Skunk Cabbage Sunday, or Mass at a Million Degrees

 

This morning I woke up too late to go to my usual Mass downtown, or even St. Peter's at 10. I was aiming for Waunakee at 10:30 but realized I wouldn't even make that, so I went to St. Patrick's at 11. Now technically that is still my parish, since both churches were merged into one parish years ago, but it feels a little like a rival, like I couldn't go to a Packers game so I went to a Bears one. Maybe it's more like I had to go to a football game for whatever reason, and I already missed the Packers, so I went to the Bears. Anyway, St. Patrick's felt like a million degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius? does it matter?), and I wondered if I was having a hot flash. During the homily I went out into the hall, which was much cooler, and another woman was there too. I assume she is too young for hot flashes, and she also said it was way too hot in there, so maybe it was the church and not me. 

Travalon and I did go for a walk on the boardwalk in DeForest, and we left the paved path to walk in the woods. To my surprise, toward the end of the path we passed some skunk cabbage. I only knew about the patch of the stuff in the Arboretum, which we often go to see when it's in full bloom, but that's in early March when there's still snow on the ground. Most of this looked like cabbage, but we did see a couple of plants that still had the little band shells, now very dry. Here is a photo.

And here are the plants after blooming, when they just look like cabbage.

In the woods we saw a bluejay.

Travalon took lots of photos of the Yahara River, which up there looks like a cute little creek.

As we walked along the path, we saw this little thing running by itself on a lawn across the river. Was it a lawn Roomba? We couldn't tell if it was mowing the lawn or just patrolling. It sure was cute, though.

Here is a movie of it in action.

Does anyone have any idea what this is? We couldn't tell if it was remote-controlled or self-propelled. A Google search for "orange self-driving lawn thing" seems to indicate that it is a Worx Landroid robotic lawn mower. We just couldn't tell if it was doing anything, but that was our guess.

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