The Day of Unexpected Twists

 

Today was the Day of the Unexpected. It started when we arrived at Mass, and the woman who leads the Care for Creation team reminded me that we had a meeting I had forgotten all about. Whoops! Then our drumming lesson was short today because the teacher had to play at Fete de Marquette. Travalon had gone to the East Side Club to see a band playing classic rock, so I felt bad telling him he had to leave early to pick me up. We went back there so he could watch more of the band, who were pretty good - I don't love most of that kind of music, but I did know all the songs. I suppose most of my classmates from drumming class went to watch our teacher's band perform. Then Travalon went to Fete de Marquette himself to watch Marcia Ball with Cecil Markovitch and the Single B-Boy. Ever since we went on that Serbo-Croatian day with them, Travalon has been on a Croatian kick, listening to tamburitza music in the car (which I really enjoy) and even dancing around the house to it. He said I should mention on here how he was doing some Croatian steps he's seen in videos, and I was loving it.

Our bandmate who always hosts band practice is out of town right now, so the leader said she could host it at her house. Hardingfele said, "That won't work. Famous is deathly allergic to cats," because she has two cats. (Hardingfele has four.) I said, "I'll take some drugs and stick it out as long as I can," but Hardingfele kept insisting this wouldn't work, so I assumed she just didn't want to come. Oddly, the bass player, who was the one that suggested we have practice at our leader's house, never made an appearance. I took both the violin and the mandolin, got a bit lost and arrived late, but was still the first one there. I pulled out the violin, and the leader and I were playing along when Hardingfele arrived, so then we could play pieces for two violins. Not long after that, the leader's partner arrived with her eleven-year-old grandson who also plays the violin, so we had THREE fiddles. He only started playing the violin last year, but he's not too bad. He seemed to be keeping up. Then he asked to see the mandolin, so I put away the violin and took out the mandolin. I let him try it, but he had no idea what to do with it, so we all played "Metsakukkia" and the leader's partner recorded us and put it on social media. Considering that the kid was sightreading, I don't think we sound half bad. 

I needed exercise and to pray the rosary, so late at night I went out in my high vis gear.

There was a rumor that there could be northern lights visible tonight, but I saw nothing. That's okay, the ones I saw last October were so spectacular that they will sustain me for quite a while.

I did get an interesting email yesterday, about that piece "The Mystical Rose" that was set to the poem (or actually part of a poem) that I wrote. Some Lutheran (it's always Lutherans) wanted to perform it, and he wanted to know more about the poem, or me, or something. Like, he seemed confused that it had one last name on it, but now I have two last names. Maybe he has never heard of the institution of marriage? He asked what name I wanted on it, and I don't really care, but I did mention my pen name that in an ideal world I would use for all my writing. Just to confuse matters more. I'll be curious to see which name he uses, if he tells me.

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Horicon Marsh and Highland Night

 

I'd been looking forward to Pipes in the Glen for weeks, and today was the big day! Only one problem: I had thought the festivities started at one, so when Travalon mentioned that the Forward were having a Highlands-themed game tonight, it sounded perfect - a very Scottish day all around. However, the Pipes in the Glen didn't start until three, so we would barely have any time there before having to head back to Madison for a little footy. Also, you could get a tartan Forward scarf with your ticket, but supplies were limited, and they seemed to have sold out by the time we got our tickets, which was before I realized the timing conflict. So we went with Plan B: Horicon Marsh.

On the way to the boardwalk, we saw a little woodcock doing its boogie step across the road, but Travalon took those photos through the car window, so they didn't turn out. At the parking lot for the boardwalk, we saw a bunch of people, and then they all got word that a whooping crane was near the exit, so they left. One way to know you have spent too much time in the marsh is when you are blasé about a rare bird; I was like, "Oh well, we've seen plenty of whooping cranes," and we continued with our plans to go on the boardwalk. On the boardwalk, we saw lots of egrets and black terns and barn swallows.

Some people came onto the boardwalk with two large dogs, which is really rude because dogs are not allowed on the boardwalk. At least they were leashed... On our walk back to the car, we saw these purple coneflowers.

As we continued on the auto tour, we saw the big group looking at the whooping crane.

A little further down the road, we saw an egret posing beautifully.

Then a bunch of geese sauntered slowly in front of us.

Then we went to Old Marsh Road and met a woman who had been part of the big group, a birding club from Madison. It started to rain, so the three of us took shelter in the blind, and from there we had a great view of pied-billed grebes with babies. Here's a picture.

Travalon took a lot more, but that one shows the mama and babies perfectly. Notice how the young ones have striped heads. Okay, one more where they look like tiny Loch Ness monsters.

And here are three babies.

We saw lots of little blue butterflies, but my one photo didn't turn out, and I forgot to take a photo of the pretty wild snapdragons in bloom. We didn't see any baby gallinules, but we did see two adults.

It's weird how I tried to see them for years, and now I've seen them three times in a row. One was briefly joined by some sort of sandpiper.

We saw a bittern flying, and a number of pelicans, but there are no photos of that. Our new buddy said they had seen a swan and some baby gallinules at the other end of Old Marsh Road. She gave up on seeing the black-necked stilts and headed back just before we got to the spot where they were.

Everyone is posting photos of baby black-necked stilts online, but we didn't see any babies. We saw another sandpiper, or possibly the same one.

The gallinules were still there when we headed back.

Pretty sure their name is Latin for "little chicken," and they really do look like little marsh chickens with candy-red beaks. We also saw the grebe families again.

Here's a close-up of a young one.

On the drive home I was praying the rosary while falling asleep, and I could hear that my words were getting more slurred, but I woke myself up by saying. "When we walked into the store..." during the Our Father at the start of the Fifth Joyous Mystery, and I thought, "Wait, those aren't the words!" but Travalon hadn't even noticed. That woke me up completely, but I kept giggling during the rest of the rosary. After finishing, I said, "You wouldn't even notice if I slipped some other words in there, like, 'Hail Mary, Loch Ness Monster, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among tubas,'" and he conceded that he probably wouldn't notice.

When we got home, we got dressed and went to the Forward Game. I checked at Guest Services to see if there were any extra tartan scarves, and they said to check back toward the end of the game. I had worn my African Forward scarf and was all prepared to talk about my West African heritage if anyone questioned me, but nobody said a word, and I didn't see anyone of any color wearing that scarf. Honestly, we only saw maybe two other people wearing the tartan scarf. Before the game and during halftime some bagpipes played, and right after that during halftime some girls did highland dancing. Also, this has nothing to do with Scotland, but some people had giant balloon animals.

They always have farm animals in the kiddie area, and today they had a "heeland coo."

Seventy minutes into the game I ventured over to Guest Services, all the way on the other side of the field, to see if there were any extra scarves. By then the highland cow was gone, but guess what? They had one scarf left, and they gave it to me! It probably helped that I was dressed like a "Superfan" with my Forward shirt, Forward earrings, Forward hat, and Forward scarf. Here I am with the tartan scarf.

At that point I had given the other scarf to Travalon to wear, because you can reverse it so instead of being African print, it's just a Forward scarf. Guess what? The Forward beat Greenville 3-1! But for some reason they didn't release a big puff of pink smoke like they always used to do after winning. Even stranger, they announced that they would be playing a team from Colorado immediately afterwards. Now I have heard of double-headers in baseball, but soccer seems way too taxing for a double-header, and besides, it would not have ended before eleven at night. We did run into the Night Prayer regular who always wears six hats, and he seemed disappointed that we weren't staying, but I had to get home and blog. And even skipping the second game, I am still doing this way too late at night.

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Big Keith

 

My longtime readers may remember that last year I had two dracaena marginatas or whatever they are now called, but Greg (who is also a dracaena) fell over and decapitated one, and oddly it was unable to recover. The other one is now taller than the ponytail palm. Last year it seemed very happy outside, but this year is so rainy that I was afraid it would drown in its pot with no drainage. I guess I could just put it in a pot with drainage, but instead I brought it in every time it rained, including today. (Got very wet on my lunchtime walk!) So then I had another idea: I could put it on our porch, which is sort of like being outside, except the rain can't get at it.

If you are wondering why there is a trash bag on our porch, that is stuff from Travalon's storage unit that we haven't sorted yet. I had always thought of this plant as "one of the twins," but now that its twin is dead, I thought I could call it Big Keith. My very longtime readers may remember that several jobs ago one of the faculty gave me a teeny dracaena marginata, and I named it Keith. It contributed to my blog quite a bit before I was forced to bring it home because I could only have "professional-looking" plants in my office, and apparently none of the plants I had fit the bill. It didn't like my house and soon died, but its spirit lives on here on my blog. In fact, I did a search for "Keith" on the blog and enjoyed reading its contributions in the shadow of Big Keith. Hopefully Big Keith enjoys its time on our porch more than Little Keith enjoyed Plant World.

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FART 5 F-Bomb Drop

 

Today I worked on campus, and I walked at lunch with a colleague who apparently doesn't like the outside, because we ended up exploring the building next to ours. In the afternoon we had another FART 5 confab, and it was a smaller group today so we felt freer to drop a lot of F-bombs as we each screwed something up in the new system. When I said what I'd screwed up, the look of abject horror on my boss's face was priceless, but fortunately she did figure out a way to fix it. She said this is Mortification Week for a website she is on, and I said, "Shouldn't that be during Lent?" The only one who laughed was the colleague I walked with at lunch, so I said, "I guess only the Catholics got that joke." Apparently during Mortification Week you are supposed to post stories of being mortified at work, so I am wondering if I could post the story from when I was like fourteen and the girl I was babysitting was trying to kill a smaller child at a convenience store with her mother's pleasure toy. I mean, technically it happened at work, right? I don't know how fatal it would be to be hit over the head with a dildo, but the other child was very small, just a preschooler. Fortunately the store manager grabbed my charge and hollered, "Whose kid is this?" If you are wondering why my charge had such an item in her possession, all I can say is that I would not have expected her mom to hide it in the garage so how could I have known to stop her? And it was a cool October day, so she had a big jacket to hide it under. Anyway, it felt like the faithful remnant of FART 5 had a lot of camaraderie today, or at least solidarity against our common enemy: The New System.

Travalon picked me up from work to take me to the Labor Temple for what I am hoping is the last of the ongoing series on how to organize, and he went to check out a new restaurant called Butter Bird that he said was incredible. He brought me a small piece of chicken, and it was delicious. (I was pretty full of pizza from the organizing class.) Then he took me to Christless Presbyterian Church for an early music concert. People often seem surprised that I like early music and don't like, for example, Beethoven, but the purer intervals and danceable rhythms of early music have nothing to do with later Classical music. I had somehow forgotten that Concerts on the Square exist until Jilly Moose mentioned that she went last night, so I checked out the schedule, and it was Mahler and Mozart, Shostakovich and Beethoven. Other than a little bit of Mozart, that's a lot of No Thanks on my part. The best part is that I forgot Niko in the car while at the concert tonight, and he loves early music. Travalon said if he'd known, he could have taken Niko fishing with him on the Tenney Park Jetty, and I said, "Just as long as you don't use him as bait." He did catch a little fish earlier today, at Salmo Pond. 

He didn't catch anything at Tenney Park, but he did see a beautiful rainbow.

As we were driving to the concert, we saw Art Paul Schlosser walking down the street, and then he saw us and waved. He said, "My music is on Spotify now!" so we checked it out, and it was highly entertaining. Then on the drive home from the concert, we saw a glowing cloud that looked like an alligator.

Glowing alligators in the sky? Is that a bad omen? What could it portend?

Happy birthday to the Dairyman's Daughter! Hope you had a great one!

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Small Miracles

 

Today I went to campus and joined my other FART 5 peeps, thinking surely my issues with the new system had been resolved, but no. I ended up helping the same colleague again. My boss was very frustrated because she said she had submitted a request to update my permissions and the request was canceled by someone.

"I guess someone really wants you to get a paycheck for doing nothing," she said.

"Are you sure I wasn't laid off?" I asked, but she assured me that I was still on payroll. Still, I was feeling really down. She said I was the only one in FART 5 that this had happened to, but that it had happened to people in the other four FARTs. OK Universe, I got my comeuppance for thinking I could just breeze through Go Live - can I get back to work now? And then Seabird told me she couldn't walk at lunch because there was a retirement party in her department. She's been on vacation for a week, so I haven't seen much of her. Hardingfele couldn't walk either, so I set off glumly for my walk alone... and promptly ran into my Irish teacher, who works in my building but usually is remote all summer. She asked how I was and I told her my sad story, so she said, "I'll walk with you." After I had complained enough to get it out of my system, she told me about her wonderful trip to Ireland. It seemed like that had to come from God, because how else to explain the timing?

I'd like to say that set the tone for the rest of the day, but unfortunately the rest of my workday was just as frustrating. I have to print a bunch of donor letters, and our fancy printer can supposedly fold them, so I watched a video to see how it's done and tried... just to find that choice grayed out. I fetched my much younger and more technologically advanced coworker, but she was just as clueless so I didn't feel quite so stupid. We tried a million things suggested online, but the button for "folding" remained stubbornly grayed out. It looks like a folding party might be in our future. 

I am having a very restful and quiet evening because Travalon is hanging out with one of his guy friends. My big decision now is whether to go back to campus again tomorrow, and my second decision is if I should wear the goose T-shirt. It kind of fits my mood right now.

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Octogenarian Birthday Extravaganza

 

Yesterday was "Go Live" Day for our new system at work, but I waited until today to try to do anything when we had an open lab. I was feeling all cocky that I had gone to all the trainings and tried all the situations in the test environment, while a colleague had not gone to any trainings and had no idea what to do. But pride goeth before a fall, and somehow my permissions were screwed up so that I couldn't do anything in the new system. I spent the whole time helping my clueless colleague, then I went for a walk in Allen Centennial Gardens over lunch with Hardingfele. First we gazed at the pond full of lilies.

Then we admired some green zinnias.

And we found one last prickly pear in bloom.

After lunch I went to help my clueless colleague again. I thought we were going to do an expense report, but first she wanted to order some paper. So simple!... except when we did a search for "paper," we got no results. We even tried the product number, and still it said no results. So as of yet, neither of us has done anything successfully in the new system.

I left work an hour and a half early, since I couldn't do anything anyway, and Travalon picked me up. We went to a birthday party for a Shamrock Club member. It was a big party for an age ending in zero, and the birthday boy wore an amazing shirt that said "Oldometer" and then showed the number flipping from 79 to 80. First a local Irish band played, the one we always see at Alt Brew, and then there was a pig roast.

People brought all sorts of sides and salads and desserts, plus there was birthday cake. We mostly hung out with other Shamrock Club people there, although I did talk to a woman who was a childhood friend of the birthday boy. I said she could join the Shamrock Club, and she did admit that both her maiden and her married name were very Irish. We also talked to the guy from New Zealand, who is always pleasant company. After dinner a funk band played, and most of the club members left, but Travalon and I really liked the music, so we stayed until the band took a break. When we got home, I saw that Lazarus is almost done blooming - each of those puffballs full of flowers now only has one or two blossoms left. They still smell really wonderful. I found my new shirt had arrived. It's perfect for Horicon Marsh:

I said I owed this blog two photos, so I'm actually going to post three, because two are the front and the back of the commemorative glass I got at the showing of Purple Rain.

And this is the little conductor hippo we got at the Illinois Railway Museum. Travalon has dubbed him Casey Jones, after a train conductor so famous that there is even a Grateful Dead song about him.

Isn't he adorable? I'd like to ride his train to a place where I can do my work because the system hasn't decided to lock me out. We shall see what tomorrow brings...

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Jamming on a Monday Night

 

Today I got a couple of messages to do nothing, and you don't have to tell me twice to be lazy. The first one was from my FitBit, which said I have been overtraining lately and shouldn't exert myself too much today. The second one was from my new boss, because the new system went live today but she said there were some problems mapping people so don't do anything, and that is an order I can get behind! I did help a faculty member use the form for the new ticketing system, and it's not nearly as self-explanatory as I'd hoped. She and I were laughing about how useless it really was. Sigh... this means I'll have to train all the faculty in how to use it.

In the evening Travalon drove me to the music club for another Moldy Jam jam, and then he went fishing, but he got rained on. That wasn't in the forecast! I really enjoyed the jam today and felt like I was doing a good job figuring out the tunes I didn't know. When it was my turn to choose a tune, I chose "Butterfly," since I like a) slipjigs and b) any tune in E Dorian. Then the next guy chose "Redwing," which I know, and the next woman chose a tune I know (can't remember what it was now), and I had to recycle some water, but the next guy chose "Kitchen Girl," and it's in A Mixolydian, and I'll stay for anything modal. Also, it was great to have so many tunes in a row that I knew. Oh yeah, the woman chose "Out on the Ocean," which is one we play at the Slow Irish Session. They do some Irish tunes at this jam, but they do more Appalachian fiddling tunes. I should get braver and suggest ones I knew from childhood like "Devil's Dream" and "Rakes of Mallow," because they never play them there, but one of the leaders said they knew them. The thing is, if I suggest a tune, I have to lead it, and it's been forty years since I played "Rakes of Mallow." The bassist in my own band wanted some fiddling tune suggestions, since she is a fiddler first, and I suggested that one, so maybe my band will play it. The other thing is that sometimes the version I know of a tune isn't exactly what they play at the jam, but it's generally close enough to fudge it.

Travalon got home just before I got off of work, so we took a short walk to the dock, and I saw Lazarus was opening its flowers even though it wasn't dark out yet.

However, it wasn't releasing any fragrance at that time. When we got back from the jam, it certainly was. I looked it up online, and if the bugs around here pollinate those flowers, it will make orange berries. It didn't say if they were edible, so I'm guessing not. Since Lazarus's kind are native to sub-Saharan Africa, I'm not sure if the right bugs are around here to pollinate it. The important thing is that the bugs outside are eating the evil bugs that were all over Lazarus and the other monocots. You can see the yellow spots on Lazarus's leaves from where these evil, fuzzy bugs were sucking juice out of its leaves. I can't ever seem to get rid of the bugs no matter what kind of spray I try, but they do disappear in the summer when I take the plants outside. Greg is too big to take outside now, so it will just have to fight off the bugs on its own. It was looking terrible, but it's looking happier, so maybe it is winning the fight. I have had these plants for at least sixteen years, going by my blog posts, and somehow they still keep living to see another day. That's the beauty of dracaenas. The downside is that they are apparently very prone to stupid fuzzy bugs.

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Niko's Serbo-Croatian Day

 

This morning Travalon and I got up as early as we would on a workday, because we were meeting Cecil Markovitch and the Single B-Boy at 8:30 to head to Milwaukee. We ended up getting to the Croatian church half an hour early, so we grabbed some coffee nearby. The priest was not Croatian (I believe he was from somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa), so the parts he did were in English, but a lot of the Mass was in Croatian. I had read the readings first thing this morning, but ironically the only one I could remember was the Gospel reading, which was the only one in English. I was puzzled because at least a third of the congregation had matching shirts on, dark blue polo shirts with trim around the neck and short sleeves that was a sort of floral red and green pattern. Were we supposed to wear a uniform?

After Mass it all became clear: the people in the matching shirts were the tamburitza group. I may have mentioned how I think that little instrument Travalon found for me in an antiques shop, that I was calling a "bouzouki," is actually the smallest size of tamburitza. We paid $10 to attend the concert in the church hall, and that included lunch of grilled stuff and random salads. There were desserts for a minimal cost. We sat with a friendly guy who is a pillar of the congregation and Croatian by marriage, and he and Travalon and Cecil talked about their Croationness while the B-Boy and I, who are mostly Celtic, had little to add to the conversation. There was well over an hour between when Mass got out and the concert started, so I took a walk outside, where I discovered a bike path and even saw a train. The day was cool and rainy, but that was a pleasant change after all the intense heat lately.

The concert was really good. It reminded me of the balalaika group here in town. Here's a sample.

Despite the rain, we went to the Milwaukee Lakefront and walked out on the breakwater. It has a lot of cool graffiti and artwork on it.

I couldn't back up enough to get this whole one into the picture without ending up in the lake, but it seems to tell a story:

I just loved the colors on this next one, but it's not so artistic:

And here are pictures that Travalon took:

It was very foggy on the lake and downtown.

After walking there, we went to South Shore Park and walked some more, ending up sitting on a fishing pier. Travalon took a photo of a fabulous catamaran moored there.

I like the view of downtown from this angle.

We went to Old Towne Serbian restaurant for dinner at five sharp. It's right by St. Josephat's Basilica.

They seemed not quite ready for us; they opened a few minutes late and then seemed surprised that we had reservations for five. The food was delicious, and we were there for over two hours, laughing really hard about everything, like Cecil had never heard of "animated shorts," which is what I've always heard short cartoons called, so he imagined it was an item of clothing. Then he told a story about how he was once wearing shorts and some guy told him he had great legs, so he went walking on Park Street all the time hoping it would happen again, and the B-Boy said, "No, that happened on Wilson Street." So we were all like, "That's why it never happened again!" and he said he needed animated shorts and it would happen again. You may be wondering why we went to a Serbian restaurant when the rest of our day was Croatian, but there apparently aren't any Croatian restaurants in Milwaukee. 

The sun had been hiding all day, but it came out as we drove west toward home for a spectacular sunset. When Travalon and I got home, I checked on Lazarus the Corn Plant Dracaena. The flowers had been open last night, but this morning when I went to take a photo, they were closed. However, when we arrived home well after dark, they were open again.

They are kind of pretty, but it's really the fragrance that is what makes them wonderful. I wish I could post that for you. It was lovely having Jolly Bob bloom in the house when it bloomed, because it filled the whole place with the fragrance, but since Lazarus is outside, insects might pollinate the flowers. Maybe I will get corn plant dracaena seeds. I wonder how hard they are to grow from seed?

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