Boat Ride with Lotus Harvest and Choro Session with Humiliation

 

I forgot to mention two things yesterday. One was that I didn't bring something with me to eat before the condo association meeting, so at my afternoon break I went and bought a sandwich. They didn't have the kind I love, so it took a bit for me to decide, but then I was in the right place to see a train go by on campus, with lots of beautiful graffiti. I didn't take any photos or videos, sorry. I was kind of far away from it.

The second thing was right at the end of the day when I asked my coworker who isn't even thirty if she was done in the mailroom, since I was going to lock up early to go to the meeting. Her student hourly asked me how the Halfway to St. Patrick's Day party was, and I said, "Lots of fun! Thanks!" so she said, "It was lit, huh?" I said we're all too old for that, and she nodded knowingly and said, "It was lit!" My coworker asked if that was the party I'd told her about that morning, so I said, "No, that was the Willy Street Fair yesterday. It's not Irish, just crazy." Then I told them about going to see Herb Alpert, and they were both like, "Who??" so the student looked him up and she said he was kind of a thirst trap... and then she saw his age. "He's 91?" she yelped. "That's pre-World War II!" I said yes, he was even before my time, but it was amazing how energetic he still is at his age, so we speculated that the music kept him young. The part that really killed me was when the student said she was glad my weekend was "fire" or "lit" or "ballin'" or some slang like that, and I was amazed that a college student (and not a poor one like I was who couldn't afford to do anything, but one with a boyfriend and enough money to travel abroad) thought that my life was so exciting. I mean, it is to me, but it's always interesting to learn that it is to people who are less than half my age.

This morning Travalon and I walked earlier than usual because I had a bunch of meetings mid-morning, and it was sunny outside, but when we actually got outside, it was raining! And yet no rainbow! My second meeting lasted about three minutes because none of us had any issues to discuss, so Travalon and I took a long lunch to go out on the boat. We saw a cormorant, terns, gulls, and a family of pied-billed grebes, and we also saw this buoy that seemed to imply we should be speeding:

"Slow? No!" But you can see from these others that the word "wake" was below the water line on that buoy.

We also harvested a lotus seed head and ate the seeds, which taste a little like macadamia nuts when you get them at the right time. (The "right time" seems to be the autumnal equinox.) I did throw one back, just to give the plant a chance to reproduce. It only seems fair. When I told Seabird about it, since she was the one who had told me about how you can harvest the lotus seeds, she asked me to grab some seed heads for her, but we didn't get a chance to go back out in the boat. However, I forgot one seed in my pocket, so at least I can bring her one tomorrow. Here you can see a line of lotuses in front of a hill.

Tonight there were only four of us at choro: the guy who runs it, the cavaquinho player, the student who always goes to the Slow Irish sessions, and me. The student and I were embarrassed because while we are pretty good sight readers, we are not really improving because we don't practice between sessions, which are only once a month. The cavaquinho player was surprised that we don't - he said he does. My problem is that I do so many things that I never focus on any one thing enough to get good at it. 

I could see on the way to choro that the train was going to be heading north through our neighborhood, and sure enough, the guy who always makes a video of it had posted one when I got home. Here are some screenshots of graffiti.

This is some random graffiti. It's not like the train I saw on campus yesterday, that had lots of "Puck" and "Amor" on it. I do not recognize a single one of these tags. Also, the first engine was the yellow one the railroad has just acquired, but the second one was the standard red one like most of theirs are.

Famous Hat