Magical Monday in the Marsh

 

Travalon was able to get today off of work, so I asked for it off as well, and we drove to Horicon. We decided to walk on Old Marsh Road, just before the floating boardwalk, and as we walked along we met a couple walking the other way. I asked if they had seen anything interesting, and they said they had seen a pair of whooping cranes off to the right. I said I would really like to see a yellow-headed blackbird, and they said they had seen a number of them just beyond the turn in the road. We set off, and we saw (and heard) this song sparrow.

We also saw this male blue-winged teal all by himself.

We saw a pair of swans. Here is a photo of one of them.

Then we looked to the right and saw the pair of whooping cranes!

There were lots of these wild roses in bloom.

When we passed an area with trees, on the other side it was marshier, and there were lots of these lovely water lilies blooming.

There was no manmade noise, and I could hear all the bees buzzing around in the blooming sweet clover. We also heard lots of intriguing bird songs. One sounded like a laugh, and the people we had talked to said that was a sora. Another sounded like a puppy, which tundra swans can sound like, but I believe those have all migrated much further north (hence the name), and the ones we saw today were trumpeter swans. Here is one with an egret.

And here is a closeup of the egret.

We also heard a weird birdsong that sounded like the bird was being strangled, and I thought that might be the yellow-headed blackbirds. It was! We actually saw three. Here are photos of the one who posed most nicely for us.

I believe these are oxeye daisies.

Then we could hear thunder in the distance, so I said let's hurry back, and when we turned around, we could see a lot of lightning strikes to the north of us. We saw the two whooping cranes again, and after we passed them, they began calling to each other. I wish I'd brought recording equipment, but you can find really good examples of these calls on All About Birds.

We were too far away to see if there were any baby cranes. As we neared the car, we saw five egrets, but when they saw us, they flew up into the trees.

We also saw wild irises.

On the rest of the car tour, we saw this egret.

We also saw black-necked stilts.

We went to the part where we often see the white-headed goose, but there were no geese in sight today. This female house finch is sitting on her nest under the roof of the building.

Here is her mate, I think yelling at us?

Here is proof that we saw all four Big White Birds today: pelicans!

In the Explorium, there is a snapping turtle named Marshall.

We went back to the driving tour, but it never stopped raining, so we just looked out the car windows at another egret and geese families with teenage offspring. 

Then we went to the Columbus Antique Mall, where I found a rosary and mother-of-pearl cross.

This little painting was a dollar, and I think it might glow under blacklight, but for once I'm blogging before dark so this question will have to be answered in tomorrow's post.

There was a banjolele with a cracked neck, but I did find this adorable and very cheap ukulele that was totally playable but seemingly tuned differently. This is another mystery for me to solve in my spare time, just like the mystery of how to tune my sitar.

And I bought this silver beret-type hat. No idea where I'll wear it.

This is a better photo of the hat, but not of me.

Travalon had some more photos on his camera from when he has gone out to the dock at sunset and when he went to Sauk and Devil's Lake on Saturday, so look for those on tomorrow's post.

Famous Hat

Outdoor Theater and Steel Drum Band

 

Yesterday Travalon and I met Jilly Moose for coffee at Ancora, since it is not far from my garden plot and in theory I was going to go there yesterday. Of course that didn't happen... Then I went downtown to meet Tiffy, and we went to Himal Chuli for lunch as usual. We walked down to the Union Terrace and sat gazing at the water, then we walked up Langdon Street to the Edgewater Hotel and went back to State Street for bubble tea. The bubble tea place has moved and is now where the coffee place we always used to go to was located. Then Richard Bonomo picked us up, and we drove out to the outdoor theater, where we met up with the Dairyman's Daughter. We watched a really funny play called The Rivals, which is perhaps most famous for the character of Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses the incorrect word. Some of her best lines: "You're as stubborn as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!" "I contracepted a message from her." "All men are Bavarians!" During intermission, I felt my phone vibrate, and I looked to see if someone had sent me a text. It was just a reminder to do DuoLingo, so I said to Tiffy, "DuoLingo is yelling at me!" A woman standing nearby said, "DuoLingo is yelling at me too!" She was studying Spanish. We commiserated over how that pesky green owl never leaves you alone. We got home very late, and I quietly showered and crawled into bed... and a few minutes later Travalon said, "You can turn on a light." I said, "But I'm already in bed." I was trying to be very quiet, but I must have awakened him just enough that he slowly came to and began talking to me, well after I was done making any noise. So then we talked about our day, and he had a good time fishing out in Sauk and at Mirror Lake, but he didn't catch anything.

Today we woke up so late that our usual Mass was almost half over, so we went to the church near us and were still a few minutes late. To our surprise, Rich texted us about joining the group for brunch, and when I called, expecting them to be done eating, he said they had just ordered their food since this was the week there were coffee and donuts after Mass. So we went downtown and joined the usual gang and Jilly Moose for brunch. We did finally get to my sorely neglected garden plot, and even after an hour of weeding it still looks exactly the same, which isn't weedy, but it's not perfect either. We walked on Governor's Island, and then I wondered if they were canceling band practice because they had played downtown on Thursday evening, when I had take minutes for a meeting, and they always cancel practice after a gig. I checked my email, and sure enough, there was no band practice, so we met Jilly Moose at the East Side Club to hear a steel drum band. It was a perfect evening, and the band was so good. They ended with the Led Zeppelin song "Kashmir," which actually sounds really good on steel drums. We saw sailboats and even a pelican on Lake Monona. It's such a beautiful venue.

Famous Hat

 

Happy 100th Birthday, Judy Garland!

 

This morning there was a little excitement at our place because we got a "new" love seat:

It is only new to us; our neighbors across the hall gave it to us because they got a new futon. Which is maybe kind of ironic, because then we used this to replace the futon we had been using for a couch. 

Travalon reminded me that today Judy Garland would have been one hundred years old, so I mentioned it on the chat at work. A coworker said we should drink Judy Garlands tonight, and when I asked what that was, she said like a Shirley Temple but with vodka in it. I remembered Shirley Temples fondly from when I was a kid and we would go to fancy restaurants with my grandparents. I felt so adult having my own drink, and of course to a kid they were delicious. So tonight Travalon and I went to Mariner's, and when the waitress asked if it was a special occasion, we said, "It's Judy Garland's 100th birthday!" We asked for Judy Garlands to drink, but the waitresses didn't know what those were, so we explained and did get something that tasted very much like a Shirley Temple with a kick. Delicious! 

We were enjoying our seafood when there was a commotion at the next table over, where two older couples were dining. One man had apparently fainted and thrown up on himself, then he came to and had no memory of it happening. He insisted he was fine, but his wife panicked and called 911. The hostess came over, rubbed his back, and asked if there was anything she could do for him, and he said sure, she could come over to his house and do that, so I figured he wasn't dying. When they brought the bill, he joked, "The food is on me tonight!" since he was covered in vomit. Two extremely hot young EMTs arrived with a stretcher, but the man kept saying he was fine, and they let him walk out to the ambulance. Meanwhile, Travalon and I were trying to mind our own business, gazing out at the water and trying not to seem too curious about what was going on. To our surprise, the waitress brought us a slice of key lime pie on the house because we had to witness all that. So it was a rather eventful 100th birthday dinner in honor of Judy.

Famous Hat 

More Lucky Trainspotting

 

An annoying thing happened at work today. A faculty member had $99.93 left on a grant, and it didn't expire until next June. They submitted an expense report to get reimbursed... and then I couldn't find the grant. After a lot of research, I found out it was closed, even though it was supposed to be good for over a year. Apparently the granting agency goes through randomly and closes grants that have less than $100 left, so this one missed the cutoff by seven cents. I had no idea they did that! And of course they did it right between when I told the faculty member they had almost $100 and when they tried to get reimbursed. At least the granting agency did promise to reopen the grant when I asked why it was closed. So strange! Why say it is good until the end of June 2023 if you are just going to go ahead and close it when you think there isn't a big enough balance left, and then not warn anyone??

This morning as I got ready to go on my morning walk, I heard the train whistle from the west, one intersection before the close one, so I had maybe a minute and a half to get out there. I threw my sandals on and raced out the door, and by then I could hear the whistle at the close intersection, so I ran around the corner of our building and got there just in time to see the train pass by. Then as my neighbor and I were walking at lunchtime, we suddenly heard a rumbling from the east, so we looked at each other in surprise. We happened to be in exactly the right spot to see the train, and it appeared within moments. How lucky! We could have been deep into the neighborhood like we were earlier, where you can't see the train at all.

Today I got a mysterious text, and the name seemed familiar, but the person they were addressing was someone else. I responded before realizing that it was a group text from a weight loss group I had been in. Nobody had texted the group in so long that my new phone had no record of our conversations. I must have looked like a really old person, responding with how this wasn't the person they were looking for. It's like when I say I have no cash, and people tell me I can Venmo money to them. No, I can't - I'm over fifty and don't understand that stuff. I'm just waiting for the day when a homeless person on State Street begging for money tells me I can Venmo them, since never having cash on me is one way to get out of giving panhandlers money. Of course, since I can't Venmo anyone money, never mind panhandlers, I guess I'm still safe.

Famous Hat

Lost in the Bowels of a Building

 

Right now the tulip trees are blooming on campus. There are two on a wooded path behind the Social Sciences building, and when I went to see them, I found some blossoms on the ground. I picked two up and put them on my hat, then I went to Van Vleck, and on the way I ran into my Irish class buddy. She probably thought I was ridiculous, prancing around with flowers on my hat and babbling about how I was going to find more flowers. I'm kind of like a character from a fairy tale, always off to find flowers or mushrooms deep in the woods while wearing my wide-brimmed hat. I continued on towards Van Vleck, and the two tulip trees there were in full bloom. So pretty!

Then I went to see the big tulip tree in the Botany garden, and on the way I passed the baby tulip tree on Bascom Hill. I assumed it was too young to bloom, but it was full of blossoms! For some reason they were past their prime when the other ones are right at their peak, but because the tree is so small, I could easily reach a blossom to show you the interior. It looks like its other magnolia cousins inside.

Here are its past-peak flowers.

Because the petals are neon orange at the bottom, I wondered if they glowed under blacklight. Answer: kind of...?

Today a funny thing happened at work. My boss and my coworker named after a Norse god are both leaving for other jobs, but they are the only two who know about a storage room for our books in the building across the street, so this morning they took us other three administrative staff to show us where it is. The storage room is in the basement, past creepy old drawings of human anatomy, and it was full of cockroach parts like wings and legs. Why just parts? Do the other cockroaches eat them? We didn't see any live cockroaches, but we did see a very alive big black spider. When we went back to the entrance, it was raining really hard, so one of my coworkers said he knew where there was a door closer to our building. I know this door too, since it's the one I go into when visiting Hardingfele's office, but I had no idea how to get there from where we were. Apparently neither did my coworker, because we spent forty minutes wandering the halls of the basement of the building, wondering what was around every corner. (We know they have cadavers for the Medical School down there somewhere.) At first it was funny, but soon we wondered if we would ever escape. When one coworker tried to go a different way, another one said, "Wait! Stay with the group! Haven't you ever watched a horror movie?" It did feel like we were in one. Finally we found the other door and dashed through the rain to our own building, which didn't seem so bad anymore, even if it did try to kill us last year, and even if it does have a cockroach population of its own. At least it has no cadavers or creepy old drawings of human body parts! My favorite thing about this adventure of ours was that it showed up as a workout on my FitBit, as it should. Forty minutes of frantically trying to escape a scary building is definitely exercise!

Famous Hat

Guest Post: Miracle at the Walk to Mary

I had asked Rich some time ago for a first-person account of the miracle he experienced on the Walk to Mary, figuring it would be better if he recounted it than if I did. Here it is:

The “Walk to Mary” is an organized pilgrimage walk that starts at the National Shrine of St. Joseph on the campus of St. Norbert’s College in DePere, Wisconsin, to the Shrine of our Lady of Good Help in Champion Wisconsin. The distance is 21 miles. In 2022, almost 3,500 people made the walk.

The “official” photo library of the Walk can be viewed here.

A group of 4 of us from Madison traveled up to the Green Bay area in two cars on Friday night, April 30, 2022, and stayed at a facility run by the Norbertines over night.

The next morning, Saturday, May 1, we assembled outside the Shrine of St. Joseph for the pre-walk prayer service, and the start of the walk. Our group met a number of other people, including the B-Boys from Madison, and Ethel from the Milwaukee area.

Once the bell was rung, we started the walk, which starts off by leaving the St. Norbert’s campus, crossing a bridge across the Fox River, and then walking for a few miles along the bank on the south side of the river, toward Green Bay.

After a couple of miles, Luxuli, who was walking beside me at that point, said, “Rich! You are walking differently all of a sudden.” I looked down and saw that my right foot was indeed pronating severely! I sat down on a nearby bench, and was making ready to remove my shoe, thinking that something had gone wrong with my support inserts. It turned out that half of my shoe heal was missing! The shoes I was wearing were running shoes I had had for some time, and I had no idea that the heals were in bad shape. I was a bit mystified.

Of course, I could not possibly make the walk with half of one shoe heal missing without making a big mess of my knees, so I started looking for something to stuff into the heal to take up the empty volume. Luxuli had a spare plastic bag, so I tried stuffing that into the void. That seemed to work, but I needed a way to keep it in place. A little further down the path, I stopped by a first aid station to see if they had any bandaging tape. To my surprise, they had none. The best they had was Bandaids, or the equivalent.

So we did the best we could with those, and continued. I knew, from having done the walk once before, pre-pandemic, that there was a major stop at the 7-mile mark, at the parish of Sts. Peter and Paul, where there would be sandwiches and other things for the pilgrims, in addition to water and portable toilets.

We got there, now toward the end of the population of pilgrims (it is still a mystery how we wound up at the rear of the pack, as we were making pretty good time). I was hoping to find some duck or strapping tape to reinforce the repair job on my shoe. I approached one of the women who was volunteering, and asked if she could find out where on the parish campus I could find some duck tape, showing her my shoe, and explaining my predicament.

She immediately brought me to her husband who was nearby. He indicated that he had some tape in his truck, which was parked nearby. He then asked my shoe size. I replied “11-1/2”. He then said that he also has some running shoes of that size in his truck, which shoes he was planning to replace anyway. So he brought me to his truck and produced a pair of running shoes.

They fit just about perfectly.

I transferred my arch-support inserts to those shoes and put them on, continuing to be amazed that someone just happened to have a pair of running shoes that fit me just about perfectly.

I removed my shoes, and gave a thought to repairing them, until I looked at them. The soles were falling apart, suddenly, on both shoes. I’ve never seen soles and heals fracture on running shoes that way before. Then it dawned on me that the shoes — New Balance running shoes — were about 30 years old. They were not all *that* worn, but the synthetic material had failed from aging.

So, thanks to a small miracle at the hands of our Lady and our Lord, and by the kind offices and generosity of a parishioner of St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Green Bay, I was able to successfully complete the walk.

Let us be thankful for the small miracles, as well as the larger ones!

Richard Bonomo

Bally-a-Cleeya

 

Saturday was a rainy day, so we thought it might be a good day for birdwatching. Travalon and I went to Stricker Pond again, and we saw this boat-tailed grackle.

Look how much smaller the killdeer is than the mallards.

This mama wood duck has at least twenty-five babies!

We also saw a great blue heron.

Here is a mama mallard.

Now that the female mallards all have babies, the males hang around in stag parties.

Here is a baby mallard.

This fungus is so interesting-looking, and I think it might have been an edible kind.

Here is a wood duck mama with only seven babies that are a lot bigger.

We went to a 66th birthday party, so the theme was Route 66. That was a lot of fun. I kept running into people who looked kind of familiar, so we'd start talking and realize how we knew each other. Travalon was happy to see Cecil Markovitch there. After the party, we went to Tiedeman's Pond, and as we were walking down the path, we passed a goose family. Travalon went by first, then I didn't realize he took a picture of me edging by the geese as they hissed at me. Yikes!

This little rabbit wasn't nearly as hostile to us.

And we saw another great blue heron.

In the evening we went to the new Downton Abbey movie, which we liked even better than the first movie. In this one, some people are making a movie at Downton Abbey, and suddenly it has to change from silent to a talkie. Meanwhile, half the family are at a villa in the south of France which was mysteriously willed to the dowager. When we got home, I did DuoLingo and got my sticker for this month. It is DuoLingo's 10th birthday this month, so I guess DuoLingo is a Gemini...?

This is out of order, but on Friday while I was talking to Tiffy, Travalon must have gone down to our dock and taken photos. I really like this one of the Betty Lou Cruise coming in at sunset.

Sunday Travalon and I went to Holy Hill for Pentecost. I really loved the homily because the priest talked about each line of the sequence. I guess he loves it as much as I do! I really liked this picture in their program because it's a dove, but when I first looked at it, I saw a very happy creature with long ears. See? Now you can't unsee it. It's an optical illusion.

In the afternoon I had a workshop with an All-Ireland fiddle champion at the Lakeside Coffee House. Hardingfele, an 11-year-old girl, and I were the only ones there. I brought the mandolin but then was wishing I'd brought my violin, so I borrowed Hardingfele's a couple of times. That was humbling! I'm not as quick at picking up tunes as I was in my younger days, but is this because I've been playing chords instead of melody for years? After the workshop Hardingfele, Travalon (who had gone fishing while we were at it), and I walked to the Chinese bakery on Park Street, which also has really good food (I had curry chicken with rice noodles), then we came back for a concert of our teacher with another All-Ireland champion on the uilleann pipes. They were so good!

Today my neighbor told me she went to lunch at a place called Breakwater and they had really good wings, so Travalon and I went there for dinner tonight. It was the place near my old apartment on Pirate Island, and we sat out on the balcony overlooking the river. Because of the dreary weather and the fact that it was Monday, no other people were outside, so I hoped we might see some birds. We did! We saw this white duck hanging out with some mallards.

And we saw a blue heron fly right by us! Who knew we needed the good camera for a weeknight dinner? Our waitress said she also sees pelicans. What a great dinner spot! And Travalon said the wings were good, just as our neighbor had promised. I had the very spicy jambalaya. So delicious!

I had a clever title for this blog post and told Travalon it would be way better than just "Stricker and Tiedeman's Ponds," but now it's late and I can't remember it. Another blog post title I had pondered was "Bally-a-Cleeya," which is a sort of phonetic spelling of the Irish name for Dublin. My original Irish teacher was one of the organizers of the concert we went to, so I did speak a little Irish this weekend.

Famous Hat