FART 3 Co-Working Space and Union Picnic

 

Today I wanted to be on campus for the Union picnic, but the water in my building was still turned off. My boss said I could go to the co-working space used by FART 3, in the building where the information school used to be until they built the new building with talking robots. It wasn't a bad space - it had lots of windows, spots with two monitors that I could plug my laptop into, a fridge and a microwave, and lockers for our valuables. The people there, mostly from FART 3 but some from HART 4 (that's the HR team), seemed nice enough, but I didn't talk to them much. At lunchtime I went to Library Mall to join my Union peeps for the picnic, which was BYOF so I brought a sandwich, but they all got fun stuff from the food carts. They were hoping to catch people walking by, but not too many people were on campus with the cooling issues. The Union provided popsicles. Is this a rainbow popsicle or a chakra popsicle?

Someone brought a cheese plate and crackers, so I snacked on those too, and some almonds and cashews with dark chocolate chunks mixed in. At first there were just a few of us standing around, but more people joined, so we sat in the shade and talked. It was kind of fun, but was it worth going to campus for? I have to go again Friday for a blood donation appointment, but there won't be very many people in the co-working space that day. If nobody shows up, I won't be able to get in, so I'll work at the library.

In the building I worked in today, there are a whole bunch of lockers, and some had your basic locks on them, key locks or combination locks, but this big a$$ lock kind of blew my mind.

When I got home, I saw my black calla lily (which has six blooms) has one perfect bloom.

Then I went for a "limp" around the neighborhood, since my foot still hurts. Everyone assures me it is plantar fasciitis, and I know that's not serious, but how long does it last?? Anna Banana II did tell me a good stretch for it when we prayed the rosary on Zoom tonight, so I tried it and that seemed to help. Anyway, right after work I sat on our dock for a bit, then I checked out the oddly narrow sidewalks they seem to have created on our street. It's still torn up; at first when they tore it up, we said, "Oh, we can just go north," but now the bridge is blocked off, so we have to take the gravel road, but we said, "No worse than a road in the Upper Peninsula," and then today it was clogged with machines, so if someone was coming the other direction, you just had to wait. What will they do next to make it even worse?? As I limped along the new sidewalk, I found a crane feather, so when Travalon drove by as I was almost home, I hopped in his car and handed him the feather. If cranes can flirt with them, why can't I?

Meanwhile, Travalon went to Columbus and saw two Amtrak trains. Then he went to Portage and walked on the Ice Age Trail, where he made a new friend.

If this looks familiar to you, like you think you've seen it on the blog before but in autumn colors, you aren't mistaken - we have hiked it for the Mammoth Challenge in the past. 

Then Travalon went to the rail yard and saw some graffiti and some train engines. Check out this guy opening a door on the front of the engine!

The weather was so pleasant today - it felt like paradise, because it was a bit cooler, with no air quality issues. Everyone is so much happier. Look how happy Frothy is!

This is Jilly Moose's blond moose. I don't know if Niko and Nenagh were very happy today, because I brought Niko to work with me but somehow forgot Nenagh. He used to come to work with me all the time to see her, but now that I've brought her home, they go everywhere together. Weird that they have the same taste in music... which is just the same as mine. Isn't it funny how that all worked out?

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Pandas and Sharks and Bears, Oh My!

 

Today the water was shut off in my building, but I didn't care since I always work from home on Tuesdays anyway, and then I went to Adoration with my new polar bear-tracking bracelet with the lava beads which arrived in the mail today. How timely, since it matched my lava rosary, which I used at Adoration. This is a female polar bear on the western side of Hudson Bay in Canada, probably in the Churchill area; we're also tracking a young red panda in Nepal and a female hammerhead shark off the coast of Florida. The original shark was Riptide, but then she vanished, which they said could happen when the tracker is over a year old, and they gave us a new one to track named Athena who has been going up and down the east coast of Florida. Then today Riptide suddenly appeared on the east coast of Florida herself, so apparently we are now tracking two sharks.

Travalon had a short day at work, so he went to visit a high school buddy. He saw a train stopped on the bridge above the road.

Then on my way home from Adoration, I saw some graffiti in the rail yard here in town, so I stopped to take photos.

I told Travalon about it, so after dinner he went to the rail yard and took some photos.

There were several videos on social media of trains in our town, including one I saw on my way to Adoration, but I probably won't make screenshots because it seems like I've already featured all the graffiti on this blog. It was fun to see it again, though, like seeing an old friend. "Oh, there's 4AL Car! And 4 A LAUGH Car! And I remember that Puck!" Hopefully if I keep seeing the same graffiti over and over, that means I will see the really cool graffiti I saw last Tuesday but didn't get a chance to photograph. They must be keeping all these cars local.

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Mando-Uke and Marimbula at the Jam

 

Here's a photo I forgot to post, of a Christmas ornament we got at Siesta Beach back in December.

Today I worked from home and had to wear a mask during my walks, since the air quality was still bad due to the Canadian wildfires. However, I felt a lot better and decided to go to Moldy Jam tonight. Travalon went to see Graham Nash, so he was able to drop me off and pick me up. Right after he dropped me off, the feisty mandolin player said, "I have to show you something!" and she handed me a white ukulele, so I tried to play a C chord and it sounded awful. She laughed and said, "I tuned it like a mandolin. It's my travel mandolin for taking on the airplane." That was not the only interesting instrument there tonight; a really good fiddler brought a thing like a giant thumb piano and used it to play bass. Wish I'd gotten a photo of that! He probably would have let me take a photo. Halfway through the session, the feisty mandolin player said I should use the uke-mando, so I did, and I loved it! It was a joy to play, although I discovered that I couldn't do tremolo since it only had single strings. Here is a photo.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the other instrument, which he called a "marimbula." It looked like a giant, wooden kalimba. I did find an image online that looks a lot like the one this guy had.

It was about three feet tall, and I loved the bass sound. Apparently these are only $270, which seems like a really good price for such a thing. So it was a really fun jam session tonight with all these crazy instruments.

When we got home, it had cooled off a lot, and I went for a walk because the air quality was so much better. I thought the moon looked so beautiful reflected on the lake. This photo doesn't quite do it justice.

I have to get to the most important part of this post - the DuoLingo bragging!

That's right, I was 10,000% correct! And check this out:

Know why I'm acing Portuguese with 97% accuracy? Because it's 3% different than Spanish.

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Proxy Puck and the Lamest Luau

 

Today Travalon and I wore tropical clothes to Mass because right after we got done recycling the plastic, we were going to a luau at the East Side Club. However, when we got there, only a handful of other people were sitting around inside, and a few more were out in the hazardous air. The food was pretty good: pulled pork sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and coleslaw. The place was sort of decorated - I feel like this janky parrot kind of sums it up.

Bright and cheerful, but sort of deformed. We have been to lots of excellent luaus at the East Side Club before, but this one had no music, no pig cake, and very few people. In a few hours the steel drum band was going to play, but we saw no reason to sit around and wait for that, so we went up to a spot in Windsor where you can see trains. Actually, on the way to the East Side Club we stopped at the spot off Fair Oaks and saw some graffiti, so let me post that first.

Travalon took those with his good camera. Then we went to Windsor, and he said it was the same cars he saw there last week. I think the one with the pink graffiti is something he took a photo of in Portage a few weeks ago. The first two I took with my phone, and the others he took with his good camera.

Then we spotted some more train cars just a few blocks away. Here are photos I took:

And here are the photos Travalon took:

Next, we went to my future parking lot, from which you can see the Madison rail yard, and we found lots of great graffiti. Here are my photos of it:

And here are Travalon's photos of the same graffiti, and some other ones he could take photos of with the zoom on his camera.

When I said I could title this blog post "The Lamest Luau," Travalon said I should call it "Proxy Puck and the Lamest Luau" after the graffiti we saw. Then we went back to the East Side Club, and there were a lot more people there in Hawaiian outfits, so maybe more people came to the luau in the second hour. One woman had a truly amazing outfit where she had put a hula skirt and bra over a white sundress and then had leis in her hair and around her ankles, but I thought it would be rude to take a photo of her. Here are what Travalon and I wore - I love his Hawaiian shirt from St. Thomas! See if you can spot the great blue heron behind us and to the right.

We sat in the shade, listening to the steel drum band (which includes both my Brazilian drumming teachers), and it was so wonderful that we felt a little sad that we had to leave after about an hour. But Travalon was going to see AC/DC at Camp Randall tonight, so he had to find a place to park. I suppose I could have gotten my car and come back to the East Side Club, but sitting alone with my N95 mask on (since the air quality was bad again today) didn't seem that appealing. I could have gone to the Slow Irish Session, but oddly that didn't appeal to me either. Since the usual place where we have band practice is right near Camp Randall, Hardingfele offered to host, but she has like four cats and I'm very allergic, so we would have had to practice outside in the bad air. Also, I've had a sore throat all day and am still not sure if I'm fighting a virus, and Hardingfele is very paranoid about viruses. I texted her to let her know I wasn't coming, then I regretted it, thinking about how pleasant it might have been to play the mandolin in her backyard. However, it probably wouldn't have been that good for my antique mandolin to be out in this smoky air, and if I wasn't there, then they could practice inside. I put my mask back on, since I'd felt better outside listening to the steel drum band, and I took a rosary walk and then sat on the dock. It's a mystery about what's making me feel worse - the stale air inside our pent-up condo, or the smoke outside? Or is it truly a virus? That would explain my lack of interest in making music, when usually I live for it. I've just felt blah lately and have only averaged about 6500 steps a day for the last few days, but at least today I got about 9200. Maybe I should have gone for my usual 10,000, but maybe I shouldn't push it. I'm working my way back up to normal.

Famous Hat