Martinsville

Friday evening Travalon and I went to the Manna Café for dinner. We have been there several times for brunch, when it is always packed, but they only recently started serving dinner, and it hasn’t caught on yet. I suppose there is more competition for dinner than brunch, but the food is just as wonderful. Travalon was ecstatic to see chicken paprikash, a Hungarian dish his grandma used to make, on the menu, and he said it was so delicious that he would eat dinner there every night. However, you can’t eat dinner there on Sundays and Mondays.

Saturday evening Travalon and I were going to a spaghetti dinner at Immaculate Heart in Monona, but he thought I had cash and I thought he had cash, and neither of us was right, so we decided we’d better stop and get cash. Cecil Markovitch was driving, and he dropped Travalon off at a pharmacy downtown and said we’d be in the area, since right in front of it was a no-stopping zone. Travalon went inside the pharmacy, and Cecil found a parking spot right across the street, from which we could see Travalon come out of the pharmacy and approach a car stopped in the no-stopping zone. We waved at him, but he went up to the other car, opened the door, and sat right down in the passenger seat! I’m a bad wife because I laughed so hard I was crying. Travalon is a big guy, so he may have scared the other driver, but luckily the guy didn’t pull a gun or anything, he just said, “I think you have the wrong car.” So Travalon got out of that car and finally noticed us across the street, laughing at him. He said I could blog about this.

Sunday Travalon and I overslept and didn’t make it to our usual Mass, so we went to the nearby church’s later Mass after having some coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Then we were going to watch American Sniper, but it was sold out, so we stopped by his favorite place, Pooley’s, for a light lunch and then drove to a tiny township we’d been told about by some choir members. It’s a little place called Martinsville that consists of a Catholic church called St. Martin’s, a bunch of houses, and a bar called The Keg. The bartender there told us about another establishment “further up the road” that was a converted chicken coop, but we didn’t succeed in finding it. In the evening we went to Richard Bonomo’s house for a birthday party for Mr. Icon, who is visiting from Alaska. He gave Kathbert and Miss Heartsong jars of sea glass, he gave Travalon and me knit caps (but Travalon’s didn’t fit), and he gave Rich a T-shirt that says: “I can’t hear you over the sound of how epic I am.” He says it’s a lot warmer in Kodiak right now, but the social life up there is not very vibrant. So now you know, in case you were thinking of moving up there. 

Famous Hat