Travalon's Boating Lunch Break and Tiffy's Birthday Dinner

 

Today I took an early, long lunch to go boating with Captain Travalon.

After work I met Tiffy and Travalon downtown, and we went to the Indian restaurant on State Street for Tiffy's birthday dinner. We had gobi mandarin, which is deep-fried cauliflower in a delicious tomato sauce, and garlic naan, and then for my main course I had something with cheese and potato dumplings. So tasty! We all had kheer (rice pudding) for dessert because that's what the other two wanted, and while I wanted rasmalai, they were out of it. We did have to wait awhile for the waiter to come back for our dessert order, and then another while for him to bring the bill, but that's okay, we just chatted.

Here are more screen shots frrom the video of the local train I posted two screenshots from yesterday.

And here is a screenshot from one of Travalon's videos that he made yesterday in Portage.

This screenshot is from a video made at night, so it's harder to see, but I hadn't seen it before.

And more screenshots from another video:

I still have to get back to Travalon's videos from several weeks ago, when we had a day off of work and went to Dupeyville. It's just that people keep posting videos on social media with such awesome graffiti.

Famous Hat

Improv with a Robot

 

Today I did another "interacting with robots" research study that felt like an improv lesson, because we had to make up conversations on the fly. It was kind of fun! I do enjoy these research studies, and they usually pay a small amount of cash on top of it, so that's a bonus. I just use the cash to pay tips. Then this evening the train went by right at the start of our Union meeting, so I couldn't go out and watch it. I checked the video that guy always makes of it, and it had NO graffiti on it, not even the half-hearted stuff that I generally don't bother posting. But hey, Blogspot is letting me post photos again. Here's the ledge at Ledge View, the place where we hiked yesterday.

And here we are in front of it! 

Here's that print of the painting of train cars with graffiti spelling out the lyrics to "King of the Road," along with a couple of paintings I've done of Niko over the last few years.

Speaking of Niko and his beloved Nenagh, I found that bringing her on adventures was making her grungy, so she was no longer the bright orange she had originally been. Worse, because she is crocheted, she was starting to come apart - she's more delicate than Niko. So she is now a homebody, and he goes out on adventures without her and then comes home to tell her about them.

I forgot to post this on Tuesday, when Travalon and I went out for a walk and found they seem to be building a pyramid where Mariner's Inn used to be:

Travalon went to the Portage rail yard again today and brought back some photos of graffiti.

And here is some really colorful graffiti from a train that went through Madison. I grabbed these screenshots at work and put them on the blog using my work computer during lunch, just to see if it would work. Now I seem to be able to load photos on Boethius my home computer as well. 

There was a lot more interesting graffiti on the train in this video, which I will post tomorrow since this post already has so many graffiti photos. This train also had a lot of graffiti that I've already posted. I love seeing them again - it's like seeing old friends.

Famous Hat