Golden Eagle at Sauk

 

This morning before Mass, Travalon watched Crystal Palace, and they lost. Jerry the Kraken and Roy jr. commiserated.

At Mass at the far east side church, there was another baptism. That's three in the last month. It was also the pastor's birthday, so we sang "Happy Birthday" to him right before the closing hymn. As usual at that church, the offertory and communion praise songs were contemporary, but the opening and closing hymns were classic ones, in this case "Hyfrydol" and "Thaxted," or for those of you who don't think in Hymn Tune, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" (the processional hymn at our wedding) and "O God Beyond All Praising," or "Jupiter" from The Planets by Holst. I love being able to sing them with great gusto, because nobody can hear me over the amped-up praise band.

It was a beautiful day for late January, so Travalon and I took a long walk along the canal at Tenney Park. We saw a tux duck.

We also went under or over a lot of bridges.

There was a bird party at the small pond in Waunakee, but it was very exclusive - only Canada geese.

When we got home, I went for a rosary walk and saw a little clump of snow looking up at me.

Meanwhile, Travalon was watching the Commanders play the Eagles, but there was no good news there. He took me to the Slow Irish Session, where I joined my bandmates (except Hardingfele) and my Irish teacher - we actually spoke a little Irish to each other. I chickened out once again and brought the mandolin instead of the fiddle, since it makes less noise so mistakes are less obvious, but that worked out well because we sang a bit, and it's much easier to sing while playing the mandolin than the violin. I ended up sitting between two other mandolin players; the guy on my left was quite a bit older than I am, and he only played tunes he knew because he couldn't read the music projected up on the screen quickly enough to keep up, while the guy on my right was half my age and very good-looking, and he kept saying, "You better check your A string." "You better check your E string." Travalon was laughing on the ride home as I told him about it, how if I were young I would have been devastated that someone so hot was being so critical, but at my age I'm just like, "Yeah, whatever. I could have birthed him." I did note that while there was no sexual tension whatsoever (I wasn't asking myself if he were flirting with me by noting my out-of-tune strings), had our genders been reversed, would I have thought I had a chance? The other day I saw a video where a guy was crying because women kept telling him that at 45 he was too old, and this other guy stitched in his part of the video asking, "How old are these women?" Right? A woman in her 50's will rarely harass a guy in his twenties for daring to talk to her, but a man in his fifties might mistake a woman in her twenties talking to him for interest in him. Isn't that fascinating? Or maybe just sickening?

We passed this decorated bank on our way home.

It used to be called Monona State Bank. I have the vague impression that it changed its name rather than being bought out by another, bigger bank.

We had dinner at Zippy Lube, and the background music was all French pop music, except for one song that was Brazilian pop music. They gave us free donuts because they were closing soon, and the donuts must be getting old. They are the last thing I need after too much sushi and saki yesterday - I had no idea that saki had that many calories! Yikes!! Then we went home, and Travalon watched the Bills-Chiefs game, but that was disappointing too. Yes, it will be the Eagles and the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. To quote Grumpy Cat, "I hope both teams lose."

As promised, here are the photos Travalon took yesterday at Sauk.

These next photos are the alleged golden eagle, and I think it's true because you can see that his legs are bare. Bald eagles have feathers on their legs right down to their feet. We thought we saw a golden eagle at the dam some years back, and there is a male golden eagle who is known to be in the area, so this has to be him.

There were also a lot of common mergansers.

Here are goldeneyes in the foreground and mallards in the background.

More mallards. We saw plenty of them in town today too.

So I did miss something exciting at Sauk yesterday, because while golden eagles are common in some other parts of the country, they are rare around here. Still, I think we did see him a few years back. I wonder how he gets along with the bald eagles? I assume they can tell he's different. Do they think that's cool, or do they shun him? I really don't know much about eagle society.

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