Day of Annoyances for Both of Us

 

Today was not a great day for either Travalon or me. My iPhone had updated overnight, so a bunch of my apps were grayed out, including DuoLingo and FitBit. This meant I couldn't do my morning Portuguese lessons, and more importantly, it meant I didn't notice that my FitBit battery was dangerously low until I got to work. Oddly, the grayed-out apps came to life at work when I pressed them, while at home nothing I did worked. I called Travalon to ask if he could bring my FitBit charger to work, and he sent me a photo that I said was the right thing, but when he arrived, it was my old FitBit charger. He wanted to get a haircut today, but they told him there was a wait, so he went to four different stores looking for a charger for me. However, my FitBit must be out of date, because nobody had one in stock. That wasted all his free time before work, and then at work the kids were running amok. Worst of all, he had a long meeting after work, so he missed our ukulele strum tonight, when the songs were all about trains. We've been listening to train songs in the car.

My FitBit charge was getting lower and lower, but I had high hopes going to my blood donation appointment. However, nobody there had a FitBit; they either had a cheap knockoff or an Apple watch, which is more expensive. When I got there, there was one beach towel left, and I felt bad to take it, but they said I was the last appointment this afternoon (which seems odd, since it was only 2:30), and there were no walk-ins after me. The beach towel is beautiful.

Since I was the last donation today, they told me to take as many snacks as I wanted. They did say a ukulele strum sounded like the perfect evening after donating blood, since it's so relaxing. I also got a lot of work done today and am feeling slightly more caught up. Then in the evening I went to the ukulele strum, and while the people seemed less friendly today, the songs were excellent. Lots of Johnny Cash, and almost everything was a 1-4-5 song. There were just enough weird chords to make it interesting. Afterwards Travalon and I had dinner on the Lone Girl's roof, and we were the last ones up there. When we got home, I began searching for the FitBit charger, and then Travalon found it on the floor by the couch - how on earth did it get there? The last place I'd seen it was either the table by my easy chair in the living room or the table on the porch. Anyway, St. Anthony and Travalon came through for me.

Meanwhile, my phone was running a bit low on charge too, but DuoLingo was sending me a very threatening message.

I charged the phone during Night Prayer and then did half an hour of DuoLingo, so the owl should be happy. In the meantime, my FitBit got charged up to 100%, so all my little first world problems were solved. Oh yeah, during the ukulele strum a guy was giving out cans of coffee-flavored beer, so I took one and liked it but didn't finish it. Travalon had the rest of that, and then we also got a small glass of the house raspberry sour and split that. It was very pleasant up on the roof, since things had cooled down. It was very hot today at lunchtime when Seabird, Hardingfelde, and I took a walk to check out the blooming black locusts. We kept running from shade patch to shade patch. Hopefully tomorrow is slightly less hot and also less annoying for both Travalon and me.

I forgot to post this yesterday: we saw lupine in bloom yesterday when we walked at Jackson's Landing.

It felt like a little piece of the Necedah Wildlife Preserve right here in Madison.

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Nordic Party with Fiddle Music

 

The photos were not syncing from my phone to my computer, and I wasn't sure if the issue was the phone, the Cloud, or the computer. They all said they were set to automatically sync, and they all seemed to have plenty of storage room left. But I turned my phone off and back on, and the missing photos appeared on Boethius, except for the ones with the rainbow. Here is the view we had yesterday from the Madison Club, pre-rainbow.

You can see the skylight of the room we were in last year below us, and the fountain and blooming crabapple trees on the Monona Terrace. You can see what a gloomy day it was.

This morning I woke up briefly at 6:35, rolled over, and woke up at 7:35, well after my alarm should have gone off. Apparently I'd forgotten to set it. I rushed to get ready and was late for work, but not too late. I figured I could make up the time this afternoon. It was just that kind of day, like I put the last of the coffee into the new mug they gave us yesterday (sorry, no photo yet), and before I could make another pot, someone came in desperately needing coffee. On my morning break I took a leisurely stroll, sniffing the lilac, the crabapple, and the currants along my path. At lunch Hardingfele and I went to Allen Centennial Gardens. Here are a couple of photos.

On the way back we ran into a person I know from the Union and a person I know from Irish circles who were walking along together - I had no idea they knew each other! Hardingfele and I had Indian food in the cafe in her building, then I ran into another person from Irish circles. 

My "working late" was kind of a joke, because I'd forgotten that there was a party for the graduating seniors, with snacks and with live music.

I told Hardingfele to come over so she could enjoy the snacks and live music too - she knew one of the fiddlers. Then I took a later shuttle back to my car, but to my surprise some of the people from my usual shuttle were on it. Were we all working late today?

Someone wrote "Mandalorian" on a blackboard in the hall at work, with a symbol that must be from the show, so you can see my response below:

Travalon went back to the pond with wood ducks.

Wow! Finally the rainbow photos have downloaded to Boethius!

I hope that they were worth the wait.

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Wrapped in Our Lady's Mantle

 

It was a day today. My phone should have been charging all night, but when I went to do Portuguese on DuoLingo this morning, it was at 20%. Fortunately I have the old charger cord that still works, so I brought that with me and charged my phone at work. I worked on campus, and after we walked at lunch, Hardingfele showed me a tool they use in her division to find funds by the people who own them, which was easy to do in the old system but hard to figure out in the new one. I mentioned this to the Hive Mind and got all kinds of pushback about how people in my position don't need to know this information, even though we're the ones people go to when they want to know what money they have available. My boss even private messaged me to see if I was still confused about how this works. Ah well, I have the tool, so I can do it. Then after leaving work, I realized I'd forgotten to lock the mailroom door, and when I got to my car, I'd forgotten to put my parking tag on my rearview mirror. There was no ticket on my windshield, but maybe they're going to send it to me later.

In the evening Travalon and I went to our old church to be wrapped in Mary's mantle. I had done it back in December, but while some people had gotten their photo taken, I hadn't. Hockey Girl said we could do one after their Intercessory Prayer group tonight, so here are some photos of Travalon and me wrapped in Our Lady's mantle.

Thanks to Richard Bonomo for taking these photos. Weirdly, the parking lot at the church was full except for the part right in front of the church, so we assumed at first that something big was going on upstairs, and we thought the Intercessory Prayer Group met downstairs, so imagine our confusion when we saw they were meeting upstairs, and there were maybe a dozen of them. So why were so many cars in the parking lot?

Remember a couple of weekends ago when Travalon saw all those people out on the ice of the lake by the Memorial Union? They left a huge mess behind, lots of beer cans and stuff, that would have gotten into the lake when the ice melted. But then other people connected on social media about this, and a bunch of them went out and cleaned up the mess, so the story has a happy ending.

I looked it up, and it was St. Patrick's Day 2009 when that man asked my band to play "Coconut Grove." The older song is actually called "Cocoanut Grove," which may be why I couldn't find it back then. This was almost twenty years ago, so the man who made this request may be long dead by now. The song he wanted is from the 1930's, so it makes sense that his in-laws were listening to it. It's so old that even my octogenarian bandmates hadn't heard of it.

Let me end by saying I want this blockade of Cuba to end now. The people are suffering so much. They have so little fuel that they can't even do surgeries. This is pure evil.

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Badger Basketball with Blackwell

 

Yesterday I worked on campus, and Seabird and I took a short walk on our morning break, but she had no interest in walking at lunch, so I walked by myself. I kept hearing a train coming, and then the crossing arms would come down, but then they would go back up again, and the train never passed - just like on Monday night! What's going on with that?? Our boss always has a riddle to start our department meetings, and yesterday's was: "What language does a bridge speak?" I couldn't think of anything except "Pont-ificate," which makes no sense, but two of my coworkers figured it out: "Span-ish!" 

Right after work I caught the 202 shuttle down to the Labor Temple, and the Former Professor Formerly Known as Lute Player was on it too, so we sat together and talked about a genetic service just for Holocaust survivors, among other things. She said something very sad, that people are looking for a lost uncle who may have survived, but they never find anyone like that, just a lot of distant cousins because all Jewish people are related. Often their entire immediate family was completely wiped out. Then I was supposed to be doing paperwork with the president and vice president of our former local to aid with the merger with the other local, but a guy from the South Central Federation of Labor ("Scuffle") came in and started talking to us, and I could not stay awake. When Travalon arrived, we gave a ride to the vice president, who lives right off Monroe Street, and then we checked out all the inflatable Santas on that street. In one block, practically every house has one in the front yard, or on the roof.

Travalon and I went to the Badger basketball game and watched them handily defeat Northwestern. A guy named Blackwell is the new Tonje, the great player from last year - he got 1000 lifetime points during this game (it was fun to watch his points add up until he got there), and he got a double-double. Travalon says he came to visit the kids where he works, and they were very excited, but when they found out he is 6'7", they just kept saying, "Six Seven!" The game seemed very loud, and I had forgotten to grab earplugs (we keep a stash in Travalon's glove compartment), but Travalon got a free pair at the Welcome Desk, so I wore them throughout the game. Why is everything so loud these days? Am I a cranky old person for complaining about this?

DuoLingo gave me my annual summary:

It feels good to be a legend at something, even if it's just yelling at a language app: "No! That's exactly what I said! Why is it wrong?!?"

Today was very, very cold. My jeans had been falling down during my walk yesterday, so today I wore slightly tighter jeans... and then they were falling down too. This makes sense, if I really have lost almost twenty pounds, but what a pain. I didn't want to walk outside anyway, so Hardingfele and I walked around in her building. When I got back to my office, my phone was missing - had it fallen out of my pocket one of the times I had to hitch my pants back up? But wouldn't I have heard it?? I checked my (short) path outside and then went back to Hardingfele's office to say we'd have to retrace our path around her building... but she had found my phone just sitting on her desk. Had I taken it out of my pocket and set it down? I don't remember doing that at all. The bad news is that I did this before our walk in our building, so I didn't get credit for those steps on my phone. Hardingfele was mystified: "Why do you care? Don't you have a FitBit?" Yes, but I like to compare them to see how many intentional steps I got versus steps around the house getting ready for work, "steps" when I wave my arms during a boring online meeting where nobody can see or hear me, etc. But the good news is that my phone is not lost. Phew!

Hardingele has a plant that looked vaguely familiar, so I asked what it was, and she said, "A peace lily, of course." I said, "That's no peace lily," so we asked both my plant app and my phone what it was, and they both said a type of ginger. (Not the same type.) I thought, oh yeah, that's where I've seen that kind of plant before - at Olbrich Garden! Hardingfele was shocked that it wasn't a peace lily. It's a rescue plant, so it's not like she could ask anyone what it was, since she found it abandoned in her building. Here's a not very good picture of it.

I mostly walked around on my floor at work, and back where hardly anyone sees it there's a chalkboard, so I drew this picture on it:

The Martian is saying, "It's colder than my home planet!" I remember years ago, it was around this time of year, and on a talk about Ice Cube down at the South Pole we actually got to talk to the people down there, and it was colder here than down there. (It was their "summer" at the time, but still.) Then that summer, a fellow where I worked came back from visiting family in India, and he said, "Wow, it's hotter here than in India!" I thought, "That's a hell of a tourist slogan!"

Come to Wisconsin - hotter than India, colder than the South Pole!

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Hopped Up on Tripita and Galactic Burritos

 

Sorry for the silence the last couple of days. Friday I crawled into bed at exactly 2 am, and yesterday I just wasted too much time and ran out of time to blog, so now you'll get a very long blog post. It starts with Friday, when I worked from home in the morning and then logged out and took a walk at Governor's Island with Travalon. I drove down to Cecil Markovitch's house, and then he, the Dairyman's Daughter, Richard Bonomo, and I drove to Chicago. It was a fine drive until we hit the Chicago traffic, then yikes! We went to Tutto Fresco, the same Italian restaurant we went to last time we'd gone to a show at the Athaeneum, and I ordered a half-order of seafood linguine but still had to put half in the cooler Cecil keeps in his car. (Unlike Travalon and me, who keep buying coolers because we keep forgetting to bring one with us... but this did come in handy when our fridge died, plus I wrote an article about our dead fridge that got published in Guidepost, which was a bucket list item of mine. But I digress.) Cecil was texting the Single B-Boy, saying he got a Caesar salad with three anchovies on it, and the B-Boy said, "That's three anchovies too many." Then Cecil tried to order an espresso after dinner, but they said the machine was broken, and Cecil said that was a running joke between him and the B-Boy, that half the places said their espresso machines were broken, so he texted him about that. Only it autocorrected a word, so he tried to correct it but sent the text and accidentally turned on voice-to-text, so it was writing a text that said, "Oh shoot! It's writing everything I say! Good thing I said shoot. What if it did this while I was at confession and then sent my sins to all my contacts?" And then he decided, what the hey, he'd send that text to the B-Boy too. Which reminds me, earlier in the day I was emailing a faculty member, and for some reason Outlook changed haven't to 'aven't, so apparently my email program thinks I'm Cockney.

We thought we were going to see a concert put on by the Sistine Chapel Choir, but it was actually part lecture given by a woman who writes art commentary for Magnificat magazine about the art in the Sistine Chapel, and part concert of music sung in the Sistine Chapel by a small subset of the choir, about five guys. (I know, this just happened, but for the life of me I can't remember if there were five or six.) The last piece was the Allegri "Miserere," the setting of Psalm 51 that was only sung in the Sistine Chapel until a teenage Mozart transcribed it. The lecturer said the punishment for transcribing it was excommunication, but the Pope was so fascinated that a 14-year-old had done it that instead he wanted to meet Mozart, "and that," she quipped, "is one way to get a papal audience." (She was very funny.) After that, the piece was out in the world, and I've sung it myself, but I've only ever heard women or boys hit the high C. To my surprise, one of the grown men in this group was able to do it. It's a breathtaking moment. They could have left things there, but they said they didn't want to leave us on a somber note, so they were going to sing "O Sacrum Convivium." They didn't say by whom, so of course my mind immediately went to the Tallis version that I love so much... and in this I was to be deeply disappointed. Whatever they sang, it was... fine, but it wasn't Tallis. Then we drove home from Chicago, and I got into bed at exactly 2 am.

Yesterday Travalon (who had gone to a high school football game Friday night) and I met Cecil at Greek Fest, at the local Greek Orthodox church. I will say that I am Orthodox-curious and just love the St. John Chrysostom liturgy, which I know you can get at an actual Catholic church, but not around here. My goals were simple: eat tripita and galactoboureko and drink Greek coffee. We weren't going to eat lunch because we were meeting Tiffy in New Glarus for her (early) birthday lunch, but Cecil was planning to have a whole meal at the Fest. However, when we went to get the tripita (which is basically feta cheese in phyllo dough in little triangles), the guy said only one tripita comes per order, so we ordered two. Then they gave us one order of tripita and one of spanakopita, so we had to return that and get another tripita... and then they had four little triangles in each order, which was way more than we needed. When Cecil arrived, we offered him tripita, and then we all went downstairs to get "galactic burritos" and Greek coffee, and he also got the thing that looks like baklava but shredded, and then he was too full for lunch. They also had a little market downstairs, and I couldn't decide between the big prayer beads for $20 or the little ones for $10, but then I saw a Niko bag for $10, so the little prayer beads it was.

After all that tripita, I ate two bites of "galactic burrito" and was done, but then I couldn't close the container. A woman was going by with a whole cart full of galactic burritos, so I figured she could help me, but she couldn't either. She put it in a bag and tied it tightly so it wouldn't open. I will say that they had SO MANY galactic burritos there because that must be what people want. I mean, you can get baklava all over, but Greek Fest (and the church's bake sale in November) is the only place I've seen galactic burritos. My Greek coworker says they're easy to make: "Just make a simple custard and then use frozen phyllo dough." I understand the second part, but that first part... what?? She might as well have told me, "It's so simple, you just build a nuclear reactor." And what is that opposed to, a complex custard? The mind boggles.

Then Travalon and I drove down to New Glarus, and I was so full of sugar and caffeine and fat that I was making up random songs and babbling about any random thing that popped into my head. We met Tiffy at Glarner Stube, a Swiss restaurant that Cecil said has the largest urinal in the Midwest. Whether that's true, I can't say, but the place does have two bathrooms that are marked unisex, and the one I went into did have a very large urinal in it. Here is a photo, courtesy of Travalon.

I was too full to eat a lot, so I had a cup of mushroom soup and then a couple bites of Travalon's savory puff pastry dish and a couple bites of Tiffy's schnitzel and a couple bites of the roesti, which is basically hash browns with Swiss cheese, and a couple bites of red cabbage. So really a great Swiss sampler platter. After lunch we went to Tiffy's sister's house in Monroe, which was shockingly nostalgic for me, because I remembered playing with her nieces there when they were little girls, and now they're pushing thirty. They were not there, but Karl the Chocolate Lab was (Tiffy was dog sitting), so we played with him. He's old and graying now, but he still loves playing fetch. Then Travalon and I went to Baumgartner's for cheese sandwiches, and I tried Limburger cheese for the first time. It was not nearly as stinky as I'd been led to believe. We couldn't talk Tiffy into joining us. 

Today at Mass we sang a hymn to the tune of "Slane" for our opening hymn, then Travalon and I stopped by the coffee shop on North Street, as is becoming our habit after Mass. Because of the Iron Man Triathlon, we didn't want to go anywhere near downtown, so we headed north of town, to the boardwalk in DeForest. To our surprise, the path into the woods is closed off now, so that's a disappointment. Then we went to the East Side Club to hear the Prairie Flowers at three... only the email had the time wrong, and they had started at one, so they were just packing up when we got there. Inside there was a Packer watch party, but it was too nice out, so we just sat by the lake. I do still love the Packers, but I always take a while to adjust to football season. Anyway, they beat the Lions. 

You will be shocked to hear that there was more band drama. I wanted to go to the Irish slow session, but our leader wasn't happy about this. She said I was only allowed to go to the second Irish slow session in the month, not the first one. That annoyed me, and anyway I didn't want to fight with Iron Man road closures on the way to the other end of town, so I said forget it, I'm going to the Irish session. Our bass player came too, but at first neither my Irish teacher Famie nor the red-headed flute player were there, and then I thought hmm, maybe I skipped band practice for nothing. They mentioned the flute player was sick with possibly COVID, so while she didn't feel that bad, she decided to stay home and not infect us, and then Famie arrived a little late. During the break, she, the bass player, and I were chatting when Hardingfele sent me a text that she was skipping band practice, so that means there were only the guitarist and two fiddles, which is enough for practice but we'll probably get a pissed-off email about how we need to take practice more seriously. The flute player had prepared a playlist for us of tunes commonly played at sessions, and I noticed "Slane" was on it, but we didn't play it. However, I did sing it for the hymn during Night Prayer, because it was the evening hymn in Magnificat for Thursday, and I was going to sing it then, but someone else had a hymn they wanted to sing. Tonight they asked me to pick a hymn, so I said sure and sang "Slane." I sure do love that tune.

This has nothing to do with anything else, but my aunt who lives in Colorado sent this photo.

I can see why they live in Colorado!

Man, that was a lot of words. You'd think I was still hopped up on Greek coffee, tripita, and galactic burritos.

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Seeing Willie, Smelling Wacky Weed

 

Today I took the day off of work... mostly. Travalon and I were going to put the boat in the water today, but the hitch on the trailer is not working right, and the plugs wouldn't stay in the drainage hole. Instead, we went to the Apple Store so Travalon could have them look at his phone. The guy said yup, it's dead, but it was surprisingly cheap to replace it because it's an older model. The guy put the sim card in the new phone, and Travalon was able to send me a text, but all his information seemed to be gone. We were surprised that it wasn't backed up to the cloud, but at least he had a working phone.

We had lunch outside at a Chinese dumpling place nearby, and then we got fancy bubble tea. We took a walk on Governor's Island since it was such a lovely day, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that they had paved the road out to it, and the parking lot. They used to be gravel and full of potholes. Then I worked for an hour while Travalon tried to set up his phone more, and suddenly his contacts and all his information were there, except for his photos. We do have hope that those might download from the cloud sometime too.

We both got packages in the mail today. Travalon got a book, and I got yet another rosary. But this one glows in the dark! Check it out. Here it is under regular light, where it is pretty enough.

It looks good under blacklight.

And it really does glow in the dark!

In the evening we went to see Willie Nelson, who is 91 years old but still out touring. He still sounds the same, and he still plays guitar well, but his son sang a lot of the songs to give him a break. He only played for a little over an hour, but that's impressive when you consider that most people his age are dead. We parked some distance away, and we passed these cheerful alliums on the way.

I thought this building across the street and the trees in front of it looked so good in the light of the setting sun. It really brought out the colors.

They took someone out on a stretcher during the concert, and then I saw an ambulance with its lights flashing (but no siren) speed away toward the hospitals. As we were walking back to the car, we saw a guy fall over, and everyone rushed over to help. I went over, but they seemed to have it under control. Then we passed another guy who had just fallen, and people were helping him. And then a guy passed us on the sidewalk practically carrying his friend who could barely walk. Are Willie Nelson concerts that dangerous for anyone not named Willie Nelson? They are drinking until they can't walk, but he smokes pot and has lived almost a century. Speaking of pot, I wore my hemp hat with the marijuana leaf design on it, and we smelled so much wacky weed that we almost got a contact high. Is the dank weed really that bad for you? Willie Nelson seems to be singing, guitar-playing evidence that it is not.

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Not-So-Funday Sunday

 

This morning Travalon and I didn't really have to do anything, since we had gone to Mass last night. Eventually we did some cleaning, but like yesterday, I was surprised at how hard it was because I had so little energy. We went for a walk at Patrick Marsh, but it was very cold. We saw a lot of gulls and a couple of blue herons.

Travalon suggested we take a walk at East Towne Mall, so we did that too. I did barely get my 10,000 steps today and my 22 (actually 23) active minutes, so not a banner day for exercise. I was so exhausted that I didn't go to the Slow Irish Jam this evening, and I barely dragged myself to band practice, just to be abused by a somewhat new member of the band. Worse, nobody else really stuck up for me. I don't know if everyone was mad that I missed practices for our vacation and also going to Chicago, but after all, I can't spend every Sunday evening in town, and they all take vacations themselves. What the heck.

It was a strange day all around. At JC Penney's we saw a very pretty rosary, but I was shocked when they said it had originally been $750 but had been marked down to $200. Seriously? It looked like it was worth about $35 to me. Who goes to Penney's to buy valuable rosaries? And it wasn't made of semiprecious stones, just sterling silver and glass, with some mother-of-pearl on the crucifix and centerpiece. What on earth made it worth anything like $750? Obviously I didn't buy it.

Stranger still, I opened Google on my phone to look up a basketball player who had an amazing game in the tournament and who graduated from Travalon's high school in 2018. That seemed like a long time ago for someone still in college, so I was trying to find his age. Google of its own accord did a search on the term "demon faces" before I had entered anything for it to search for. It would be strange enough for it to conduct its own searches, but on that particular term? Spooky!

Thanks to Travalon for the title of this blog post.

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Short Skyway Adventure

 

This morning Travalon and I hit the road fairly early and stopped in Tomah to check out an antiques mall and art gallery. I was drawn to a painting even before knowing the artist had painted it with his feet, so I got that, and Travalon got a Count Chocula figurine, a Catwoman model, and a World War I biplane tin sign, as well as a rosary for me and a small model of the Milwaukee lighthouse. We also stopped at the Norske Nook in Osseo; we have one not that far from our house that we rarely go to, but this is the original so it's iconic. I really wanted the ligonberry sour cream pie, but they were out of it, so I had pumpkin cream cheese pie, and that was really good. Travalon had chocolate mint pie with little pieces of Andes Candies on top. Travalon's phone no longer charges in the car, so to save his battery he let me play music on my phone, since mine will charge in the car. I said we could skip any song he didn't like, but he didn't ask me to skip any - he thought they were all tolerable.

When we got to our hotel in downtown Minneapolis, we found it was overrun with Christian college students, who are having some sort of convention here. We wanted to go in the skyways, but they closed at six (the internet said ten), so they were already closed. We were able to access a couple of tunnels, and Travalon got some photos.

Check it out - there's a wedding going on in this skyway! You can see the bride in white.

We came back to the hotel and explored a bit, and we passed a table with huge sizes of T-shirts that said: "Free Shirts!" so we each took one. They were for the Christian convention, I think...? but all the Christian college students were thin, so they didn't need XXL and XXXL shirts. Eventually we had a late dinner at the bar; Travalon had poutine, and I had squash gnocchi with vegetables, walnuts, and a maple reduction sauce. We also split a margarita flatbread with arugula on it, kind of like a salad pizza. There is a pool at this hotel, and after dinner we peeked in and saw a couple of people who were just leaving, so we ran upstairs and changed. I wore my new free T-shirt over my swimsuit, and Travalon took this truly awful photo of me modeling it:

I wore the sweatpants on the way down to the pool, and nobody was milling around to see how lovely I looked. We had the pool to ourselves... for a few minutes, then some young guys came into it and took over the deep end, and then even more young guys came into it and started playing a game of frisbee. I was trying to swim laps, so I gave up and swam around the shallow end of the pool while Travalon waded. (I didn't like the bottom of the pool - it was slippery. But at least the pool wasn't freezing like some hotel pools we have encountered.) I didn't want to wear my sweatpants over my wet suit, so I just carried them... and then there were a whole bunch of college kids all over everywhere, and in the elevator with me, to see me wearing no pants, just a really oversized T-shirt that I obviously stole from their group. Or maybe they thought I was a chaperone? Anyway, my FitBit says I swam twenty-two laps, so I've worked off a fraction of that pie from Osseo.

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