Saturday in Milwaukee

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Travalon and I are trying to live more simply for Lent, so we had fish at home, and then we went to the health club. Saturday we made up for it by living larger: we went to Milwaukee, and Travalon went to his high school buddy’s daughter’s basketball game while I went to a show called “Shen Yun,” which is Chinese music and dance, with Tiffy. I said to her that while I don’t really like Western ballet, I loved this show, and she said, “The costumes and music were very different than in Western ballet.” This show had dances from all sorts of regions and ethnicities in China, like the Han, the Yi, the Tibetans, and the Mongolians. The orchestra was mostly full of familiar Western instruments but featured a Chinese lute and a stringed instrument called an erhu (pronounced “ahr-hu”) that is supposed to be the instrument that sounds the most like a human voice. It does sound somewhat human, but I would say the cornetto could give it a run for its money. The costumes were so beautiful, and the dances featured a lot of very athletic tumbling type moves like backflips and somersaults. Afterwards we met Travalon at a fancy German restaurant called Mader’s for a delicious dinner. His friend’s daughter’s team had barely lost, and this was the game that would have sent them to the state tournament, so that was a letdown. Otherwise it was a wonderful day, except for all the drunk Millennials staggering around in green T-shirts for something called the “Shamrock Shuffle” that seemed to involve going barhopping as a team sport. As we were leaving the restaurant, we saw one ambulance on every block for three consecutive blocks! Think they were there for acute alcohol poisoning episodes?

Yesterday we had a quiet day. We took a long walk on the walking/biking path that goes between Windsor and DeForest, and while we usually start in a park in Windsor, this time we decided to start from the other end, since we had never walked the whole thing. We googled the path and found out it is called the Upper Yahara Path, and the far end is at the intersection of two roads in DeForest. We drove there and found it was a quiet residential street where it was easy to park, and then we set out on the path, which started with a long, elevated boardwalk along the river. It was so pretty! We walked until we got to a house we recognized from coming the other way, and we found the map that showed the whole path. We also found Little Mendota Lake in DeForest, but it is smaller than Tiedemann’s Pond! You would certainly never mistake it for the big Lake Mendota. In the evening Travalon went to the last Badger basketball home game, then he joined a small group of us at Rich’s house for dinner with an old friend who is in town for a while. It was a very relaxing day with plenty of fresh air and exercise – just how I love to spend my weekends! 

Famous Hat