First Women's Pagode Rehearsal

 

Today I worked from home. Travalon left mid-morning to hang out with his high school buddy, so in the evening I made dinner: tempeh, rice, and snow peas. I've been reading about how we should all eat more fermented food, and tempeh is fermented. Then again. so are coffee and chocolate, and I have no problem with consuming those! It's been a while since I've cooked, so I enjoyed it. I am really loving this Mediterranean diet so far, even if "Mediterranean" seems like a misnomer if an Asian food like tempeh is allowed on it.

In the evening I met with a bunch of other women at the Quadra for our first women's pagode rehearsal. Pagode is the softer version of samba than what we do in my drumming classes, and it's more tuneful, so I brought my mandolin. Mandy has sure had some adventures! The others all took up different percussion instruments while I strummed the rhythm... and then we all had to switch instruments, so I put the mandolin away and tried some of the drums. I was probably the oldest one there, and I felt a bit remedial since the leader kept coming over and showing me how to do the rhythms. (There's a different rhythm for each percussion instrument.) Afterwards people were hanging around and chatting, but I wasn't part of any of the conversations, so I was just going to go home. Then a woman I know from drumming school started chatting with me in the parking lot, and when I got home, my neighbor and her boyfriend started chatting with me in the parking lot. So it got late, and so I'll limit what I post here.

Travalon went to Horicon Marsh with his buddy, and he took lots of photos. I'll share more soon. Some of these photos just made me laugh, like the two barn swallows on the boardwalk and the egret peeking out of the grass.

This is a male blue-winged teal.

And I believe these are gadwalls.

Here is the cormorant rookery again.

Not sure what this is - another gadwall?

And some yellow-headed blackbirds.

Here is a black-necked stilt.

And here is one flying.

Travalon said they saw three of the four Big White Birds. Here is a swan.

Another stilt flying.

Egrets are another Big White Bird.

This is a black-winged tern.

Some adolescent geese.

And this is an adolescent yellow-headed blackbird.

This is a sandhill crane. They never saw the third Big White Bird, the whooping crane.

But here is the fourth Big White Bird, the pelican.

After Travalon dropped his buddy off, he went to the Portage railyard again. Here are some photos of graffiti on train cars.

Sorry, no graffiti in this photo.

But here is some fantastic graffiti.

Tonight as I was playing pagode, I wished I could take all the beauty humans have created in pagode music and train art and whatever, and create the ultimate work of art. Not sure what that would be, but apparently as my middle-aged brain was being confused by syncopation, it was dreaming up something that looked urban and sounded Brazilian. And that actually would be pretty cool. My big contribution to the group today was when we were voting on a name, and there was a tie, so I suggested combining them. To my surprise, everyone liked that idea. So since combining things was a winning theme for me today, why not combine music and visual art?

Famous Hat