Not Headless for Mardi Gras

Happy Mardi Gras! Today at Irish class we gave our teacher a present: good Irish whiskey and a decanter that is engraved with an expression in Irish that means: "Better broken Irish than perfect English." Of course I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like: Nios fearr briste Gaeilge na foirfe bearla, only it rhymed, plus Spellcheck keeps trying to "correct" my Irish. I'll find the actual expression and put it into a subsequent post.

Travalon went to New Orleans Take Out and got shrimp creole for me and fried oysters and shrimp for himself to celebrate Mardi Gras. We also had dirty rice and cornbread. I was afraid that with the treats I had at work I would have gone over my calorie count for the day, but I ran through most of Ant-Man (a very entertaining movie) and managed to burn off all those calories. Of course I forgot to wear any of my Mardi Gras beads, but Handy Woman lent me a strand so I wasn't completely beadless today. And I love that Spellcheck tried to change that to headless. Though it is true, I was not completely headless today.

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Super Bowl L

Did my readers have a good weekend? I had a really fun one, starting with Friday night, when Travalon went to watch high school basketball. I brought four pizzas over to Richard Bonomo’s house to share with him, Kathbert, Jilly Moose, and Antoshka. After all that pizza, Jilly Moose and I needed to burn off a LOT of calories – she showed me how to scan the bar code on the pizza box to get the calorie information in our health app – so we had a dance party right in Rich’s living room. Antoshka provided some background music and kind of made fun of us, but he was so entertaining about it that we just laughed. We all said he could be the next Richard Simmons, but he didn’t know who that was, so Rich showed him a video, and he did a great impression. It was so much fun, and Jilly Moose and I did manage to burn off all our calories.

Saturday Travalon had to work, but we had time to go out for coffee before he had to head in, and then I met Jilly Moose and OK Cap for lunch at the Great Dane. Travalon and I went back to Sauk to see eagles, but this weekend we had no luck. In the evening we went to the Tipsy Cow for dinner (the goat cheese curds are so amazing!), then we had some time before our show started, so we went to what Travalon thought was a sports bar called Woofs. As soon as I walked in, I realized our mistake: I was the only woman in the place, and the walls were covered with pictures of hot young men with barely any clothes on. Once we were outside, we realized the “Open” sign was rainbow, so that should have been our first clue it was a gay bar. We went to the Argus Bar instead, which is a lovely old pub. The show was a Brazilian Carnaval concert with lots of samba music, and I danced so hard that I worked off those cheese curds (per my health app), but the dancers weren’t going to perform until 12:30 and we were tired so we left just before midnight.

Sunday morning we overslept and missed our usual Mass, so we went to the nearby church at a later time and then headed to Cross Plains for lunch at Coach’s. Travalon is doing a survey of all the local places serving chicken wings, and he says so far they are the winners. Then we went back to Sauk but still didn’t see any eagles. We did, however, see one of the other people from my Irish class. We drove to the Crystal Lake resort for a quick drink (I had water – do you know how many calories are in a beer??), and then we went for an invigorating hike on the Ice Age Trail with Rodney. We watched the Super Bowl at home, and I indulged in some pizza and a beer, but boy – calories! I had to walk/run through quite a bit of the game to work it all off! We both felt the officiating was biased against Carolina, and some other people I’ve talked to agreed. The refs called Carolina for every little thing but let Denver get away with some pretty egregious stuff. Plus the ads weren’t really all that entertaining this year. Travalon felt that for the 50^th Super Bowl they should have had a halftime act that had been around for 50 years, like the Rolling Stones, but of course they had more hip hop type artists. Today people were saying that Cam Newton, Carolina’s quarterback, was a poor loser because in a post-game interview he just said, “They played better than we did.” What did they want him to say? What is there to say when you lose the biggest game of your career? I think people should cut him some slack. If you just lost the Super Bowl, would you really want to talk about it? Plus, can I just state how lame it is that they decided to forego Roman numerals for the Super Bowl when it would have been a simple one this year? Super Bowl L, not XXVII where you have to do math to figure out what the heck it is.

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Badger Basketball vs. Ohio State

Last night Travalon and I went to the men’s Badger Basketball game. I had gotten free tickets by redeeming points from my credit card (the first time I had actually tried to redeem them for anything), but Travalon said they were the worst possible seats in the whole place, in the back row on the top tier and right behind the basket. He did gamely bring his binoculars, but then we saw a guy selling tickets in front of the Kohl Center who said he would give us two seats together for a good deal, so Travalon bought them. They were very good seats, on a corner on the second level so you could see the court really well. The Badgers played Ohio State, and for the first fifteen minutes or so nobody sat in the seats next to me, so I put my coat there. Suddenly two people arrived, saying, “Traffic was so bad!” so I moved my coat, but I didn’t notice until almost the end of the game that my hat had fallen beneath the guy’s seat. I thought for several sad minutes that I would have to walk all the long, cold way back to the car without a hat. The guy was a Baby Boomer white guy who kept making sort of patronizing comments about Nigel Hayes’s abilities, how he wasn’t shooting well and he was missing easy shots. For the record, Nigel Hayes shot 21 points last night, the leader of the team. I felt like there was something vaguely racist about an older white guy making those kinds of comments about a young black guy, a sort of plantation mentality “My ni**er isn’t performing for me!” attitude, but maybe I was reading too much into it. Anyway, other than the guy’s running commentary about Hayes’s subpar performance (and what would have made him happy, 51 points???), it was a really fun game. I did feel a little weird about the expensive lighting in the Kohl Center, like think how many kids in Third World countries could be fed and vaccinated with that money, and is a fancy light show really necessary when the game would be just as exciting on a simple outdoor basketball court? Maybe I am looking for problems where none exist, seeing wasteful spending and racist attitudes where everyone else just sees a good time. Why? Am I an inherently negative person? I didn’t think so… Anyway, I did really enjoy the game, and yes, the Badgers won by 11 points. Thanks to Hayes, of course.

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Too Restless for Pandora

I have gotten back into listening to Pandora, the online music program, at work, and today is my Irish roots music day, but for some reason they intersperse a lot of zydeco on that station. I guess, why not? Irish jigs and reels are as fast-paced as zydeco. However, I have realized my current job is not that conducive to listening to Pandora, because I am up and down and in and out a lot, which means I either have to pause the music or risk missing something good. Truly, I am not one for sitting still. At my last job, Light Bright and I would spend at least an hour a day wandering, under the guise of “going to the other building to deliver mail,” and I do miss that. It was when we used to come up with topics for me to blog about. At my current job we only have one building, and it is not that big either, but going up two flights of stairs is easier to deal with than going up seventeen, and so I do stairs a lot more at this job. Also, I have an office at one end of the building but regularly have to go do bookkeeping stuff in the accountant’s office at the other end of the building, and of course there are my hourly trips to the restroom and/or water fountain. This must be why, according to my iPhone, I travel two miles a day on an average day at work, not even including the mile walk at lunch. Imagine what kind of mileage I got at my old job! I must not be the kind of person they had in mind when they created Pandora.

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Watching Classic Television Shows

Travalon wanted me to blog about the TV shows from the 60’s and 70’s that we have been watching. We discovered we get two stations that show “classic shows,” so we have been watching things like I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hogan's Heroes, The Barney Miller Show, and Taxi. One thing that strikes me about these shows is that people seem to be a lot nicer to each other, for the most part, than they are on today’s TV shows. This was especially true on an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show I caught one night. Why is that? Were people just nicer back then? Did they care more about each other? Or do shows now depict how people really are and that was an idealized version of life? Of course, the show from now that I watch the most is Downton Abbey, and drama is their whole schtick, so you can't have people being too nice to each other or there would be no show.  

Yesterday Travalon and I watched some game shows, and I noticed that they tended to have one white team and one black team. When the questions were more from white culture, the white teams did better, but when they were more from black culture, the black teams did better. I thought they had better ask a very even mix, if they wanted things to be fair. Oddly, although I am the whitest person I know, the black culture questions were easier for me. Maybe I don’t fit neatly into any culture!

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Happy Candlemas

Happy Candlemas to my readers! How did I celebrate this Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord? Not by going to Mass, although as it turns out, I easily could have. Today was supposed to be marked by a heavy snowstorm, so I asked for the day off of work. However, this morning everything was clear as could be, so Travalon and I ventured out for coffee. Around ten the snow started to fall heavily, and I thought, "Ah, I was wise to stay home, after all!" There was even thundersnow, and apparently some people saw lightning. However, by one the snow had tapered off again, so Travalon and I went to the Willows for their $2 Tuesday tacos. Then we went home and watched The Lion King, which was a surprisingly appropriate choice for today, because the presentation of the cub is prominently featured in the movie. It does seem as if the movie could be a metaphor for Christ's life in some ways, because after the presentation, Simba leads a hidden life until he is called upon to save his people, er, lions. Though he doesn't have to die for them, he does risk his life to save them from evil. Anyway, that was our "snow day" today. Watch - the weather will be worse tomorrow, but they will really look at me askance if I take two days off of work for nonexistent weather conditions!

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Ethel's Father's Funeral and Women's Basketball

Happy February! January is finally over! Is it just me, or does it feel like the longest month? Years ago I used to get an email that said what day of the year it was, and when I told my boss at the time that it was the 40^th day of the year that day, he quipped, “It’s January 40^th!” Sometimes it sure feels like January is forty days long…

Friday evening Travalon went to his hometown to watch basketball, so I hung out with Rich, Kathbert, and Antoshka. I brought broccoli to our dinner, and Rich cooked the biggest slab of salmon I have ever seen. It took so long to cook that we were noshing on pistachios while waiting, which pushed my fat intake for the day over my recommended amount, according to the Drill Sergeant, i.e., the health app. I seem to go over on fat every day, even though I manage to stay under my total caloric allowance. Nuts and avocados really have a lot of fat!

Saturday Travalon had to work. Rich and I drove to Milwaukee to attend the funeral of the father of my old friend Ethel, the one I got stuck on a roof in Rouen with. Her brother, who is a priest, was the main celebrant, which was touching because he cried a little during it but not so much that it interrupted the proceedings. This man had nine children (Ethel is the youngest), and two became priests, but the others all had kids, and some of them had a LOT of kids. Some of those kids are having kids now, so the deceased had over a hundred children and grandchildren. A friend of his told us he learned one thing that interested each grandchild so he could talk to them about their interest, and they wouldn’t feel like a faceless part of the crowd. He was in the Air Force, so the burial was with full military honors. It was a happy funeral, if such a thing could be said, because he had so many descendants to mourn him and we all felt pretty sure about which direction he was going. Rich and I stayed for the luncheon and then headed home. Meanwhile, Travalon went back to Sauk and saw three bald eagles this time. In the evening we went to the Nau-Ti-Gal, and the bartender was trying to talk me into doing the Paint Night for this month, which is painting a set of wine glasses. How about it, Rosary Ladies? Anyone interested?

Yesterday OK Cap and I went to the women’s basketball game, which was very crowded because it was only a dollar to go, and Luxuli joined us after working on some computer problems. The women lost pretty badly to Michigan State, but it was a fun game anyway, and the a capella group MadHatters performed during halftime. In the evening all the Rosary Ladies and our husbands went to dinner at Liliana’s, since it was the last possible day I could use my birthday month coupon for an order of free beignets. Since each order is three beignets, OK Cap ordered another round so each of us got one. Then, of course, Travalon and I went home and watched Downton Abbey. It was a shocking episode because the Earl of Grantham almost died after puking up blood all over the dinner table. Apparently the actor was so good at projecting the stuff out of his mouth that he got it all over his “wife’s” vintage dress on the other side of the table, which made for quite a display. However, the dress is from the 1920’s and made of beads, and when they tried to clean it for a subsequent scene, it sort of disintegrated. If you have not seen the show, the clothes are amazing. I just love flapper-era fashions! 

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