State Park Adventure Journal

 

Today I worked on campus, and it was a crazy day as far as meetings, people needing stuff, etc., but not too much exciting happened. A couple of times I held the elevator for a student who was only going up one floor, and one of them laid a SBD (Silent But Deadly) fart on the rest of us in the elevator before escaping one floor later, while we had to go up many floors. Thanks, dude. 

It's been cooler the last few days, and I hope my houseplants are still okay outside. I have the black calla lily, Lazarus the Dracaena, the ponytail palm, and the purple tradescantia still out there. I went into the bedroom to see if we can close the window with that mourning dove nest in the way, but the sturdy, perfect nest that supported two babies to adulthood is gone; just a few sticks remained, and they didn't get in the way of closing the window. The problem seems to have solved itself.

We had another quiet evening at home, so Travalon and I finished writing in the State Park Adventure Journal we got at Rib Mountain this past weekend. We have not been to many of the state trails, but we have been to most of the state parks. Travalon says he has been to all of them, but some (like Lizard Mound) he was at as a kid and barely remembers. There were some he had been to without me, and there were others that I knew better than he did, so the memories are a hodgepodge of our time together and our single days. We still have lots of empty pages in the Adventure Journal, and for every state park or trail there are four suggestions of things to do, most of which we haven't done, so we will keep the Adventure Journal in the car and try to see some of these places and do some of these things. Of course, some of them are not anything we'd do willingly. Winter camping? No thanks! Watching the sun rise from an overlook? If the weather is warm enough to be out at sunrise, then the sun is rising too early for me to be there watching it. That's just science. But I was intrigued by the accessible tandem kayak you can rent at Lake Kegonsa State Park - maybe we'll have to try that. I do remember years ago a bunch of us were piled into a huge canoe, so many of us (five?) that it almost sank, and we could barely paddle around Lake Kegonsa while another friend sailboarded around and around us. That was the Big Banana, a giant yellow canoe with brown spots on it, just like a banana, where it had been repaired. It died in a windstorm when it was blown into a tree, many years ago. Once Rich and Kathbert tried to paddle in it using little toy paddles, bright orange plastic ones, which didn't work so well. Or so I hear - I wasn't in the Big Banana to see how badly it went, I only heard about it after the fact, but it would have been a sight to see: a big yellow canoe and tiny orange paddles! Kind of like when Oregon played against Syracuse in a Final Four game, because Oregon has chartreuse uniforms and Syracuse has bright orange ones, so that was the most aesthetically pleasing college basketball game I ever saw. But I digress.

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Today Feels Like a Lizzo Song (You Know the One)

 

Sorry that I have not blogged for a couple of days, but I didn't have much to say. Tuesday evening I did go out and see five planets strewn across the night sky in an arch, with the moon at the end of it, so that was lovely. Wish I hadn't missed the northern lights last Thursday... Yesterday I worked from home, so there wasn't really anything to say. But today I was back on campus, and two things happened.

The first thing was that when I came back from my lunchtime walk, a woman had already called the elevator, so I stood next to her. She was Asian, and she was singing a song under her voice in a language I didn't recognize, but I really got into the song. She stepped away from me, so maybe she thought I was standing too close, but she kept singing. The elevators were crazy busy at that time of day, and one stopped going down, so I got on that one, figuring it would go up before one going up would stop on the fourth floor. I went down to the first floor, and a bunch of undergrads got on and hit the button for the sixth floor. For some reason undergrads are not allowed to use the elevator to go to floors two through five; you have to use your ID card for those floors. So they all go up to the sixth floor and take the stairs down. Then the elevator did stop on the fourth floor, and the students all got out. The Asian woman got in, and when it was just the two of us, she began singing the song softly again. I looked over at the sheet of paper she was holding, and the words appeared to be in Hmong, or as it is written in their language, Hmoob. I said, "I like your song," and she smiled at me. Maybe she was practicing to sing it in front of a class of unruly undergrads? I want to be in that class. Maybe she will teach them all this song, and it's very pretty.

The second thing was that I had a meeting this afternoon, and only after I got back from it did I notice there were crumbs from my lunch all over my sweater. Which was odd enough, because it was pizza - I never think of pizza as especially crumby - but how had I not noticed it in the mirror? Did everyone else at the meeting notice and think, "What a slob - she's got crumbs all over her sweater!"? But it is a patterned sweater, so maybe the crumbs were hard to notice unless you looked really closely, like when I looked down at my sweater and saw them. I can only hope so...

For some reason today I keep thinking of the Lizzo song "About D@mn Time." I can't imagine why...

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Almost Like Christmas (It IS a Feast Day)

 

Sorry that I haven't blogged in several days. Tuesday after Adoration I was just too tired, although my eye was a lot better. Last night Travalon and I went to Mass in Waunakee for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, since I had a meeting tonight, then we looked at Christmas lights up there. We went through the Rotary Lights display, and we went to the house that has a light display set to music. One song was a kid singing about how he farted on Santa's lap - there really is a Christmas song for every occasion! 

Today was an eventful day. At lunchtime I went to give blood, and it took them half an hour to figure out if I could give while on steroid eye drops, then it only took five minutes for the donation itself. They always tell me I'm faster than average, which I chalk up to drinking so much water. Afterwards there were packaged goodies, but I made a beeline for the homemade Christmas treats. Not long after that, one of our professors and one of our grad students (but from different programs, so I'm not sure if they know each other) were in the middle elevator in our building when it got stuck!!! It took the experts forty-five minutes to rescue them - yikes!! This is why I have always heeded the advice of a coworker back at the hospital, who said if you have to pee, do it BEFORE getting into the elevator. This is further proof that our building hates us and wants to kill us, but again there is no plan to renovate or rebuild it.

Here are some recent pictures. Duolingo gave me a year-end report, and apparently I rock.

Yesterday on my lunchtime walk, I saw this adolescent swan among the mallards and coots. Is my buddy the coot among them? I sure hope so! I never found him on Tuesday.

I posted a photo of this house in a nearby neighborhood last year, but this year they seem to have even more plastic light-up snowmen. Where do they store them in the offseason? 

This evening felt like Christmas came a few weeks early, because first our Ice Age Trail patches arrived in the mail, and then I was going through stuff we had bought in the last few months, and I had forgotten about some of it myself, like this cuddly horse and cool hat from the Ukraine festival.

And I had completely forgotten about this larger cuddly bubble tea.

This is yet another blacklight poster with mushrooms on it. At least it's different - the first two were identical, so one is at Rich's house, since he has a blacklight too.

I had completely forgotten about this T-shirt that I got at an antiques shop. It doesn't glow under blacklight, alas, but it's so beautiful.

I got this bag and pillow for hardly anything at St. Vinny's during Street Fest. I know I got some other stuff too, so I'll have to hunt that down. Like, there were some stuffies. Look for those photos in a future blog post. And oh yeah, I forgot about the unicorn seahorse.

I got these treasures, including a chakra pyramid and a pyrite pyramid, on the trip I took with Tiffy to Galena.

And these are the crystals from my first eight days of the Advent calendar!

For some reason one day there was that little turquoise triangle in with the big crystal, so is it a bonus crystal? It came with the big red one on the top row on Sunday. Aren't they lovely? And I'm only a third of the way through the calendar. This is the best Advent calendar ever!

Tonight Travalon and I tried Stephen Colbert's Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, Americone Dream. It's so good! Travalon said he could eat a gallon of it. It's vanilla with a caramel swirl and chocolate-covered pieces of waffle cone. I'm surprised that, as such a huge fan of Colbert, I haven't tried it before, since he's always talking about it on his show. Plus the proceeds go to charity, so it's win-win-lose... for my waistline. My old boss Handywoman once suggested a flavor of ice cream to Ben and Jerry's for a contest, and she won, so she got free ice cream and a trip to somewhere tropical. Now I'm forgetting all the details (was it in the Caribbean? did the flavor include chocolate?), but how cool is that?

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Great Football Weekend

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Friday Travalon and I hung out on campus, as we have been doing, and we got stuck in an elevator at the Historical Society! The door didn’t open, and we couldn’t get it open from the inside, so we pressed the emergency button. A guy spoke to us and said he was going to have to call the fire department, so then Travalon and I were feeling a bit like everywhere we go, the fire department shows up: first the brewery when we ordered pizza, then the All Saints’ Mass, and now this. However, we heard some people outside the elevator, so we pounded on the door and they had no problem opening it from the outside. I got the guy back on the line and said we didn’t need to be rescued anymore. Hopefully that is the last of the fire department showing up wherever we are…

Saturday my old friend Ethel came to town with another friend of hers and four free tickets to the Badger Game! Travalon didn’t mind going with three ladies, since it was such an exciting game – we really didn’t know what would happen, since Iowa had destroyed Ohio State the week before. The Badgers did prevail, although at first it wasn’t a sure thing – right away they threw an interception, and Iowa ran it back for a touchdown! Ouch! It was so good to see Ethel again. She is very busy with five kids, but her husband came home with the tickets and said he couldn’t go, so she should go with friends. I guess someone at work gave them to him. Ethel made her older kids babysit, and one of them kept calling her during the game when something really exciting would happen. She also recorded most of the Fifth Quarter, when the band performs, for him.

Sunday Travalon, Rich, and I were invited to a party thrown by our realtor to thank all her clients past and present. Travalon and I played five holes of miniature golf, and I scored 17, so as you can see golf is not my game either. After lunch at the party, we went home and watched the Packers finally win with Hundley at quarterback. To add to the sweet taste of victory, it was our ancient rivals the Bears on their home turf, so I believe now the Packers are up one game in this oldest rivalry in the NFL. The Bears were good for years in the 80s when we were very bad, so we had a lot of catching up to do, even with Favre and Rodgers as quarterbacks. Then Travalon and I went for a hike at Holy Wisdom Monastery. I hadn’t noticed when we hiked there last year that you can get a really good view of Lake Mendota from the top of the hill. They have a little pond on their land, so we hiked around that as far as we could go. Some of it seems to be private property, and some is torn up. They are apparently doing some sort of prairie restoration project there. The weather was pretty mild for this time of year, but unfortunately the sun never came out. Oh well, we will enjoy these mild days while they last!

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Elevator Ups and Downs

Elevators are tricky things. Today I almost got on one going up until Light Bright asked at the last moment, “Are you going up, Hat?” A little later we were on the third floor and I had to go to the sixth floor while she had to go to the ninth, so she hit the elevator button. To my surprise, she hit both the up and the down buttons and asked, “Which one do you think will come first?” I replied, “Down, but neither of us is going that way.” So we joked about how when the elevator full of people going down stopped on Three and we just stood there, I was going to point at her so they would all know it was her fault. Sure enough, the elevator was going down… but nobody was on it, so we were saved that humiliation. It sat there for a moment, then the up light went on, so we got on it. I said, “I was right, down came first, but up came pretty quickly after that!”

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Admiration on the Elevator

This is a true story that happened to my office mate Light Bright yesterday. She was riding the artsy elevator, and two men subsequently boarded it, when they stopped on a floor where two women were peering into the elevator. One of the men held the door open for them, but they said, “Oh, we’re just admiring.” The two men loved hearing that. One said he was going to tell his wife that he was admired at work today. Then the women said, “No, we meant the picture,” meaning the large backlit flowers on the back of the elevator. Then the men were completely embarrassed, and Light Bright was trying very hard not to laugh. I said that was a great story, and I was going to have to blog about it, so I just did.

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Elevator Art

At work we had a dingy old elevator for the staff to use, and a few weeks ago they shut it down completely. When it was working again, it had wood paneling on the sides. “Swanky!” we all said. I don’t remember it shutting down recently, so maybe they did all the work over the weekend. All I know is that on Monday when the doors to the elevator opened, I was greeted by the sight of a backlit picture of cosmos flowers, many times larger than life. I found it very cheerful, and when my office mate Light Bright saw it, she said, “Holy cow!” But now we hear that not everyone is as fond of the change as we are. Some people have said it is overwhelmingly cheerful or just too big. Apparently they don’t enjoy seeing flowers as large as people. Who needs elevator music to complain about when we have elevator art for people to complain about?

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Crazy Elevator

I have to deal with elevators a lot at work, and today I had a very strange experience on one. I was taking a cart from the top floor to the ground floor, and at the next floor down about twenty people got in the elevator. I wasn’t sure the elevator could handle so many people, but the doors shut and it continued down until a couple floors before the bottom, when three people got off. Then the doors wouldn’t shut, and it just sat there. If twenty people weren’t too many, why were seventeen suddenly too many for it to run? Finally all the other people got off the elevator, grumbling that they would have to take the stairs. Since I had the cart, I couldn’t take the stairs. As I debated about going to find another elevator, the doors shut and the elevator took me the rest of the way down.  When I told my office mate Light Bright the story, she said, “That’s blogworthy,” so I’m blogging about it.

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I Saw the Midwest Meteor of 2010

Of course yesterday, as soon as I left Rich’s house after putting that instant classic of a movie on my blog, I saw something truly blogworthy. This is such big-time news that it has even made the national news website, and I was in the perfect spot to see it: an enormous meteor! It was traveling east as I was traveling west around 10 pm, and at first I thought it was an airplane coming in to land at our airport, since it was traveling the right direction. It was a bright white light, but suddenly it grew enormous and green, with a halo around it just like in a sci-fi movie. Then it exploded into several orange pieces, which fell to the ground. It was amazing!

Today I saw something just as strange: a Guinness truck being followed by a Bud Lite truck. Trying to catch some quality? To me, Bud Lite makes even less sense than decaf coffee; if people drink cheap beer just to get drunk, and lite beer has a lower alcohol content, then why would anyone drink cheap lite beer? If you have an answer for me, feel free to leave it in the comment section. (I will concede that there is a time and a place for decaf coffee, and that time and place is after dessert late at night at a fancy restaurant when you want your coffee but you want your sleep too.)

My day started very badly, as I dropped my breakfast on myself, my lunch on the floor, and part of my outfit into the toilet. (And not the one in the sky.) Of course that all set me back so much that I missed the bus and had to take the next one, so I was late to work. However, when I pushed the button to call the elevator, it opened right up! That has got to be right off the Lolameter for luck. So far the rest of the day has been normal, but in a few minutes I have to sing at the funeral of a tenor from my OTHER choir who died of a heart attack… and he’s younger than I am! I remember when anyone who was younger than I was and got married was shockingly young; those days are long gone, so now this is the new shocker for me. (Not to mention the rest of the choir, including his poor, poor girlfriend in the alto section. Keep her in your prayers or, if you don’t believe in that, send some good vibes her way.) So dropping breakfast, lunch, and clothes is hardly the worst luck I could have.

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Smackdown: Hornets vs. Protestants

Once Richard Bonomo came to see me at work, and as I may have mentioned, my office is at the very top of a tall building. We got on the elevator, and as it went down, it acquired more people. On one floor it stopped and the doors slid open, but there was nobody waiting outside to get into it. Instead, an enormous black hornet flew into the elevator, and everyone ducked as far back into a corner as possible. I cried, "Don't kill it!" as someone swung a folder at it, but two floors later the elevator stopped again, the doors slid open, and again nobody was waiting to get on, but the hornet flew out. Then Rich said, "It looks like he just wanted that floor," and everyone laughed.

Now I have seen dogs window-shopping in Greece and cranes trying to get into the Pharmacy Library, but that is the first time I have seen an insect seem to do a normal human activity. It is funny to think that our first impulse is to believe the bad ol' hornet is going to get us, when maybe all it wants is to go from the 6th to the 4th floor, like all us lazy hominids who don't take the stairs. But if we are always expecting the worst out of people, of course we would expect the worst out of other creatures too. So next time you find yourself trapped on an elevator with a hornet, ask yourself, "Does this hornet want to be with me any more than I want to be with it?" After all, it can only sting you, but you can squish it, which is a little more deadly... unless you happen to be deathly allergic to hornet stings. Next time, don't kill the hornet unless it is clearly coming to attack you. At that point, it's self-defense.

Remember, it could always be worse: instead of being trapped on an elevator with a wasp, you could be trapped in an elevator with a WASP.

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