Ursula and Coventry

 

Today I have absolutely nothing to blog about, because I felt a bit unwell in a way that might have been contagious, so I worked from home. Also, I was so light-headed that just the drive to the shuttle stop sounded scary. It made for a very productive day, but I missed Seabird bringing in red bean mochis and also an early music concert at lunch, as well as our department meeting. At least the concert was recorded, so I can catch it when they post it early next week. I did take a walk right after work, hoping to see a train as confirmation that I was right to stay home, but all I saw was a lovely sunset which I did not take a picture of. Sorry.

Speaking of pictures, here are Ursula and Coventry together.

Travalon always has his stuffies getting into romantic relationships, so why shouldn't I? And here is Ursula with the stuffed bubble tea that matches her.

Here is Coventry the Christmas Dragon with a stuffed Christmas tree.

And here is the Hawaiian Capricorn keychain I thought was a necklace.

Guess my reading comprehension sucks. It's from the same place as my grandma's Cancer necklace. Maybe I can make it into a necklace. More likely I'll just take it to work and hang it up with all my evil eye protection things. Once a very Catholic former grad student stopped in to say hi, and she was taken aback by the evil eye protectors. The astrology thing wouldn't have helped. The thing is that I don't really believe the protectors do anything - I just really like the way they look. I especially love my cuddly evil eye protector, Niko. He's sitting her next to me, protecting away.

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Heart Hoya Surprise

 

Today I have even less to say than yesterday. I worked from home and walked outside every chance I got. FART 5 had a meeting this morning, and our boss said there is a nasty cold going around, but I remember thinking, "I feel fine." However, by midafternoon I was stuffy and sneezing - power of suggestion? I took an allergy pill but didn't feel better, just sleepy, so I called in sick to Adoration. (I did lead Night Prayer as regularly scheduled.) Thought I was feeling better and would get the rest of my steps today, but once I got up and started walking around to music, I didn't have the energy. Will go to bed soon and see if tomorrow I am back to myself or have a full-blown cold. Weirdly, while I feel feverish, the thermometer says my temperature is just fine. That's a hopeful sign, anyway.

Here's the exciting news in my life, which I have already mentioned: the heart-shaped hoya leaf I have had for years is sprouting a new shoot!

This is maybe not the best photo of it. It was easier to see when it was in the tiny pot it came in and had been in for years. I just transplanted Big Keith the Dracaena and my money tree, so while I was at it, I transplanted this too, since if it's actually going to grow into a whole plant, it will need more room. However, this pot seems too large for it, so hopefully it doesn't die. Not sure why pots that are too big are bad news, since in nature a plant is in an infinitely large pot, but I remember years ago I took a leaf like this from a hoya plant when I worked at the greenhouse on campus, and it was happy for a long time until I transplanted it... and then it died. I hope that isn't the fate of this plant. As you can see, the bottom of the leaf is getting a little brown, and I thought it was finally dying after all these years; I'd read these "zombie leaves" can live for years but never have any new growth so eventually they die. So I was expecting it to die any day, but instead it sent up this shoot! Also, a piece of my rick-rack cactus broke off, so I stuck that in a pot, and the bottom turned black but the upper part has all sorts of shoots coming off of it, so I removed the black part. I hope that wasn't a mistake too, and that it was perfectly happy as it was. Plants are so mysterious. Sometimes I get plants that die right away, but often they seem very happy for a long time and then they suddenly start dwindling away, and I can't save them no matter what. I have a gasteria right now that looks awful, so I took a photo of it with the plant app that can supposedly tell you what the problem is, and it just said, "This plant is okay, but it could be better." Um... thanks? Am I overwatering it? Underwatering it? Please, just give me a hint! Useless app.

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Animals We Saw in Florida

 

Today I worked on campus, and at lunch I walked with Hardingfele. She must have found the weather tolerable, because she didn't have any interest in going to the greenhouses today. We walked outside, and when we got back to her office, she showed me a Starbucks gift card she had found on the ground. She wondered how much was left on it, but I said probably nothing if someone had just dropped it like that. She looked up how to check the balance on it, then she checked it... and it was $0. Hey, you get what you pay for. Then in the afternoon I had a long meeting, and I ran into my former boss, but Handy Woman wasn't there this time. I have found the issues confronting academic staff less compelling than those facing university staff, who are often way underpaid and treated like crap, but today I got interested in a group that meets to decide if they will support or oppose various bills working their way through the state legislature. That sounds like my kind of group!

As promised weeks and weeks ago, here is a short movie I compiled of all the videos Travalon made of animals we encountered on our travels:

Some of these are native to Florida and some, obviously, are not. I'll give you a hint: if they are from Busch Gardens, they are not anything you would see in the wilds of Florida.

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Bad Bunny: Best Super Bowl Show Ever

 

I forgot to mention that Friday right after I got done with work, I went outside to take a rosary walk. It was very cold and I was tempted to go inside, but I stuck it out and was rewarded with seeing a train during the fifth decade. God's talking to me in Train again. Also, yesterday I went outside to take a walk and saw that all three of my packages had arrived: my Muppets hoodie, my Hawaiian Capricorn keychain (thought I was ordering a necklace just like Grandma's - oops!), and my "Minnesota Nice" basket of soap, lotion, scented oil, and lip balm. It was a fundraiser for people in Minnesota, and you could send one to a person in need in Minnesota, so I bought one for myself and one for someone being terrorized by ICE. Sorry, no photos of my loot yet - soon.

This morning there was twice as much plastic as usual, but there was a Care for Creation meeting after Mass, so I couldn't help too much with the recycling and poor Travalon had to take all the bags to the drop-off point himself. They were also selling pizzas after Mass to help people in Belize, so we bought one and had it for lunch. My Brazilian drum lesson was really short today, but like last week, my FitBit thought I got a workout from bicycling outside. Last week I was very sore after walking all around the Milwaukee Public Museum the day before, so I was happy to get "steps" by drumming and fiddling. Today I was short because it was so cold outside; Travalon and I walked around the house, but we didn't get that many steps so I cheated and put the FitBit on my right wrist when I went to band practice. Unlike the Slow Irish Session last week, where we played continuously so I got credit for a walk, this time my FitBit didn't register any workout, but it did register enough steps that I only had to walk around the house to one song when I got home to get my ten thousand steps. Not bad!

When I got home, Travalon was watching the end of the Super Bowl. The Seahawks won, which pleases me as far as I care, since neither team was the Packers. Travalon had recorded the whole game, so once it was over I rewound and watched the halftime show. And was that ever amazing! Having just been to Puerto Rico, I could recognize some of the tropes in the show, and I was happy to see Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Bad Bunny had so much energy, and he did have a lot of salsa flavor in his music. I haven't listened to him much in the past, but maybe now I will. He did work with a professor at our university to write his album about Puerto Rico, that I believe won a grammy. He certainly did win a Grammy at one point, because he gave it to a kid during the show. Also, a couple invited him to their wedding so he said they should have it during his show, and so they did. A real wedding! This has to be the best Super Bowl halftime show ever. It ended with Bad Bunny name-checking every country in Latin America, and ending with the USA and Canada, as people behind him carried all the flags. My regular readers know I'm a real sucker for parades of flags. But this show sucked me in from the beginning, when it depicted the sugar cane fields of Puerto Rico, and the old men playing cards at a table. Of course, that could also be Cuba. All my love to both islands.

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Balkan Singing and Croatian Wild Game Feast

 

Today Travalon and I had a very relaxed morning. I started the Portuguese course on DuoLingo and took a vigorous rosary walk in the neighborhood, and I did repot a plant. That was about as much as I accomplished this morning. Then we drove to Oakwood Village, a retirement community, to sing Balkan music in their chapel. We were very confused because we parked close to the chapel, but the doors to it were locked, so we had to go in the main entrance. Fortunately we ran into one of the people leading the singing, who led us to the chapel. We sang for an hour with about a dozen other people; it was scheduled to go for two hours, but we had to go pick up Mamastep to head to the Croatian wild game feast in Milwaukee.

Tiffy and my other college friend met us at the Foreign Legion, which was already very crowded. We couldn't find five seats together, despite having made a reservation for five - there were lots of spaces that were reserved, so we have no idea why we didn't get a reserved space. Tiffy and my other college friend found two seats together, and Travalon, Mamastep, and I found three together, so I only talked to the other two briefly now and then tonight. There were all sorts of wild game dishes, pheasant gumbo and elk goulash and venison medallions and rabbit in cream sauce and fried frog legs, which were my favorite. The gumbo was really good too. I had to eat somewhat lightly because of my diet medication, which will make my life miserable if I eat too much. There were also rolls, green salad, sauerkraut that was very different than German sauerkraut (more like boiled cabbage), and a wonderful thing like polenta. And then of course there were a ton of desserts. 

The tamburitza group of high schoolers that the fundraiser was for played a few songs, including the US and Croatian national anthems, then there were the raffle drawings. Tiffy and my other college friend had not bought raffle tickets because they are smart, so they said goodbye and took off. Mamastep and Travalon had bought raffle tickets, because I had forgotten how interminable the raffle for items on the table was last year, and it was no better this year. Why do people buy raffle tickets and then ignore them? Or were they so drunk that they couldn't figure out if the number called was one of their tickets? (Likely.) The guy calling the numbers would call the same one over and over while the rest of us were like, "They're not here! Just draw another number!" We didn't win anything, and other people at our table had a ton more tickets and didn't win anything. They were joking that the people had forgotten to put their tickets in the basket for drawing until finally one woman did get to go up to the table, and she got a gift certificate for a hardware store. I saw people with way cooler things, like orchids and paintings, but I hadn't really looked at the table before the drawing so I had no strong opinions about what I would have chosen in the unlikely event that our number would have been drawn. Then there was a "high table" with prizes of greater value, but there were only five of those so it went a lot faster. Also, I think the people who had bought those higher-priced tickets cared more. We only had three for the "low table," one for the "high table," and one for the 50/50 raffle. The amount this year was around $500. Mamastep bought a number of 50/50 raffle tickets, but she didn't win either. So we headed home, through a light snow, talking about random things like embryonic development and jazz standards, and so we had a very Balkan day to make up for all the Celtic days that Travalon has to put up with, like Thursday night. I'm all for fair representation of our ethnic heritages - I love tamburitza music. Travalon made some videos, but it was so loud with people yakking that you can barely hear the music. They really got loud during the raffle - if someone won, a bunch of people at their table would make turkey calls. Why? Because alcohol.

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Bob Marley Birthday Party

 

Today I worked from home and went to the dentist. I saw a different hygienist this time, one who was all old-skool and used the scraper instead of the sonic thing. I actually preferred that, because there was a little pain, but it was the kind I could wrap my head around, instead of the five kinds of pain the sonic thing gives me, each unique and excruciating. The only thing that makes me not sure about this hygienist, who is older than I am, is that she had FAUX News on in the background. Come on, either watch fiction or news, not fiction pretending to be news. They were talking about some schools with bad scores were letting their kids walk out early to protest ICE. Yeah, and so what? I'm sure a lot of schools with high test scores did too, and it's not like you could blame the test scores on the walkouts since they predated them.

The kids Travalon works with made Olympic medals, like this one:

In the evening we went to a Bob Marley birthday party fundraiser for a food pantry at the Crystal Corner. They even had a cake for Bob Marley.

It was Black Forest flavored. Travalon said I could post this photo of him.

Here is a better photo of him.

He is enjoying a Commuter Kolsch. I had an infused drink. We were right by a very cute window.

At first, a DJ was playing reggae, and it was loud, so I wore earplugs. Then a live band played a short set. They were really good!

I thought, "Are they already taking a break?" and then I realized they were packing up their instruments. There was a raffle, then we had cake, and the DJ started up again and kept getting louder and louder. We headed home, and I finished the Spanish course.

Pretty optimistic of DuoLingo to think I could get a job in Spanish. Garbage collector, maybe. "¿Es su basura? Damela, por favor. Gracias!" Maybe if we move to Puerto Rico, I can get paid to collect the trash.

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Irish Session at the Elks Lodge

 

Today I worked on campus, and it was not a good day. I made mistakes, other people made mistakes, and it was generally just a crappy day. At least I made my new boss laugh, because she was having a whole crappy week. Weird... I don't usually have two bad days in a given week, but Monday was a weird day too. At lunch I walked with Hardingfele, who was not prepared for the weather - no hat, wimpy gloves, and wimpy jacket, so she wanted to go to the greenhouses again. Not that I ever have a problem with going to the greenhouses, but yesterday Seabird and I walked outside and were fine. You have to dress for the weather.

When I got home, Travalon's Valentine's Day present had arrived in the mail, and when he got home I asked if he wanted it now or on Valentine's Day. We were both curious, so he opened it. It's a Hawaiian shirt of the Mike Tyson Punch-Out game, the one with Bald Bull that Travalon often plays while I'm at my Brazilian drum lesson. Sorry, he didn't try it on, so no photo, but he was very pleased with it.

Then we went to the Elks Lodge in town, a place I have always been curious about. It's on the water just like the East Side Club, and tonight there was the Irish session there, but it was invitation only. The red-headed flute player was there, along with the mandolin player who had his fingers injured in that gruesome saw accident - he's able to play again! Yay! We saw some Shamrock Club members there, our buddy who is always flitting around talking to everyone, and the adventurous couple we see everywhere except the Burns dinner, because it turns out they were in Florida at that time. Apparently part of the reason the Elks Club hosted this session was to get people interested in joining them, so I was afraid they would be giving us the hard sell, but it was the opposite - after seeing that beautiful space, we were curious but didn't see anyone to ask about how to join. We had a light dinner and listened to the music, and we really enjoyed our time there. 

When we got home, Travalon gave me my Valentine's Day presents: a book about the Camino that has a lot of very useful information, and a teddy bear with plaid that matches mine.

She doesn't have a name yet. Come to think of it, I'm not sure my Irish bear ever got a name either, and now she's missing a shoe. When I find it, I can take a photo of them together.

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