Madison Irish Fest

 

This morning Travalon and I went to the closer Mass again, but I may have to go back to getting going earlier on Sundays. Originally I'd heard our current church would only have Mass in Spanish, but now the plan is for it not to have Mass at all! What?? Why would they keep around an empty church building? Answer: they won't. So we have to start going back to fight for its survival.

I downloaded the free Merlin app to identify birdsongs, since all the other bird nerds rave about it, and today I tested it out when Travalon and I went for a walk on Governor's Island. We heard birds all around us, so I fired it up, and it immediately said we were hearing a yellow warbler. That makes sense, since we have seen one there before. It also said we were hearing an American redstart, which I had never seen before, but I looked up, and there it was! So that's a lifer for me. We heard three kinds of vireos, including a Philadelphia vireo, which I've never heard of before. It identified songs I do know, like the robin, the northern cardinal, and the red-winged blackbird. Travalon asked if we were hearing any woodpeckers, and I said, "No. Wait, yes. A red-bellied woodpecker just sounded off over there!" This thing is mind-blowing. You can hear way more birds than you can see, and it's so cool to know what's around you. It's like listening in to a foreign language with some sort of translator.

Then we met Jilly Moose at Garver Mill for the Madison Irish Fest. It used to be in a barn in Arena, but this year they decided to have it a week earlier and a lot closer. The first few bands weren't that exciting, but then some really good ones played, and to my surprise some of them came over to the table where we were sitting, so I got to converse with them. The mandolin player didn't pick up an instrument until grad school, so why is she so much better than I am? And I felt a little discouraged because they all knew each other, and they knew about Irish jam sessions and sea chanty sessions all over the place. I feel so out of the loop. Nobody knows our band, and nobody really comes to listen to us. Of course, these people all specialize in Irish music, and I think they all do something at the big Irish Fest in Milwaukee, like take classes or go to some jam session or something. I've only paid my money and gone in. 

We had pizza for lunch, then we had some bubble tea at a place with Asian food, so we thought we'd have that for dinner, but Travalon went fishing for a bit, and by the time he returned, the Asian place was closed. So we had pizza for dinner too. There was also a stand selling "Irish" food like corned beef (never actually had any in Ireland), but they were packed up by then too. The weather was so beautiful that I mostly stayed outside, although there was another stage inside. We saw a lot of Shamrock Club people too, but I never saw my current Irish teacher. (My first Irish teacher was there.) I really liked the traditional music groups, but the last group of the evening was led by a singer-songwriter who wrote songs about how his heart was broken by a girl he met in Telluride, and I'm not really a fan of that stuff, so we decided that we had spent enough time at Irish Fest. Overall, it was a really good time.

Famous Hat