Duck! Duck! (No Goose)

 

Yesterday Tiffy was busy, so after Mass I went to the Care for Creation meeting. It's so wonderful to meet with people who are the kind of Catholics I remember from childhood, at a school run by Franciscan sisters. Care for nature, care for the poor, care for our beautiful planet. Travalon went antiquing, then after the meeting we had lunch at Dairyland and then spent the afternoon at Patrick Marsh, birdwatching. At band practice we had a new person come, and she works right near Hardingfele and me, so Hardingfele suggested we all walk together sometime. The new woman is originally from Germany, and she plays the violin, so we had three last night. Of course, I always stand willing and able to jump in on the violin...

Today I worked on campus and wore my argyle beret, and both my coworker and Seabird said they really loved the colors. It was very windy, so a beret was an excellent hat choice - anything else (other than my third eye beanie) would have gone flying off. However, it was also very sunny, so it was a bad day not to wear a hat that shaded my face. That's April for you.

Here are photos Travalon took on Saturday at Patrick Marsh while I was with Tiffy, and Sunday at Patrick Marsh with me, and also from our dock the last few days, for example this pair of wood ducks and this pair of blue-winged teals.

These are photos from Patrick Marsh. First, a male mallard.

Next, a pair of buffleheads.

Red-breasted mergansers doing their mating dance.

And some canvasbacks with their reddish brown heads.

This is a pair of red-breasted mergansers.

And this is a pair of scaups.

I think this is the female red-headed duck.

And here she is with the male.

Here is a pair of common mergansers.

And another male red-breasted merganser.

Here are some ruddy ducks.

This male blue-winged teal was on the small pond near the lake.

Here you can see the blue bill of the ruddy ducks.

More red-breasted mergansers.

There was a flock of cormorants on the other side of the lake.

Then we saw a pair of wood ducks. The male is so colorful, and the female has cute eyes.

And here is the pair of red-headed ducks again.

The wood ducks: the male, and then the female.

And the red-headed ducks again.

More red-breasted mergansers.

The male red-headed duck with a Bonaparte's gull.

A male red-headed merganser.

And this was a flock of canvasbacks.

Here they are facing down a horned grebe.

Back at our dock, we saw our old buddy Tux Duck.

Do you still have some time for DuoLingo bragging?

Tomorrow, if I have nothing exciting to blog about, I'll post a bunch of screenshots of the weird messages DuoLingo gives me when I do well in a lesson. Of course my favorite was: "You're a precious freshwater pearl!" but did I think to make a screenshot of that? No, I did not. And of course as soon as I did think of it, I never got that message again. Sigh.

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Ghostwriters in the Sky

 

This morning Travalon and I went down to the dock, and we saw the wood ducks. He took some photos, which I will post soon. Then he left to go to Patrick Marsh to go birdwatching, Lazy Lake in Fall River to go fishing, and Columbus to go antiquing. I went downtown to meet Tiffy, and the traffic was horrible, but we weren't sure why. (She got caught in it too.) The weather was surprisingly warm, so we ate outside at the Globe, and then we got bubble tea and went up to the roof of her sister's building. We came back to my place and went out onto the dock, where we saw blue-winged teals and were attacked by gnats. We also heard the eerie music made by the wires on one of the boat lifts as they vibrated in the wind. I thought it sounded like Tibetan monks, but Tiffy thought it sounded like Native songs, so we joked that it was the ghosts of the Ho-Chunk who used to live here. It had cooled off by then, so I decided to wear my argyle beret.

When Travalon came back, we tried to go to Lola's for a very early dinner, but even at that ridiculously early hour there was a ninety-minute wait, and we didn't have that kind of time. We ended up going to the Turkish restaurant on Monroe Street where we had brunch last Sunday, and we all had lamb. We had a lot of time and not far to go, so we walked across the street to the ice cream shop and indulged. I asked if I could get a child's sized cone, and they said sure. Perfect! I don't love how ice cream places always try to give you a ton of ice cream. I had Zanzibar chocolate, which is the darkest chocolate flavor they have. 

Then Travalon dropped us off at the Baroque concert at the little Episcopal church on Regent Street where they had Bach Around the Clock. This group almost always performs there, and they tend to play stuff by obscure composers that make you think, "No wonder he's obscure." The first piece was by a composer who died in 1630, yet he published it in 1641. Tiffy and I puzzled over this, and I said, "Well, I was planning to keep writing after I die." She said, "A ghostwriter?" and I said, "Damn straight. Haven't you heard of ghostwriters in the sky?" So then we were trying not to laugh during the piece. There was a Bach concerto for viola de gamba, which Tiffy noted in amazement has seven strings. That's nothing - my sitar has eleventy million strings, which is why I still can't figure out how to play it. I had not heard of most of the composers on the program, but the soprano did sing a song by John Dowland, and one of the harpsichordists played a suite by Handel in F# minor. Whatever this harpsichord was tuned in (Werkmeister?), it was not equal temperament, and that key (which I had thought all Baroque composers avoided) sounded as out-of-tune as those self-playing orchestras at House on the Rock. Tiffy noted that even the harpsichord itself seemed to be complaining on certain notes. I do love the sound of the harpsichord, but yikes. 

Meanwhile, Travalon was at Leopold's, and he brought us both decaf pandan lattes when he picked us up. Yum! I told him that in the middle of a flute piece I was really enjoying, I almost burst out laughing thinking about that ridiculous AI depiction of me with six argyle berets, and we both started singing, "She wore an argyle beret!" You know the tune, "Raspberry Beret" by Prince. I grew up in Minnesota, so I am contractually obligated to love Prince. Besides, his music is amazing. I do actually have a raspberry beret, and it may in fact have come from a second-hand store, but right now I am just loving my argyle one.

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Irish Music at Alt Brew and AI Poetry

 

Today I worked from home, and I went down to the dock at every break, but the ducks were not around. The weather was very pleasant, but the system we use to pay invoices was driving me crazy because I had submitted one yesterday, but today there was no sign of it. I submitted it again, figuring if it was stuck in the system, at least the fact that it was the same invoice number would trigger it to stop payment on the second one. However, I submitted it and stayed on the page, and I saw it wasn't in submitted status. I found a history log, and it said the attachment was too large. You'd think I would have gotten an error message, but no - it just goes off into the void. So I compressed the PDF of the event poster and tried again, and this time it seemed to work. It's always an adventure using these systems...

In the evening Travalon and I went to Alt Brew to see The Currach, a local band that plays Irish music, led by Daithi the Fiddler. None of my buddies came today - not my Irish teacher, not the woman with the Irish name and the curly red hair, and not my Shamrock Club buddy - although they had all been there last month, along with a bunch of other Shamrock Club people, when we couldn't go because we went to a jazz concert. I did see some people who go to the Lutheran church where I used to sing. The college Irish dancers came again, and they wanted people to get up and learn a jig, so Daithi pointed at me, since I have done other, less physical dances with them. And guess what? Irish jigs are as hard as they look! I can't really leap in the air or lift my knee up that high anymore. I wore my new argyle beret and the Waterford crystal harp pin, which got a tiny bit chipped. I felt so bad, but now it has character. Really, you can barely see it. And after all, do I want to put it away and keep it pristine forever, or do I want to wear it? If it gets too chipped up, that's just an excuse to go back to Ireland and visit the Waterford crystal factory.

Looking at my beret sitting in front of me made me wonder what the funny little wormlike thing on the top is called, and it does have a name: the cabillou. When I was living in the Basque country the summer I was twenty, the men wore black berets on regular days and red berets on festival days. When we went to Pamplona to see the Running of the Bulls, some of the younger guys had red berets on with cabillous that were so tall and thick that they looked positively phallic. (Couldn't find any photos of this by doing a Google search.) I love crazy words like that, like the guajeo is the piano line in salsa music. I told Travalon I should write a story where the main characters are named Cabillou and Guajeo.

I'm continuing to play around with Chat GPT. I asked it to write a haiku about argyle:

Diamond patterns dance,

Woolen warmth in crispest air—

Argyle holds the chill.

I came into Night Prayer late this evening, and Rich said I should show everyone how Chat GPT works, so Anna Banana II suggested we ask it to write a haiku about Daylight Saving Time:

Clocks leap while we sleep,
morning sun hides once again—
time plays tricks on us.

I showed them how you can give it a prompt, like, "Draw a cockatoo drinking a margarita while sitting on a pagoda," and it will give you this:

So Jilly Moose asked if it could draw Mr. Swanky. I asked it to draw a swanky moose, and I guessed it would be wearing a tux and tails, but I didn't predict that it would have glasses.

What's up with that? Rich says it's to make the moose seem more intellectual and therefore more sophisticated. To me, this moose looks like a waiter, like he should be serving you drinks at a nightclub with an Up North theme. Or maybe he's a groom at an all-deer wedding, waiting for his lovely caribou bride to come down the aisle. Why don't we have Chat GPT write a limerick about him?

There once was a moose dressed in style,
With a tux and a confident smile.
He sipped vintage wine,
Said, “This life is fine—
Being dapper is always in style!”

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