The View from Holy Hill

Last night Hockey Girl and I went to a concert in which a bunch of students played Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and they were amazing! I used to listen to a lot of Vivaldi in my mid-twenties, more L'Estro Armonico than The Four Seasons, but definitely anything by the Red Priest, and this made me think I should pull out those old CDs and listen again. They started with "Fall" instead of "Spring," which is how I usually hear it, to match the actual season I suppose, but I liked that because it ended with the fiery final movement of "Summer." Viva Vivaldi!

Today I used a floating holiday to take the day off of work and join Travalon in taking his mother to Holy Hill. We do this every October, and today was a beautiful day to do it. However, it was also quite windy, so when Travalon and I tried to go up to the top of the bell tower, we stopped at the first open level. I could have gone up higher, but that is not the issue - coming back down is! I was afraid that with the fierce wind I would be far too terrified to go down the open staircase. The view was amazing even from the lower level, and we could see the skyscrapers of downtown Milwaukee thirty miles away. We also went to Pike Lake State Park, and Travalon and I hiked on part of the Ice Age Trail after we took his mother back home. My regular readers will be stunned to learn that I bought two rosaries at the Holy Hill gift shop, but I had a prepaid Visa card from doing a health assessment at work, so it was like getting free rosaries. One is an Irish rosary, and I have a sub-collection of those now, at least three and probably more. The other one is a one-decade wooden rosary with a tau cross for the crucifix; it is supposed to be a bracelet, but it is far too large for me to wear it that way, so I thought about using it as an anklet but finally decided I would use it as a "walking rosary." It should work well to use on my lunchtime rosary walks. We encountered a priest as we left the shrine, and he happily blessed my rosaries. I am not sure how many of my other ones are actually blessed...

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