Savor the River Valley Redux

 

Sorry for not blogging the last couple of days. I worked from home and didn't have much to say about that. However, today was a lot of fun. Wolverhampton won, so Travalon was very happy. It's been a while since they had a win. Then we headed back to Spring Green to hit some more stops that we hadn't had room for last week on the Savor the River Valley Tour. Our first stop was a bakery called Sky Blue Pink, where Travalon had a pistachio scone and I had some sort of Polish pastry that was like a cross between a donut and a danish, with chocolate and cheese on top. Yum! Then we walked to the General Store, because we thought Hardingfele and her husband were performing there, but they are actually playing tomorrow. Oops! There were lots of beautiful earrings there, but they were way too expensive.

We walked to a bar called Baron Brooks, since apparently the previous owner was named Baronbrooks, and they just kept the name. Someone on social media said we had to try their burgers, so that's what we had for lunch. They were very tasty. Then we went to a home decor store that for some reason served ice cream, and Travalon got fancy pretzels while I got a stone heart. (Some would argue that I already have one.) We sat outside enjoying our ice cream, under wind chimes that sounded like they were playing "Scarborough Fair." I made a video:

They must be in the Dorian Mode. On the walk back to the car I saw jonquils - they were like tiny daffodils, four to a stem, but I didn't take a picture or bend down to see if they had a scent. Then we went to the Arena boat launch, and Travalon took some photos.

We were going to hike on the trail in Mazomanie, but after seeing the bluffs on the other side of the river from the boat launch, I wanted to find them. We stopped at a gas station back in Spring Green, where Travalon found a map of Sauk County, and then we drove east on Highway 60 and tried to find some of the points of interest. One was a German Swiss Historical Area, so we drove on the road where it was supposedly located, but all we saw were some farms that looked like any other farms. We did see this old school house and abandoned church.

The views of the bluffs on this road were stunning. Check out the colorful foliage on this one.

And there were plenty of others.

There were also wild cacti growing near the road. This was a road we turned off of to see a lilac hedge, but it wasn't in bloom yet.

On this road, we saw more interesting bluffs.

The third point of interest we went to was Ferry Bluff, which we have climbed before. This time we took a path down by the river, and we saw a nuthatch.

And these flowers that I thought were called trout lilies, but my phone calls them merry bells.

Across the river, we could see pelicans.

Here is the view down the river.

Then we parked at the VFW Park in Sauk and hiked on the trail between there and the dam. We saw some flowers in the woods. Maybe these are the trout lilies? My phone didn't even recognize them as plants.

These are Dutchmen's breeches.

In the sandier areas, we saw this sand cress in bloom.

And of course we saw pelicans.

This is a view of the VFW Park from just off the trail.

Travalon has taken a lot of photos of this bluff over the years.

We came across something wonderful in the woods: a feral crabapple tree!

By the dam, there were lots of pelicans.

It looks like one pelican and the cormorant were dancing:

At least they could laugh about it afterwards!

On the way back, I went to smell the feral crabapple, and what a sweet scent it had!

I think this might be a wild plum. Its blossoms smelled a bit like grape soda.

It had been a lovely day up until then, and we were planning to go out to dinner with a gift certificate I had purchased way back for Travalon's birthday, but ominous clouds rolled in, and we could see lightning in the distance. We opted to pick up a quick dinner at the nearby gyro place and stay home tonight. There was a lot of lightning all around us, but whatever storm was going on never actually hit us. I did quite a few lessons on DuoLingo this evening and was shocked to get this sticker:

I assume they mean a personal record, which is surprising enough because there have been days I did more lessons, but the sticker seems to imply that I set a record for all users of DuoLingo. Is this possible? And if so, then why am I not winning my league? As soon as I stopped doing lessons, I got a notification saying I'd dropped out of the Top Five in my league, so START DOING SOME MORE LESSONS!! Is that any way to treat a record breaker?

Famous Hat

Basque in Shakespeare?

 

Today I worked on campus, and at lunch I went to the Just Bach concert. Today was choral works; they had two of Johann Sebastian's older cousins also on the program, and one of the pieces was "Furchte Dich Nicht" by Johann Christoph Bach, which I sang with the Lutheran choir ages ago, and which I listen to pretty regularly on YouTube. Which version? All of them! I hadn't heard it live before (other than when I was singing it myself), and it was so beautiful that I cried. The pieces by JS Bach were gorgeous too. Afterwards I saw Pete the Sailor Man and the guy we hiked with at the beginning of the pandemic, and they had a woman with them I hadn't met before. She said, "That was so beautiful, it was almost enough to make me change religions!" since she's Jewish. If you want to hear this music yourself, it will be posted on the Just Bach website on Sunday. You can always find previous concerts there as well.

The Professor Formerly Known As Banjo Player tagged me on social media with a post about how Shakespeare actually threw some Basque into one of his plays, but nobody realized it because it was nonsense words, since he didn't actually know Basque but was kind of familiar with the sound of it. This got me thinking about how, during the pandemic when I took that Basque class online, it made me feel twenty years old again because that was how old I was when I was living over there, studying the language. I am so far from fluent, but it started to come back to me, and even more interesting was when we discussed Basque culture and it actually sounded familiar to me, as if I had grown up in it, because I had lived in it for several months. I did feel a little weird when I was picking up the language more quickly than my classmates, who all had Basque last names, and it felt like they were sort of resentful. That's not to say that I wouldn't do another online Basque class, given the opportunity, but as far as I know, our teacher isn't offering them anymore. They did say I was an "honorary Basque," and they even said I was a distant cousin, since the Irish are supposedly the most genetically similar to the Basques. There is just no substitute for living in a place to really learn the language, and maybe if I ever get a chance to do the Camino, I'll get to speak it again, since that goes right through Basque country. And despite the pleas of many, many of us, DuoLingo shows no interest in creating a Basque course. Bummer!

Famous Hat

Crazy Frank's Flea Market Loot

 

Yesterday I worked on campus and then in the evening had a condo board meeting. Today I worked on campus because I had an in-person meeting, and then a couple of faculty met with me too. All that is to say that I don't have much to blog about the last couple of days; I went to the Allen Centennial Gardens and took photos of some of the lovely flowers, but they didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. However, I did get some good photos of our loot from Crazy Frank's Flea Market in Mineral Point. First, here is Travalon's stuff:

The only thing that might not be self-explanatory is the bobblehead of a Green Bay college-league baseball team that no longer exists - it's a bullfrog. Also, the figurine to the left is Popeye, if you can't quite make it out. The little truck says "Warner Bros."

Here is my stuff:

In the back row are a blue dog and a big baseball Beanie Baby bear, and between them the Spain Beanie Baby bear and "The End" Beanie Baby Bear, which sounds ominous but I assume was the last one in the series. Then there are the bride and groom Beanie Baby bears, which seemed appropriate when we are fast approaching our tenth wedding anniversary, and in between them is a little pineapple made of semiprecious stones. There are sort of rainbow earrings and an intriguing necklace (I love the magenta color) with an ankh on it, and in front is a sun catcher. The only thing that cost in double digits was the pineapple. 

I'm not really pleased with any of the flower photos I took at the gardens, especially the tulips that looked so vivid in real life and pathetic in my shots, but I did see something interesting. A while back I had blogged about the difference between a daffodil and a jonquil: a daffodil has one blossom to a stem, is larger, and has no scent, while a jonquil has multiple blossoms to a stem and often is fragrant, like paper whites. I did see these jonquils, but I didn't notice that they had a scent.

And then I saw this: it seems to be a daffodil, but this one stem has two blossoms.

I would say this is just an anomaly. I have sometimes seen two tulip blossoms on one stem, or even two calla lily blossoms on one stem. I'm calling this a twin daffodil, not a jonquil. When we were kids, we would often find a giant double dandelion blossom among all the regular blossoms, but I haven't seen one in years. Then again, I don't spend as much time inspecting dandelions as I did as a kid. Those had some pretty impressive seed heads when they went to seed - extra wishes!

Famous Hat

Travalon Twice Thwarted

 

This morning something was wrong with my brain, because I really struggled doing French on DuoLingo. I've never made that many mistakes in French, and rarely in Irish. Then Travalon and I went to Mass in the gym, and I was having trouble with the chant notation, thinking it was different than what we were actually singing, but when I looked again, it was correct. The priest seemed to be suffering from the same confusion too; he decided to do the final blessing in Latin, which he never does, only it sounded like it was half in Spanish. It really sounded like he said, "In nomine Patri, et Hijo, et Spirito Santo." Or was my hearing confused? Of course, knowing that I carry a gene for Alzheimers (though it is a gene for the late-onset variety), I wondered, "Is this it? Am I in decline?" But when we got home, I looked up common causes of mental confusion, and one was dehydration, which makes sense because I don't think I drank enough water yesterday, and also my liquid output smelled odd, another symptom of dehydration. So I drank 16 ounces of water, and that seemed to wash the confusion away.

Today Travalon and I split two of the chocolate bonbons.

We split the two on the bottom, the 24-karat gold one and the sea salt toffee one. They were so tasty. The ones on the top are chili and candied ginger with saffron. Sorry, no pictures of my loot from yesterday, I never got around to taking them, but I somehow forgot to post this photo yesterday:

It's a closeup of the padlocks on the pedestrian overpass that people seem to put on it when they get married. I know yesterday's post didn't have nearly enough photos, and you probably feel shortchanged, so I do deeply apologize for that.

Today Travalon and I went back to the Lodi segment of the Ice Age Trail so I could show him the sweeping vista he missed last weekend. He took some photos along the way:

We got to the top of the bluff, but right at the spot where you turn the corner and see the beautiful vista, there was a sign that said: "Ye kennae go no further." Or at least that's what my mind is telling me it said because I've been watching too many videos of a woman who teaches the "Scots Word of the Day." What it actually said is that we had to stop because there was a controlled burn ahead. Travalon went ahead anyway, so I followed him, but there was so much smoke that we turned around. If I get lung cancer in twenty years, we'll know why. So once again Travalon was thwarted in his quest to see this vista. However, we could kind of see it down at the bottom of the bluff. Here are some photos.

Then we went back to Whalen Grade and saw a Bonaparte's gull.

We saw gulls and pelicans in the distance.

There were scaups closer to us.

And two male northern shovelers.

"Hey Frank, want to know how to be a better musician? Stay tuned..."

We stopped by the dam in Sauk and saw three pelicans there.

Also, Jilly Moose sent me this photo, of a rosary she made for her niece who received her First Communion today. I love the colors!

I was a bit scared of going to Irish class, considering my failure at French this morning, but I seemed to be my normal level of incompetence and not anything noteworthy. At band practice there were a couple of times I read the notes wrong on an Irish jig, but I was looking at music on someone else's stand that was at an awkward angle for me, so maybe not any reason for concern. And when I did DuoLingo once I got back home, my French skills were back on point. So I'm going to guess that my cognitive skills aren't declining sharply but were just foggy because of a lack of water yesterday. I did have a drink at the dive bar, so that on top of not drinking my usual amount of water might have been enough to do it. Guess I'm getting too old for alcohol.

Famous Hat