The Hat on the Hat, or Ad Hoc Stew: Add Hock

 

This morning Travalon and I met Tiffy for coffee downtown, then Travalon went to the Veteran's Museum and the Memorial Union while Tiffy and I had lunch at the Indian restaurant on State Street and then hung out at her sister's apartment. It started to snow really hard, so we weren't too eager to walk to the Union to join Travalon, who was watching Badger basketball. Instead, he came back our way, and then we drove over to Richard Bonomo's house. 

A couple of weeks ago, Rich had wanted a bunch of us to watch The Court Jester because he said he was always quoting it. (I don't remember him quoting that movie, but he would say, "We have both kinds of music here, Country AND Western," which is from The Blues Brothers, and, "You no eat meat? YOU NO EAT MEAT?? Is okay - I make lamb," from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which I believe he has never actually seen.) I couldn't make the original showing, so Rich planned a second one for those of us who couldn't come. Unfortunately, due to the heavy snow, the Dairyman's Daughter couldn't make it in from her home out of town, but Kathbert and Cecil Markovitch joined the three of us at Rich's house for his famous lasagna and some leftover truffles before watching this incredibly silly movie. I had a cup of tea during the movie and then had to ask Rich to pause it twice so I could run upstairs and "visit the dragons." The second time I couldn't find my phone (because it was charging in the kitchen, duh!) so I said aloud, "I guess I won't get credit for this one!" and went upstairs. The others all knew I meant I wouldn't get credit for a staircase without my phone tracking it, but Cecil was completely bemused and wondered who was giving me credit for using the bathroom, Travalon? 

That led to hilarity, and more ensued when Kathbert said Rich's vent stunk, he needed to clean his furnace filters, and Cecil said, "His filthy furnace filters," and we started adding any word that began with F (not THAT one) to whatever we said about the filters. We asked him when he last changed them, how many years ago? Was it a number greater than zero? Was it an imaginary number? Then Rich said something about making an "ad hoc" stew, meaning he just added whatever random thing he had around the house to it, and Cecil asked if he added hock to his ad hoc stew. (The Catholic church he and Rich now go to recently had a pork hock dinner.) Rich's list of what he put in his stew was pretty amusing: chicken, pork, beef, onions, green onions... I said, "So just add fifteen kinds of meat and thirteen kinds of onions." Tiffy wondered if there was something he had to have in his stew or it wasn't stew, and I said, "Like how gumbo always has to have okra?" and she said she always has to have beef consomme in her stew. She said you can get it in a can. That led to a conversation about how vegetables were terrible when we were kids, and why are they so much better now? Is it just that we are adults now? But we distinctly remember that Brussels sprouts and spinach and asparagus were awful back then because they were prepared differently. I said it was a revelation when I first had raw broccoli and cauliflower somewhere, and I ate a ton of it, surprised that they could taste so good. They're even better the way they're cooked nowadays, not boiled until almost mush. 

Here is a photo that kills two proverbial birds with one proverbial stone. You can see my new Muppets hoodie that I was afraid Kathbert would detest, since she dislikes Niko and my Third Eye toque and all the evil eye protection stuff, but she said, "I have no problem with two eyes. I just don't like that weird one-eyed stuff you have." Also, you can see the little red hat on my new plaid tam. The hat pin is a thing people are doing to protest ICE, because it's a replica of hats people were knitting in Norway during World War II to protest the Nazis taking over their country. I hadn't heard of this before, but the pin is very cute, and it kind of works on the tam.

Some people are knitting actual replicas of the red tasseled hat, but I do not need another hat. I heard the local community radio station has a toque for their fundraiser, and I'm curious about that now. Not to mention my longterm goal of getting that Red Cross toque in 2027. It's important to keep your eyes on the prize, especially if the prize is a hat. Maybe even a famous one!

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New Plaid Tam and the Mousetrap

 

Today I worked from home and was very busy doing expense reports for another FART member who was way behind. Travalon and I went out onto the dock on our morning break and saw a big bird party, and he took some photos which I have forgotten to get off his camera. Then just before lunch I got an email that my hat had arrived. When I told Hardingfele yesterday that my "new" (pre-owned) hat would come today, she said, "You're getting another hat?" But I could just as easily say to her, "You're getting another cat?" Anyway, here's my hat:

I wore it for our lunchtime walk, when we went down to the dock again, and the bird party was still there. It was lovely out today, perfect for a vintage handmade "golf" tam with a big pom pom. They claimed it was an argyle beret, but I would just call it a plaid tam. I love it! I actually did get another hat on Wednesday, but no photo of that yet. It's just an indigo knit cap, the kind some people call a beanie and other people (I'm talking Canadians) call a toque, which is pronounced "tuke" because of course it is. That one says "Contrarian" on it, which is a group of people opposed to Dear Leader, including lawyers bringing cases against him... and winning. It was a fundraiser for them, and also this way at the protest next month all us Contrarians can recognize each other. It is a very warm hat. My goal now is to donate enough blood to get a bright red toque from the Red Cross early next year. I have already scheduled a donation for April.

Tiffy got to town right about the time I got off of work, and I drove her to the Turkish restaurant on Monroe Street, where the one non-meat option (it is Friday in Lent, after all) was the appetizer sampler with hummus, baba ghanoush, a red pepper spread called something like ezra, and a yogurt spread, with grilled pita bread. I also had a little bit of lentil soup beforehand. I asked the waitress if the sampler was huge, and she said no, but of course it was, so I brought half of it home. I was wearing the appropriate shirt for a Turkish restaurant, the one with the evil eye protector design on it, but you probably couldn't really see it under my (Irish) plaid poncho. I got the poncho for my first Scottish ceilidh, but it was actually made in Ireland - shh!

Speaking of shushing, after dinner Tiffy and I went to Edgewood University to see The Mousetrap put on by students, and they made us take a vow of silence about the ending. At intermission we could write down our guess about who the murderer was on a notecard, but I was way off so I didn't get put in the drawing for tickets to every show for the 2026-27 season. Which is just as well, because I doubt I'd use them anyway. Who would I go with? Travalon doesn't love the theater, and who's to say Tiffy could come to town for every show? And who's to say I'd even want to see every show? I did enjoy this show a great deal, even if I never would have guessed who the murderer turned out to be. It's never who you think it's going to be in an Agatha Christie story.

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Wrapped in Our Lady's Mantle

 

It was a day today. My phone should have been charging all night, but when I went to do Portuguese on DuoLingo this morning, it was at 20%. Fortunately I have the old charger cord that still works, so I brought that with me and charged my phone at work. I worked on campus, and after we walked at lunch, Hardingfele showed me a tool they use in her division to find funds by the people who own them, which was easy to do in the old system but hard to figure out in the new one. I mentioned this to the Hive Mind and got all kinds of pushback about how people in my position don't need to know this information, even though we're the ones people go to when they want to know what money they have available. My boss even private messaged me to see if I was still confused about how this works. Ah well, I have the tool, so I can do it. Then after leaving work, I realized I'd forgotten to lock the mailroom door, and when I got to my car, I'd forgotten to put my parking tag on my rearview mirror. There was no ticket on my windshield, but maybe they're going to send it to me later.

In the evening Travalon and I went to our old church to be wrapped in Mary's mantle. I had done it back in December, but while some people had gotten their photo taken, I hadn't. Hockey Girl said we could do one after their Intercessory Prayer group tonight, so here are some photos of Travalon and me wrapped in Our Lady's mantle.

Thanks to Richard Bonomo for taking these photos. Weirdly, the parking lot at the church was full except for the part right in front of the church, so we assumed at first that something big was going on upstairs, and we thought the Intercessory Prayer Group met downstairs, so imagine our confusion when we saw they were meeting upstairs, and there were maybe a dozen of them. So why were so many cars in the parking lot?

Remember a couple of weekends ago when Travalon saw all those people out on the ice of the lake by the Memorial Union? They left a huge mess behind, lots of beer cans and stuff, that would have gotten into the lake when the ice melted. But then other people connected on social media about this, and a bunch of them went out and cleaned up the mess, so the story has a happy ending.

I looked it up, and it was St. Patrick's Day 2009 when that man asked my band to play "Coconut Grove." The older song is actually called "Cocoanut Grove," which may be why I couldn't find it back then. This was almost twenty years ago, so the man who made this request may be long dead by now. The song he wanted is from the 1930's, so it makes sense that his in-laws were listening to it. It's so old that even my octogenarian bandmates hadn't heard of it.

Let me end by saying I want this blockade of Cuba to end now. The people are suffering so much. They have so little fuel that they can't even do surgeries. This is pure evil.

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Trivia Newton-John

 

Today I worked on campus and walked with Seabird during our morning break and again at lunch. It was sunny out, but very cold. Whatever happened to a winter day just below freezing? What's with this "feels like single digits" stuff? Also, I was extra busy today because I agreed to help another colleague with her workload, but all the expense reports I needed to do for her were for one particular faculty member who apparently has no idea how to submit an expense report. Where do they get the idea that they can just request repayment for things without any evidence? So almost all of them are on hold while I wait for actual documentation of expenses and events.

This evening there was the monthly ukulele strum at Lone Girl, and today we sang songs about destinations. There was one called "Coconut Grove" that I had not heard before, but it triggered a long-ago memory of my band playing a St. Patrick's Day gig at a community center, and someone was asking us to play that song. None of us knew the song, and this gentleman was getting very frustrated, but the closest thing we could think of was that song about putting the lime in the coconut. Weird that even the older members of the band had no idea about this song, since it was before my time but seems like it should have been something from their era. Generally in my band we don't do "singalong" songs, so already this gentleman was kind of out of line - you wouldn't ask a symphony orchestra to play a song you could sing along to, would you? Then again, maybe he would. 

Travalon came right toward the end of our strum, then he and I went downstairs to have dinner. There is always a trivia game on Wednesday nights, and tonight one of the teams was called "Trivia Newton-John." I thought that was the best name for a trivia team that I'd ever heard. And if you don't get it, I don't know how to help you, but go watch the video for "Physical" by Olivia Newton-John right now, because it is peak 80's. I don't know if you will understand me completely after watching that video, but it was from my formative years, and I was in fact an aerobics addict in my teens. Kind of wish I still had that addiction...

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Random Tuesday Thoughts

 

I have nothing to say today. I worked from home and then went to Adoration. So enjoy a photo of me standing in front of the Mariner's Inn lighthouse that isn't long for this world.

I wish our condo association could rescue it and set it up in front of our condos. After all, Mariner's Cove has a lighthouse, and we have Lighthouse in our name! 

Here are some photos from Sauk that Travalon took last week.

And here is a video he made of the Amtrak train in Columbus. This is shorter than the one that goes all the way to Seattle; it must be the one that goes to Minneapolis.

Oh yeah, I was going to make a compilation of all Travalon's videos from the Model Train Expo tonight, but I spent the evening up in the loft, dancing around to minor key tunes. The Norfolk pine still looks awful, and Jolly Bob isn't looking too good itself. I pulled all the dead leaves off of it a few weeks ago, and now it looks like it hardly has any leaves left. Is it just old? How long do dracaenas live, anyway? It's bloomed a couple of times, but I've heard that can either mean a plant is very happy or that it is miserable and is making a last-ditch effort to reproduce. I did move Jolly Bob from the southern window to under the skylight, and maybe it doesn't like that? But it was getting too tall for its old spot. Soon it may have to come downstairs and join Greg in front of the really high windows in the living room... if it survives.

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Swans and More Model Trains

 

I took the day off of work in case I needed to recover from the Brazilian drum extravaganza on Saturday, and Travalon and I set off to see swans. It was very cold this morning, and I wore an outfit that a neighbor said frightened him. Maybe it is kind of weird.

We went to Cherokee Marsh, Tenney Park, and Governor Nelson State Park, and we did see swans at each place. We didn't have time to check out Picnic Point, another place we have seen them in the past, before Travalon had to leave for work. Here are some photos.

In these next few photos, you can see a male merganser with his bright red bill.

And here is the island that doesn't seem to have a name.

This is a family of two adult swans and two juveniles that are gray.

After Travalon left for work, I did a lot of cleaning and felt tired and out of breath... but my FitBit said I had only had two active minutes. What? So since it had warmed up to the high 20's F, I went outside and took a long walk going as fast as I could... and only got two more active minutes. Since I only got seven minutes yesterday, that is eleven for the week so far, and I'm supposed to get 150. Saturday I got 144, so if it were averaged into this week, I'd be fine, but how is my lived experience so different than what FitBit tells me? The walk is especially shocking - how could it be so little active time? It's based on heart rates, and there are some days I just can't get my heart rate up no matter what I do, and others where it's high without me doing anything, just from caffeine or dread or something. Hopefully I get enough this week...

Here are more photos from the model train expo. These are the ones Travalon took.

The next few photos are of a scene with a lot of detail, like the four Beatles walking in the crosswalk on the cover of Abbey Road.

For some reason Jesus was huge in this little world - like literally, he looks about seven feet tall.

And here is the A-Team! Remember them?

And an abominable snowman by the side of a house.

This looks like fields of radishes and cotton.

And here we have a group of hippies.

There were even a couple of trains you could ride, but we didn't. Here is one of them.

Check out the skating rink!

And the Mobile station!

And circus giraffes poking their heads out of a train car.

This is a photo I took and forgot to post yesterday, of a dinosaur snacking on a Prussian soldier.

This set had a whole backstory about how the Prussians were fighting someone else and blew a hole in the time-space continuum so dinosaurs came out and attacked them, and how the museum got some very "well-preserved" dinosaur skeletons during the skirmish, and even today German universities teach about this event as the Wurst Case Scenario.

Here is a video with a lot going on.

Travalon made a number of other videos too. Maybe tomorrow I will try to collect them all, make a big video, and throw it onto YouTube.

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Brazilian Drums and Model Trains

 

I did not blog Friday because first, there was nothing to blog about, and second, I was talking to Tiffy until very late so there was no time to blog about the nothing that happened to me while I was working from home.

Yesterday I did not blog because I got home very late. I had to get to the Majestic Theater by 1:30, where I was part of a chain of people unloading drums from the truck. Then we decorated, and then we rehearsed, and then we had some time before photos. My buddy and I took a walk around the Capitol Square and then went to Youngblood, where she knows the bartender. We had a rather deep and personal conversation over sour beer before our husbands joined us and we all ate dinner there. The group had our photo taken before I discovered that up in the Green Room they had green spray to color our hair and sparkles to put around our eyes. Travalon took a photo of the sparkles around my eyes, but it's terrible. I took one at home that was marginally better, but I had already rubbed some off so they weren't symmetrical. Also, lots of people were wearing Mardi Gras beads that they had brought from home, and I had tons at home, so I would have worn them if I'd known. Everyone said, "Next year, remember to bling out!" and one dancer said, "Tonight, we are all extra!" 

In the rehearsal I was suddenly moved from one end of the stage to the other, plus a woman came up to me and said, "I'll need your drum, belt, and sticks as soon as you're done." However, Travalon could only see the side of the stage I was moved to, so it all worked out. The first act was a bunch of people doing capoeira, then we students were on next. The teachers put us through our paces, and from Travalon's videos (which are too far away to bother posting here), at that point I was out of step with everyone else, but it wasn't entirely my fault, since the two people right ahead of me were stepping in opposite directions. Suddenly it struck me as hilarious, so I was trying not to laugh, and the audience must have thought I was having the time of my life because I was smiling so much. Then we performed our song, and in that video I was in step with everyone else. After we performed, we could change back into more comfortable clothes (it's amazing how many of us ordered jerseys that were way too large and then got white pants that were uncomfortably tight), and my buddy and I sat with our husbands, who were sitting together. We watched the more competent Handphibians perform, and then I really enjoyed Saideira Pagode, the band that plays the quieter, more tuneful samba. My buddy and her hubby left partway through that performance, but we stayed and watched the Otimo dancers and more Handphibians. Around midnight both Travalon and I were too exhausted to watch whatever the next two acts were going to be, so I went to the Green Room to get my stuff. I thought I'd lost my hoodie, but it was right there all along, just kind of moved over, and then there was food so I had an orange (that's fine) and some lavender fudge I definitely didn't need. If we'd stuck around and helped get the drums back to the Quadra, which is what they call the place where we practice, there was an afterparty there that was going to go all night and then end with brunch sometime this morning. I'd sort of thought of trying to do that, and I took tomorrow off of work in case I needed to recover, but since we became pumpkins at midnight, it was a moot point for us.

This morning I wore my Scottish outfit, and the plaid matches the bear Travalon gave me for Valentine's Day.

The craziest part is that Travalon didn't do that on purpose, he just wanted to get me a Scottish bear. I got my shawl at a random gas station in Kentucky on the second day of our road trip two months ago. It was an impulse purchase that I do not regret at all! Except maybe for the three cheap bracelets that came with it. 

We only had four bags of plastic to recycle today, so we had plenty of time to get to the Model Train Expo. And guess who we ran into there? Cecil Markovitch! I just loved seeing the magical little worlds people created, some with astonishing details, like the Beatles in a crosswalk just like on the cover of Abbey Road, or a tiny circus with horses and elephants and lots of people. Travalon took photos that he hasn't sent to me yet. I mostly took photos of the Lego train set.

 They had the cutest little trolley zipping around it.

And the teeniest little Lego train.

Here is a longer video that I am surprised Blogspot let me load. A lot going on here - check out the firetruck that becomes a police car!

Tonight my Irish music buddies, Famie and the red-headed flute player, were going to an Irish music concert, but I thought I'd better get to band practice, since we have a gig coming up. Good thing we're rehearsing too, because the accordion player noticed there was an F sharp in the key signature for one of our Ukrainian klezmer tunes, but we never even noticed because it's in A minor, so obviously there is no F sharp. Since she was playing the F sharp, the tune sounded terrible until we figured out what the issue was. We have one more practice before our gig, but our leader can't make it, so she was going to make us practice extra late tonight. Fortunately Travalon came to rescue me with an iced decaf pandan latte, which is the most delicious way for a damsel in distress to be rescued. He saves me from extended practice torture AND gives me stuffies that match my outfit? He really is the best husband ever!

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