. The rocks were lovely, smooth rocks in a soothing light gray, like what they have decorating spas, and I thought it would be a shame to paint them, but then I had a lot of fun. Here are the results:

These are Niko, a cat, a mandolin, palm trees, a lotus with a jewel in it (that one probably needs explaining), a rosary, a rainbow, and just some spots. Here they are under the blacklight.

And here they are glowing in the dark. 

And a bonus photo: Jilly Moose sent me (at my request) a photo of her blond moose Frothy:

I did leave two rocks for Travalon to decorate, so when he decorates them, I'll post a photo of them if he lets me. He plans to do one with the Wolverhampton wolf. 

We went to a place I'd noticed a few months ago from the bus, a tiny pizza place called It's Good for You. It's only open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and it was closed for a few weeks around the holidays, but this evening it was open, so we went and had some delicious pizza. They have a great big pizza oven where they make the pizza fresh right in front of you. It reminds me a bit of Cafe Porta Alba, which unfortunately closed because the owner's wife got a job on the East Coast. It's Good for You isn't too far from our house, so it was the perfect thing to do tonight. I highly recommend it.

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