Formative Basque Experience

 

I really enjoy Basque class, and it's more than just the fun of learning a very different language. I've always believed that people have a formative time in their lives, usually in their twenties, that defines who they are. For Travalon, it was the summer he worked at Glacier National Park. For Kathbert, it was living in Russian House in college. For Rich, it was his time at Case University. You can usually tell what a person's formative experience is because they always talk about it, and as everyone who knows me knows, I never shut up about those two weeks in France for World Youth Day. But maybe my formative experience was actually the summer I lived in the Basque country, because it was my first time outside of the US, and it really made an impression on me. I'm the only one in my class who isn't Basque by heritage, but I can get nostalgic for the Basque country with the best of them, and I do know enough about the culture to not feel completely left out. I was young enough at the time (only twenty) for it to sort of become part of my identity, a part that I haven't had a chance to live again until now.

Here are some recent photos. First is a better shot of Travalon's new Amoco Bear.

These are a bunch of Popeye dolls that Travalon just got in the mail: Olive Oyl, J. Wellington Wimpy, Bluto, Popeye, Eugene the Jeep, and Swee'Pea.

I can't remember if I ever posted a photo of our newest dragon. Meet Pistachio. 

And here are all our dragons: Pistachio and Zephyr in the back, and Solstice and Indigo in the front.

This morning it was -17 degrees Fahrenheit out, but I was fine because I looked like this:

One long, heavy coat, two pairs of pants, two hats, and the thing I got from the Turkey Trot. (I can't remember the technical term for it.) Plus gloves and boots. On my later walks today I also wore sunglasses, so then even my eyes were covered, but the problem is that they kept fogging up. Not like there's much to see around here anyway, except snow.

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Super Bowl LV: Enough with Shady Brady!

 

Today I wasn't sure I'd get enough steps, since it's still so cold outside, so Travalon said why don't we go back to East Towne Mall. And wouldn't you know, I found rosaries at one of those funny kiosks with lanyards and jewelry. I got this one that looks like it has a scapular on it too.

Then Jilly Moose and I went to Fired Up, and I made a couple of warm climate scenes. The one on the right is the first one I made, of a tropical scene with a volcano and a palm tree at sunset, and then we still had some time before Travalon was returning from the antiques mall, so I made a more abstract scene of a sailboat approaching a boathouse.

Travalon found a couple of fun things at the antiques mall. This is an Amoco oil rig worker teddy bear.

And this is the Flintstones' car as a Hot Wheels!

I wasn't going to watch the Super Bowl, but Travalon has it on, and I'm kind of half-watching it. I did watch the halftime show by the Weeknd, and I wondered if he uses that stage name because he figures nobody could pronounce his actual Ethiopian name, and that seems kind of sad. Like, people can learn to say things if they really want to. I learned to pronounce Antetokounmpo, after all. The game itself is even more egregious than the game where the Buccaneers played the Packers, because the referees called fouls on Kansas City every time they would have stopped the Bucs. It was ridiculous! And lots of no-calls on the Bucs. The announcers and halftime analysts must not be in on the fix, because they were commenting about it. They said, "How can Kansas City get anything going if they're going to call penalties on everything they do?" Finally Travalon turned the game off, because it had gotten so lopsided. Will this be the game that finally gets everyone to see something is fishy with Shady Brady? I sure hope so!

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Eagle Above and Rosaries at the Mall

 

Wednesday when I went out for my afternoon walk, the sky was so beautiful.

Today when we went to the dam in Prairie du Sac, there was an eagle right above us, sitting in a tree and looking at us.

Then it flew over the river.

We saw some other eagles flying as well. I think this is a young eagle.

We also saw mergansers, but they are hard to take pictures of, because they keep diving under the water.

And we saw buffleheads. The males are the ones with more white on them.

Because it was so cold outside, we went to East Towne Mall and walked around it twice at a pretty good clip - my FitBit says we spent 45 minutes going at a pace of 7 calories per minute. The third time around we walked at a more relaxed pace and went to some shops. While Travalon was in a shop that just sold baseball caps of various sports teams, I went next-door to a shop that sells alpaca wool products and smaller things too. Everyone else in there was speaking Spanish. I thought it seemed like the shop in the mall most likely to sell rosaries, and indeed I did find a rosary in African colors (or, as Travalon called it, the "Bob Marley rosary"), and all different colors of little rosary bracelets. I chose one in hot pink because the color just makes me happy when I look at it.

After that we went to a huge Asian market and foot court that Travalon discovered when he had to make a Door Dash run there. The checkout lines at the market were crazy so we didn't end up buying anything there, although there was stuff we were interested in. Travalon says he will go at a less busy time, like a weekday morning. We went to the food court and bought some green tea cookies and coconut bread for later, then we split an order of pork dumplings that came with ginger soy sauce. Yum! Then as we came home, we saw a beautiful sunset. These photos don't do it justice, but at least you can get the idea.

Originally we were going to go to Minneapolis this weekend and walk in the skyways to get some exercise when it's so cold out, but driving that far in these temperatures didn't seem like a wise idea. Honestly, this is the third time we have postponed the trip, since the last two weekends were very snowy, so this time we just canceled it. I think God is trying to tell us to stay in town during the pandemic.

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Winter Wonderland

 

Today it was snowing very hard, so Travalon got to work from home. After I got done with work, but while he was still working, I went out for a walk and took photos of the winter wonderland.

In this photo of Mariner's Inn, you can see how hard the snow is falling.

Then I went over to my neighbor's house because I hadn't seen her since she broke her foot, and I brought her some friendship bread. Another neighbor gave us starter bags, and she hasn't been able to bake hers. I made my first batch with vanilla pudding mix, and the second batch I made with chocolate pudding mix and chocolate chips left over from the cassata. When I got done visiting her, it was dark outside, and that was beautiful too, but the only photo I took that really turned out was this one.

Then I took the glow-in-the-dark rosary I got in Lodi on Saturday, and I went up into the loft and prayed the Luminous Mysteries with a luminous rosary. It's time to start enjoying the black light again, now that I have prayed in my new rosaries.

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What White Privilege Looks Like

 

I forgot to mention on yesterday's post that Liliana's had a special Groundhog Day dinner, so Travalon picked it up for me. (He had shrimp and grits and some chicken wings himself.) If you are familiar with the movie of the same name, every day when the protagonist wakes up, it's Groundhog Day again, so the gimmick with the dinner was that every course was noodles and cream. That was a lot of pasta, so I ate the main course (spicy shrimp and pasta) and saved the opening course (fettuccine alfredo) for lunch today. I ate a bite of the dessert, which was like apple crisp but with noodles, and then I was going to eat the rest of it as my dessert for lunch today, but I was too full after the other pasta. Then for dinner tonight Travalon brought home some amazing leftover steak for tacos from his job, so I was too full to eat the dessert after all that. I'm sure it will still be fine tomorrow. The tiny bit I had last night was delicious.

For some reason today I thought about Ladies' Home Journal, which Ma Hat got when I was a kid, and I used to read it with great interest. I hadn't thought of it in years, not being a housewife, but I looked it up and saw it stopped publishing in 2014. There were seven magazines aimed at housewives back in the day, and now only three of them are still around, probably because most women are not housewives anymore. I did read an article noting how none of them received awards for journalism, and maybe they weren't hard-hitting journalism, but I'm thinking there's some sexism there too. It hasn't escaped my notice that literature aimed at men is often critically acclaimed, while literature aimed at women is not considered "serious" literature. Is that so? Are women less serious than men? Are our concerns and interests less serious? Or are the critics, who are mostly men, maybe just a itty bitty bit of a tad biased?

On a related note, some people think there is no such thing as white privilege, but I have certainly seen it with the way the Capitol rioters are being treated. It looks like when you complain about jail food and insist you need organic food, and they comply!! It looks like when you've been charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct, but you say you can't go to jail because you have a prepaid vacation to Mexico coming up... and they let you go!! It looks like when you confront peaceful protesters and get in their faces and threaten them with guns... and they are the ones charged with disorderly conduct, not you. Can you imagine a black person saying they had to have soul food in jail and not getting smacked around? (I've heard stories that people of color who can't eat pork for religious reasons are often told in prison that they can have pork or nothing, but if someone has proof that this is not true, I'm willing to listen.) Can you imagine a black person saying they can't go to jail because they have a prepaid vacation to Jamaica? Can you imagine black people peacefully protesting for racial justice and having white people pull guns on them, and the white people being the ones in trouble? If you can, you must be in another country.

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Happy Candlemas, aka Groundhog Day

 

Have a great Candlemas or Groundhog Day or whatever you celebrate today!

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When the Train Passes By

 

As my regular readers know, I am crazy about trains. My neighbor and I dork out over any train that passes by, and we go running toward the tracks whenever we hear a whistle in the distance. For some reason in the last couple of months we would hear a train whistle that sounded like it was coming from the marsh, which didn't seem to make any sense - how could there be a train in the marsh?? But then I looked on Google Maps, and there is a train track that runs along the eastern side of the marsh, but it doesn't meet up with the track we can see until well south of here, so when we heard a train on that track, we wouldn't ever see it. I said that it was strange that we hadn't realized there was another track until recently, but my neighbor pointed out that we only started hearing that train once the leaves had fallen from the trees; when there was foliage, it blocked the sound. That makes sense!

My neighbor broke her foot last week and can't walk with me for at least a month, so Travalon has been walking with me more. On Saturday in Portage, we heard a train, and then we saw it, and it was a passenger train! We only see freight trains by our house, and those don't interest Travalon. Today he even walked with me before work, but of course he left for work before my afternoon walk, and I was poky getting out the door because my neighbor wasn't waiting for me. I meant to walk at three, but it was a few minutes later, and then when I walked out the door, I heard the train whistle! And it was close, so it was on the track we could see!! I ran to where I could see it, but then I heard the whistle a bit further to the west, so I had just missed seeing the train. And that's on me, because if I'd gone out at three like I'd planned, I would have had a perfect view of it. Of course the train never comes at a regular time, and it seems to be coming by less frequently these days, so seeing it is a special treat. At least for me, since Travalon doesn't care and my equally train-crazy neighbor is holed up with her broken foot.

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