Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Sorry for my silence yesterday. What happened was that when I got to work, the door was locked so I let myself in with my key, but an alarm was going off. Just when I wondered what was going on, someone told me the power was out in the whole building. I went up the very dark stairs and found one coworker in her office, reading by the window, since she couldn’t do anything else. I said I really wanted a cup of coffee, but of course I couldn’t make any, so we went to a nearby coffee shop. The power was out on the whole street, but the coffee shop had brewed coffee they had made before the power outage, so we were able to get our caffeine fix. A guy there showed us a map of the outage, and it was quite extensive. We returned to work, and by then everyone was gathered in the lobby, since it has windows so it was the one place with a lot of light, and someone said a transformer had exploded and the power company said the power wouldn’t come back on for hours. I decided to take a vacation day and head home, but just after I called Travalon, the power came back on. Oh well, c’est la vie.

Travalon and I drove to Oconomowoc to visit his mother, and he also took me to lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Hartland that he wanted me to try. It turns out the owners used to own a restaurant in Madison, and somehow they got me into a conversation about biking. How they knew I used to be a big biker is beyond me, since I have barely been on a bike for the past several years… and it shows. We returned to Travalon’s mother’s place and played a very close game of Scrabble with her; I won, but we were all within a few points of one another. Travalon had the best words, like “igloo” and “xenia” on multipoint squares. Then he and I went to Lapham Peak State Park and took a hike. My phone says I went up 26 flights of stairs yesterday, but I can only account for six of those between work, home, and the choir loft, so the rest must have been from hiking. Funny how twenty flights of stairs would be an awful thing to climb, but hiking up a hill isn’t nearly so painful. Maybe it’s the lovely scenery.

By the time we returned to town, I had to leave for choir practice, and then afterwards we watched The Good Dinosaur, a cute movie but with the usual Disney cliché of the father dying while saving the son, and I didn’t really understand the ending: the main character got an award, but it wasn’t clear why. Anyway, that is why I never got a chance to blog yesterday. The big news is that Travalon just got his genetic test results back, and he is a little bit Irish! Just a tiny bit, the same amount as I am Western Sub-Saharan African, but nevertheless he can celebrate today with a new sense of purpose.

Famous Hat