Photos from Our Boat Ride into the Marsh

 

So this is crazy, but somehow Boethius my computer did upload the photos from my phone yesterday, and I couldn't find them. Today he let me upload the photos from Travalon's good camera, and those are amazing, so I'll post them tomorrow. We also went for a hike at Indian Lake tonight once I got done with work, and we have some photos of that too, so maybe that will be Wednesday's post. Anyway, if you like fall foliage, this week on Famous Hat should be just what you're looking for.

This first photo is a tree right outside our kitchen window. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but I love how the leaves are red with green edges.

Here are some photos from our boat ride back in the marsh on Saturday morning.

Here is the little island in the marsh that doesn't seem to have a name. Maybe we should call it Wank Island, just like Mount Wank on Highway 19 that doesn't seem to have a name.

My favorite captain navigating around Wank Island!

These photos are of the trees across the river from us.

This is the sunset that we saw from Governor's Island on Saturday.

Here is Richard Bonomo, looking all 2020 in his mask, consulting the corn maze map with a beautiful hill (and a telephone pole) behind him.

Sunday morning we saw a woodpecker on State Street!

It's like Christmas when I open a new bag of rosaries - I forget how beautiful they are! I got these in July in Minocqua. The green one is so lovely, but it is missing a lot of beads. The little one that I thought was a one-decade rosary is actually a Chaplet of the Infant of Prague, as I found out today when I tried to pray it over lunch and discovered it has twelve beads instead of ten.

Tune in tomorrow to see Travalon's much better photos from our cruise on Saturday.

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Cruise and Corn Maze

 

Sorry, no photos of our most recent adventures. Boethius is just about out of memory, so I might have to go buy some more for him before uploading more photos. I did try tonight, but he completely ignored the photos from Travalon's good camera, and he was having issues with the photos from my phone, so I'll just relate our adventures and save the photos for later.

On the morning of Ten Ten Twenty Twenty, Travalon and I went for a wonderful boat ride back in the marsh. The trees were so colorful. I took some photos, and maybe someday I'll be able to post them. Then I met Tiffy downtown, and we had lunch at Himal Chuli, sitting outside because it was such a beautiful day. She, Travalon, and I took a Betty Lou Cruise, and the food wasn't too exciting for this particular one (hamburgers), but the weather was perfect, and they gave us free drinks because it's the end of the season and they need to use up their supply. We saw lots of spectacular autumn foliage on Governor's Island and Maple Bluff. We also saw a lot of sailboats out enjoying the perfect conditions. After the cruise, we took a hike on Governor's Island, since Tiffy had never been there. I am terrible at estimating distances and always think everything is "about a mile," but I said I thought it was about a mile loop, and this time I checked my FitBit. Sure enough, it was just a fraction under a mile.

Today Tiffy joined the usual brunch crowd, and Travalon's phone kept telling us how to get to the corn maze. The organist said good thing it didn't do that during Mass! We didn't really need it to tell us, since we have been there so many times - we think this is maybe our sixteenth year. Richard Bonomo joined us too, and this year he read the map instead of Tiffy. We got a little confused about where we were, but we just wandered, and Travalon and I kept finding the secret punches. Travalon also found a couple of the mailboxes containing the next section of the map, which was good because those are on the map but we weren't always sure where we were in comparison to them. Tiffy is the one who is really good at reading maps, but she said she enjoyed just wandering this year, and it sure worked for us - we finished in an hour! That may be a new record for us. The picture this year is a tardigrade, or water bear, so there were a lot of curved lines, and those are always harder to follow. Doesn't matter, we had a great time and found enough secret punches to be Maze Masters as usual, and we got special pens as usual. This year they are blue.

I got done in plenty of time to go to band practice, and today people kept watching us since we were practicing outside. (In the driveway rather than on a porch.) Some people even applauded after we finished a song that we all thought hadn't gone that smoothly. Maybe they were being nice...? One fiddler told them we were practicing, "and we need to do more!" Another person was driving by, and she stopped her car right in the middle of the road, rolled down the window, and listened to us. Good thing it's not a very busy road. We haven't had any gigs at all this year, but this almost felt like one. I have no idea why this practice attracted so much attention - I don't remember getting that much last time we practiced outside. But we are right across from the zoo, so there are lots of people whose attention we can catch. And today we did!

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Garden Summary 2020

 

I think all the cedar waxwings in our neighborhood are drunk. This morning I saw one fly right into our porch window as I was working, and he bounced off and flew to a branch. I watched him to make sure he was okay, and he sat there, dazed, for a minute or two and then flew off. I keep hearing birds fly into our windows the last few days, and I was wondering why they were suddenly having this issue when they haven't up until now, but there were no fermented crabapples before this. My neighbor says she saw one fly right into a fence. "I'll bet autumn is their favorite time of year," she said. They are taking Oktoberfest very seriously in the cedar waxwing world!

This year my garden was much more pathetic than last year. I got some green beans, but nothing like the bounty last year. My ground cherry produced like crazy, but since the second plant mysteriously disappeared early in the season, I only got half as many as last year. I only got three carrots and maybe ten radishes, of which at least four were skinny and tough. The strawberries produced as much as last year, but the kale and chard were much more disappointing. The corn never got big enough to do anything, and I had a beautiful pumpkin vine covered with flowers, but it only produced one pumpkin that got about the size of a softball and then rotted. I planted all sorts of other seeds that never even sprouted, like beets and turnips. One of my eggplants vanished, and the other looked happy but never got big. It had one blossom but never produced a fruit. This can probably all be blamed on my lack of weeding. I thought I'd be spending a lot more time at the garden, now that I don't have to commute to work, but now that I never have to drive, I don't want to get into a car even to drive the couple of miles over to my garden plot. All my coworkers were saying how this was their best gardening year yet, but I guess I spent most of my extra time walking or boating. Will I try the garden again next year? Probably.

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Potato Hats and Waxwing Feathers

 

Nothing too exciting to report today. It was a beautiful day, but I was stuck inside, alas. Please enjoy this photo my neighbor took of the potatoes at the stand where we bought the kale on Sunday - notice that some of them are wearing little hats!

Here are some asters we saw on our hike around the pond on Sunday.

It's hard to see, but the pink cloud in this photo has a part that is swirled and pointed just like a cone of soft-serve ice cream. It was there for quite a while, so I was hoping when I got home and could grab my good camera it would still be there, but by then it was gone.

Today on one of our walks, my neighbor found this cool feather. It looks like it must have come from our drunk friend the cedar waxwing. You can see why he's called "waxwing," since the red looks like a little drop of wax at the end of the feather. Was he so drunk that he started pulling his feathers out??

Tomorrow's post - if I blog at all - will probably be just as exciting, since I will be stuck indoors once again. But Tiffy is coming up this weekend, so I should have more to say soon.

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Autumn Leaf Tour

Boethius is now letting me post photos, so here are some recent ones. First are the two Franciscan (seven-decade) rosaries I got in Marytown, along with a little one-decade rosary.

And these are the two rosaries Travalon found in an antiques shop in Columbus.

And here are a few pictures from Monday night, when we hiked on the Cross Plains segment of the Ice Age Trail. It went up a bluff, so we had quite a view.

I took the day off of work today, and was it ever a beautiful one! A colleague had emailed an itinerary for an autumn leaf tour around Lake Wisconsin, so I donned my Lake Wisconsin T-shirt, and Travalon and I set off. The first part of the tour was a combination of places we had never seen (the hill on WIBU Road) and places we are very familiar with (Tipperary Road), so that was fun. This first picture is from the hill on WIBU Road, named after the WIBU radio station on it.

These are some colorful trees in Jamison Park, which we didn't know existed until today. We took a walk in the woods there.

Here are some photos from the boat launch on Tipperary Road.

And some photos from the park across from the cottage we stayed at for our anniversary.

And here is a shot of the foliage around Columbia Lake, which was not on the itinerary but was just off the path so we decided to check it out.

The tour then went to the Mackenzie Nature Center, but the road it said to take was closed, and we know the place well since my band plays there every spring. The tour then ended with an apple orchard in North Leeds, but we decided to go back on the north side of Lake Wisconsin. First we stopped in Portage for a salted caramel pumpkin concrete mixer, and we ran on that all afternoon so I guess it was lunch. Travalon suggested we do a section of the Ice Age Trail that goes up the West Bluff of Devil's Lake, and he took so many photos from the top of the bluff that it was hard to choose. Here are some of my favorites.

We came back on the Tumbled Rock Trail, which is closer to the water.

Then we had what was supposed to be lunch but ended up being an early dinner at the Varsity Club in Merrimac, and after that we went to the park in Merrimac from which you can see most of the lake.

We took the ferry back across the lake, and just as we got near home, we saw this sunset.

What a wonderful way to spend a beautiful autumn day!

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Ice Age Trail Hike and Bad Day at Work

 

No photos today, because Boethius got another software upgrade on Sunday night, and now he is really being a poop. What used to take him ten minutes is now taking him at least twenty, and I can't get him to upload the photos from my phone. He really embarrassed me today, when I had to be in an Extremely Important Meeting with Extremely Important People, and I tried to log in five minutes early but it took him twenty minutes to open Zoom, so I was fifteen minutes late. Awkward! At least they have all had their own technology glitches, so they were very forgiving.

Last night Travalon and I hiked on a bit of the Cross Plains Section of the Ice Age Trail, and the bit we did seemed to be all uphill. We now have a cumulative 6.9 miles out of 40 done, and according to my phone we went up 11 flights of stairs, or the equivalent. It was really beautiful; neither of us had brought our good cameras, but Travalon's new phone takes really good photos, and then he texted them to me. So maybe someday Boethius will upload them and I can share them here. (Anyway, I kind of have to charge my FitBit, and it uses the same port as the phone.) After hiking, Travalon and I ate outside at Coach's, which was a little cold, but we have to do it while we still can. Part of this Mammoth Hike challenge is to go to three Ice Age Trail communities and patronize their small businesses, and they even have a list on the website of which businesses to patronize. Since Coach's was on there, and since Travalon says they have the best wings in the area, that was a no-brainer. So at least we are one-third done with that part of the challenge.

Today was very aggravating for me at work. Besides the aforementioned snafu with the meeting, I tried to log into our department sunshine fund, and the bank website said we don't have an account! That was consternating enough, but when I called the bank, I was told there was a three-minute wait time to talk to a human being, so I waited twenty minutes until finally it rang through to someone... who promptly hung up on me. I tried again, but by then the website had logged me out (it recognized our department as a customer, even if our account with several hundred dollars in it had mysteriously disappeared), and my phone battery was dying from being on hold so long, so I gave up and sent them a nastygram via their social media page. That seemed to work - someone got back to me, but after I was off work, so hopefully we can work this out. Richard Bonomo thinks it is just a computer glitch. I don't know what to think, but I'll try to keep an open mind. Then Travalon and I tried to take a boat ride to enjoy the beautiful evening, but the motor wouldn't start so we just paddled around near our dock. At least we were on the water and out in the sunshine.

It's okay, I have tomorrow off of work, so I don't have to think about any of this. Travalon and I will take a "leaf tour," and we will probably have some great photos that Boethius may or may not allow me to share on this blog.

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