Night Mares Are Champions Again

 

Today right after work, Travalon and I went to the Duck Pond to watch the women's softball team, the Night Mares.

We hadn't gotten to a Night Mares game yet this season, and this was their last one, unless they lost. They won last night against the Wausau Ignite, so if they won tonight, they would be champions. Well, guess what?

They hit quite a few home runs and had some impressive defensive work, and they won 7-1. I was glad to see it wasn't just women there to support them, although the bros sitting behind us were a bit obnoxious - at least they were just loud, not sexist or anything. For example, one of them was loudly proclaiming that a nightmare is a horse that sits on your chest while you sleep, and I was so tempted to turn around and tell him that the "mare" comes from an Old English word for goblin, so it's a goblin that sits on your chest so you can't move, i.e., sleep paralysis. The word for a female horse has a completely different etymology.

Speaking of linguistics, stand by for an important DuoLingo announcement:

And this took forever to download to my computer, but the sky was so beautiful right after the game.

As promised, here are screenshots from the second train Travalon made a video of Tuesday afternoon in Watertown. This one is all tanker cars, or as I call them, sausage cars, except for the very last car. Most of the sausage cars didn't have any graffiti, or they had a few random scribbles, and one said "Kelsey Visconti is a rat" in regular old letters, not tag letters. I don't know who Kelsey Visconti is, but I'm sure she's a lovely person, and the only hit I got on Google is someone who lives in New Jersey. Now if they'd done it artistically, I would have posted it. Here is some artistic graffiti.

There have been some good videos on social media, so I may post some screenshots from that tomorrow. One video was almost all cars I have already posted on here, so no point in making screenshots of those, but it was fun to see them again, like they were old friends. We have our own little ecosystem of train car graffiti here in Madison, and I am here for it.

So speaking of Kelsey Visconti, one thing that came up on Google was a TikTok video by someone who was watching a train with lots of sausage cars that said she was a rat and a "snitch b--ch," and I got a screenshot of some truly beautiful graffiti from this video, whatever RNO means.

Also, my neighbor sent me a video of a painting someone had done of a long freight train with graffiti, and the graffiti was actually the lyrics to "King of the Road" by Roger Miller, a favorite song of Travalon and mine. The original painting is sold, but the guy says he sells prints, which you can find in the link in his bio... but I couldn't find the link. Bummer.

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Forward on Fire

 

I apologize in advance to those of you who like photos, because this post will not have any. I also realize that I forgot a very important point about the Mallards game on Thursday night, that it was Bring Everything But the Dog Night. Not that many people brought pets, but I heard someone had a rabbit, and we saw a cat, a three-legged goat, a black sheep, and a baby calf, and we even got to pet raccoons! Oh, and of course someone brought a dog.

I also failed to mention that during pagode practice we heard a train horn. I knew the train tracks ran right behind the Quadra, so I asked if the back door was open, thinking I'd go out to watch it. The leader said, "It shouldn't be," but she checked it and it was unlocked, so she locked it. People asked me, "How did you know?" but I just wanted to see the train. However, it was so loud inside that I would have gone deaf if I'd been outside. Still, it feels like God talking to me in trains again, like I'm on the right track studying all this Brazilian music (Samba, choro, and now pagode) and doing Portuguese on DuoLingo. Are we going to end up in Brazil someday? Right now it's all just a lot of fun.

This morning Travalon and I met Tiffy for coffee, then he went down to the Union Terrace while we just hung out on the roof of her sister's apartment building, had lunch sitting outside at the Globe (where I saw one of our faculty members), got bubble tea, and went back to the roof. When Travalon returned, we went to Breese Stevens Field to watch the Forward soccer team, who are having a really good year. I was getting a bit alarmed because the Flock, the ardent fans who sing and play drums, were not gathering, so I googled it and they had disbanded. But then people did show up, playing drums, waving flags, and shooting off pink smoke as they sang songs with complex lyrics like, "Oh, Madison, Madison, Madison, Madison," and, "Forward, Forward, Forward." We sat near the Flock, so in the first half we could barely see it when they got a goal. In the second half we did see their goal clearly, but then for some reason Naples FC got to take a penalty shot, and those are so hard for the goalie to stop, so they had a point. There was a ton of stoppage time because of injuries, but then the Forward scored again in stoppage time! So they won 3-1! This is the seventh game in a row they haven't lost, but some were ties so they didn't win seven in a row. Still, their record is really good this year. 

A bunch of people from the Shamrock Club were down at the Union Terrace listening to the New Dubliners, but Tiffy was tired, Travalon was tired, and my FitBit had a low battery because I kept forgetting to charge it. Famie said the New Dubliners are not like the old ones, so I assumed that meant they didn't play trad music, and indeed I found a video online, and they played rock. Travalon was slightly more interested, but not enough to go see them (and he'd spent quite a bit of time at the Terrace already today), and I was not interested at all, so we just came home. I'm not one of those people who is going to love everything automatically just because it came from Ireland. I do really love traditional Celtic art and traditional Irish music, and I'm intrigued by the language, but not everyone in Ireland is into the old stuff, which is fine! I'm just not that into the new stuff.

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Mallards Game and Pagode Practice

 

Yesterday I had a really strange day. I was working from home when suddenly the internet stopped working, so I texted Travalon, and he confirmed that there was an outage. I couldn't just go to my own office to work, so I messaged my boss, who said I could go to the coworking space I had worked in the day before. I thought about it, but the day was so nice and I was feeling so sniffly that I just took half a day of personal time. This was probably due to the road construction I complained about on my last post. At first they said the internet would come back at 1:30, but then it was 5:30, and then it was 10:30. When Travalon came home from work, we went to the Culver Springs Natural Area. Here are some photos.

We hadn't been to a Mallards game yet this year, and the happy hour on the Terrace was canceled due to the police killing here in town, so while everyone else was at the vigil for the victim, we watched baseball. I had an infused drink, forgetting that they slow down time and baseball is already so slow that time seems suspended, so it was a very meditative game for me, although the Mallards did keep hitting three-run homers. In the end they won something like 14-2. Here are photos.

This guy was batting 1000 because he had one at-bat and hit a three-run homer. 

They have this stuff over the bleachers now, I guess to block out sun? And at night they light it up.

Here is a video of that.

Oops, this is out of order, but before that we went to a place in De Forest where train cars are parked, and we saw some graffiti.

And then, still before the game, we went to my future parking lot and saw more graffiti.

And here are a couple of Wisconsin and Southern engines.

And here are some screenshots I got off a couple of videos of local trains posted on social media. I recognize a lot of this graffiti, but now I'm wondering... is 4AL "for a laugh" or "for all locations"? Both are represented on the same train!

Today I was supposed to work on campus and give blood, but I felt sniffly again and canceled the blood donation, since they won't let you give when you're under the weather, and that was the only reason I was going to go to campus. Oh, and also to make sure my plants were okay, and to check for a book someone was waiting for. In the evening I went to the pagode jam again, and this time there were nine of us, which seemed like a better number than the large group last time. I am the weak link, but I still had fun, especially playing the drums with the deep bass notes. I brought the mandolin but never cracked her out. A lot of the group are in the real Handphibians, and they were supposed to play tomorrow at the Atwood Fest, but the whole festival has been canceled because of the shooting. Bummer, I was hoping to check it out tomorrow. I don't understand the facts around the shooting enough yet to have an opinion; it's always bad when cops execute people of color when you feel like they could totally de-escalate if it were a white person, but I've also heard the person was armed and had wounded one of the cops. But then I've also heard the guy was on the ground and they shot him point-blank in the back of the head, so that doesn't sound like self-defense on the part of the cops but rather vengeance. All I know is the system has got to change because entirely too many people of color end up dead at the hands of cops. I read something recently that said liberals believe the law should treat everyone equally, so they try to appeal to fairness with conservatives, but it's a lost cause because conservatives believe the law should protect high-status groups and bind low-status ones, never bind high-status groups or protect low-status ones. Which I guess if you want to be that horrible, that's your right, but then quit saying how Christian you are. Jesus totally taught that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, so they should be equal in the eyes of the law too.

While I was at pagode, Travalon went out on the dock and took sunset photos. Here's my favorite.

When I came home, the moon was big and bright, so I brought my telescope out to look at it. I would get it in view, but then when I tried to focus, I'd lose it again. Travalon came out and took a photo.

Honestly, this is probably as good as it would have been looking through the telescope. 

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