Shamrock Club Picnic 2026

 

Today I worked from home again, but my coworkers have been going in for half a day, so tomorrow I will try. In the evening I went to the annual Shamrock Club picnic alone, since this summer Travalon is working very late on Wednesdays. It was a very hot day, but there was a breeze in the pavilion where a band called the O'Darbys played Irish tunes and I sat with my buddy and the guy who dresses as a leprechaun. The couple we see everywhere was there, as well as the couple we saw at the yacht rock concert, and a very cool couple I don't remember meeting before who live in France and only come to visit for a few weeks every summer. Since they didn't have a car, I ended up giving them a ride back to their place. I brought our favorite Late July tortilla chips, but they weren't even opened. Fortunately the desserts were store-bought and not tempting, but I still went way over my calorie limit today with the deviled eggs and pasta salad and those little sandwiches like what they have at funeral luncheons. I did not stick to the Mediterranean diet tonight! After coming home, I took a walk in the neighborhood and loved how this purple clematis looked in the twilight.

Contrast that with this photo I took of Jolly Bob yesterday. It looks like a Dr. Seuss plant now. It used to have more leaves - I'm not sure what happened. I was looking back at photos of my big plants from fifteen years ago, and they all had more leaves. Now they are all so leggy. Do they not get enough light anymore?

They are also like three times as big as they were back then, besides having one-third the number of leaves. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but what?

Here are some photos Travalon took in Ridgeway last Thursday. I believe these are the old depot, an old caboose you can go into, the church where we once went to a spaghetti dinner with Cecil Markovitch, and some graffiti.

I don't know what the money-eyed lizard represents, but I feel like I've seen him before. If you see enough train graffiti, you start to notice patterns. Around here, it's always "Puck" or "Amor" or "4AL." Maybe they are local artists. I did look up how to make a tag, and wouldn't you know that Google tells you how to do it? I swear that you can find anything on the internet.

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Travalon's Tuesday Adventures

 

Today I had my usual unremarkable Tuesday of working from home, going to Adoration, and leading Night Prayer online. Travalon went to Portage and took photos of trains.

Sorry if this photo looks a little wonky - I had to edit out a voluptuous naked woman who was very well done but doesn't belong on a family blog. However, I thought the tags were too cool to not post.

Travalon swam in Silver Lake, and then he went to Lake Wisconsin.

Then he went swimming at Sauk and took photos of pelicans by the dam.

Next week he has to work every day, so he has to enjoy these adventures now.

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Venus and Night Trains and Me

 

If you like train graffiti, then this is the post for you! Here are photos I took on Saturday at the Rochelle Railroad Park. First a train was going slowly, then it backed up out of sight.

A very fast train then passed by, without interesting graffiti but just lots of truck containers. I took a photo of this one because I've always seen their trucks around, so I tried to buy stock in the company, but they don't seem to be publicly traded. C.R. England is the company.

And I liked the bunting on this gazebo. Just as I was going to take the photo, this guy stepped into the gazebo. That's okay, you can't see his face, so I don't feel the need to ask his permission to post this. Also, he walked really fast to get ahead of us, and he could see I was going to take a photo.

Just as we were going to leave the park, the first train (the one that had backed up) passed again, this time going at speed, and it had lots of colorful graffiti.

Travalon took these photos with his good camera.

For some reason, seeing all this graffiti just makes me so happy. I still have lots of blacklight paint (if it hasn't dried up yet), so my plan is to buy some more canvases at the art store and create my own graffiti paintings that will then glow under blacklight. Can I make them as pretty as the experts do? That remains to be seen. I think my tag will be Vabukka, but I might come up with something better.

Speaking of names, I found out today that the "Castle Clare" Belleek tower I have is actually Doonegore Castle - there is no "Castle Clare." It's a private residence, but Nenagh Castle has been fixed up to be a tourist attraction, so I'd love to visit that, and we already went to Blarney Castle. I said to Travalon that I should name Niko's girlfriend Nenagh, and he thought that was perfect. Turns out it's pronounced like the common name Nina in English (Nee-nah, not Nay-nagh as I'd supposed, although it is like that in Irish), and it has alliteration with Niko, so they go really well together. I think we have a winner! This wasn't a blog contest - I don't have a prize - but this time I thought of it, not Kathbert.

I worked from home today, and the only interesting thing that happened is that the little side tuft coming out of the ponytail palm my Archirritant gave me when she moved to Florida years ago had come off, so I'm going to see if I can grow it into another ponytail palm. I'm not sure why it came off. In the evening I brought Mandy to Moldy Jam, since I had played the violin all evening yesterday. That was great because I sat next to the really cool mandolin player, and she showed me some chords. We were all talking about how the star player for Team USA got a red card in the game against Bosnia (in the World Cup, which is soccer, for those of you not into sportsball), but then Dear Leader talked to the head of FIFA, and the suspension was mysteriously retracted for the game tonight against Belgium. That disgusted us all so much that we were happy the USA lost 4-1. But that is the power of Dear Leader, that he gets you to cheer against your own team because everything he touches gets polluted. Then I drove home, and I realized how much I love being out at night, with Venus shining above me and the possibility of seeing a night train on my ride home from the music club. Alas, I did not see a train tonight, but it's not like I haven't seen trains recently. I haven't heard one in our neighborhood in days, but then we haven't been around much recently. Surprisingly, I took a test about whether I'm an early bird or a night owl, and it said I was right in the middle, the person for whom the 9-5 job was invented... so why do I love night and hate getting up in the morning? Night is so beautiful.

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