Accidental Plant Sitter and F-Word Mystery

 

Today I worked on campus, and two very odd things happened. The first was that there was a big plant in the mailroom with the name of a professor who is on sabbatical this semester, and who also has a pretty new baby. I thought it was a gift, so I mentioned it to her husband, who also works in our department. He said, "Oh yeah, that's a long story." I said the plant can't stay in the mailroom, there's no window in there and it will die, but he said, "It's going to stay there a while." I said, "I could put it in my office," and he said, "That's a good idea." So I put it in the window of my office, and then I was nosy and read the note, and the person just wanted the professor to babysit the plant for three months. Who asks a professor to babysit their plant over the summer?? So I'm babysitting it. Here it is.

Oh yeah, and the owner said she hadn't watered it for a month to make it lighter to carry, so I immediately watered the poor thing. I have no idea what the story is there, but the innocent plant shouldn't get caught in the middle of it.

The second thing that happened was that we have these painted speech bubbles that we can write things on (mostly bad puns) with chalk markers, and I didn't notice anything this morning, but just before lunch I saw some incredibly mature individual had written the bad F-word, the juvenile F-word, and a drawing of the male anatomy in giant, bright yellow letters. I was too short to reach it, so a coworker had to clean it up. I did take a photo first, in case we needed it for evidence, but no need to post it. It's just a burp out the other end and the act of lovemaking. None of us saw anyone wandering around, so it will remain a mystery. To me, the funniest thing is that the chair had to look at it and decide it wasn't protected speech so we could erase it. This is because two people put rude comments on a departmental Instagram post about a Yiddish song class, and one could be removed because it was deemed hate speech, but the other wasn't specifically hate speech so we weren't allowed to delete it due to freedom of speech. I'm not sure "Fart" and "F--k" are really hate speech, and I actually found the drawing more offensive, but we pointed out that ANYTHING on a blackboard, no matter how anodyne, has to be assumed to be ephemeral. Though to be fair, everything else has been there so long that we can't get it to come off. The F-words came right off because they were so fresh.

Travalon had a weird day too. He went all the way to Watertown to see an old steam engine go by; he got there about ten, and it wasn't supposed to come for another half an hour, so he started to take a walk... and then it went by so quickly that he could only get this photo.

It had a bunch of passenger cars behind it. He said it is the Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific train, like the Holiday Train, and that it is out for some kind of anniversary run, so happy birthday to this Taurus train. He said a bunch of people were sitting with cameras set up when he got there, so he should have asked them if it was running early. When we go to see the Holiday train, there's always some train nerd who can listen in to the conversations between the engineers and whoever, so they know exactly when the train is getting in and when it's leaving. It could have been worse: Travalon saw a woman post on social media that she got her kids out of school to see the train, and they had already missed it completely even though the school is not even a mile away. What a bummer for them. Here is a YouTube video someone took of it in Minnesota a few days ago.

As we were watching videos on YouTube of the train, we heard a horn outside because a train was going by in real life. Crazy!

After that, since he had his good camera with him, he went to Dunn's Marsh down near his job and took pictures of egrets and great blue herons.

No egret in the tree above him, unfortunately, but now he feels vindicated after not having the camera yesterday at Tiedemann's Pond. As you can see, egrets are not rare creatures, but they are so beautiful and elegant - how can you not love them?

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Birdwatching at Band Practice

 

This morning, after Mass in the gym, Travalon and I drove toward Black Earth to get me some new sandals, since it's getting to be that time of year and my old ones didn't age well in Bimini. On the way we realized we were hungry, so we stopped for lunch at Crossroads Coffee House. We had iced coffee drinks and (skip this part, Jilly Moose) mushroom quiche. Then we continued on to Black Earth and got my new sandals.

It was a lovely day, so we went for a hike at Festge Park, where a volunteer told us all about the park. We walked in the woods and saw lots of blooming Jacks in the Pulpit and budding mayapples, as well as all sorts of other woodland flowers, like those lavender ones I was told are wild geraniums by some people and cranes bills by others. Maybe those are two different flowers...? 

We took a short walk at Striker Pond and didn't see much except for a robin's nest with three babies. Travalon didn't think to bring his good camera, so when we went two blocks away to Tiedemann's Pond, he had to take photos with his cell phone. We saw an egret.

Then it was joined by a great blue heron.

Suddenly we realized there was another egret in the tree right above us!

While I was doing Irish, Travalon met his oldest brother and his wife, who had brought some old photos for him. He showed them to me, and some of them were so cute! There was Travalon on his first birthday, and Travalon at the zoo in (?) the pen with the flamingos and a crowned crane, and Travalon with a nativity scene. Maybe I'll post some later, if he lets me.

I did some more birdwatching at band practice. We had an audience.

Apparently this is a barred owl. I am getting this both from the birdwatching social media hive mind and my own google search. It has a call that can sound like a dog barking, which makes sense because my bandmate whose backyard this is says she heard it and it sounds like a dog barking. There were a couple of crows that really didn't like it being there, and they kept trying to chase it away, but it mostly ignored them. Eventually it flew off, so maybe it didn't like the song we did in the Dorian mode. Our bass player didn't like it, but I still am not sure if she just thought the chords were wrong (which they were) or if she simply doesn't like the Dorian mode. It's one of my favorite modes, but there's no rule that everyone has to like it.

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Friday at Cafe Coda and Saturday in the Marshes

 

Thursday I worked on campus, and yesterday I worked from home; both days I went out on my breaks and smelled the wonderful blooming trees, mostly crabapples and lilacs, but there is a magnolia in our neighborhood with its own distinctive scent. Friday night I used the money they had paid me for the study on Wednesday (they paid in cash) for the cover charge to get into Cafe Coda to see Grupo Candela, a local salsa band. There was a short dance lesson beforehand, covering basic steps: salsa, merengue, bachata, and cha-cha. Then the group came on and played for a couple of hours. I loved the music, and also the decor at Cafe Coda. Here are some photos.

This morning we cleaned for about half an hour, then we were going to go to Black Earth to get me some new sandals, but it was overcast and I thought possibly an ideal day for birdwatching at Horicon Marsh. We started at the boardwalk, as usual, and we saw some lovely flowers there, some sort of currants and trilliums and yellow violets, among other things.

Some years the trilliums are more pink, but this year they are pure white. A google search seems to indicate this has to do with the age of the flowers; we saw them newly opened this year, but as they age, they become pinker. We also saw birds along the boardwalk, mostly barn swallows, tree swallows, and of course the ubiquitous red-winged blackbirds.

We are not allowed to go on the trail where we see the yellow-headed blackbirds until June, and then only through August. We continued along the drive and saw an egret and some baby geese.

We saw a pair of gadwalls, two red-headed ducks, and a lot of pelicans who were cooperatively fishing.

We stopped by the center with the pagoda-like part, where we have often seen a whooping crane hanging out. No sign of him today, but they told us his name is Grasshopper, because while he is living as a wild crane now, he was born and bred at the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo. Apparently he has hooked up with a sandhill crane, so the ICF will probably seize any offspring they have, like they did years ago when this happened with another mixed pair who had a "whoophill" baby that survived to adulthood. I thought they didn't want to interfere in nature, except apparently sometimes they do.

As usual, we had lunch at the Subway in Mayville, then for the first time we went to their resale shop. No rosaries; I only saw one thing that intrigued me, but we didn't get it. It was a pot of four fake flowers, and it had a button on the side, so I pressed it. It played Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" as the flowers spun. It made me think of Travalon's mom, because she loved that song, so I almost got it for that reason. If it's still there the next time we go there, maybe I'll get it.

We went to Theresa Marsh, where we didn't see much but some coots.

There were some killdeer loudly crying as they flew around.

We heard a lot of thunder in the distance, and it started to sprinkle, so we decided to return to the car. On the way back to Mayville we hit some heavy rain, but it cleared up by the time we got back to the area where we often see the white-headed goose. Someone posted a photo of him this spring on the birdwatching page, asking, "What kind of goose is this??" so he is clearly still alive, but we didn't see him today. We did see more baby geese.

We did see several cormorants fly by and land in the water. They were pretty far from us, but Travalon did get photos.

We came back home and debated about going to a dance at Folklore Village, but we were both tired and rested a bit before heading to the health club to swim. Only... they close earlier than their posted hours on Saturday. What?? If there was ever a night you'd expect them to be open late, it would be Saturday. We got there four minutes before they closed, thinking we had a whole hour to swim and shower. I got very grumpy, not just about that but about how life in general is skewed toward the morning people, and how people used to complain about having a 9-5 job but I've NEVER had the luxury of starting as late as 9, so things are just getting worse and worse for us non-morning types. Recently I saw a social media video of a British guy saying he learned that kids in the US start school at 7:30 am when they don't start in the UK until 9 am. Why does this country think early mornings are so virtuous?? Witness the constant attempts to make Daylight Saving Time the yearlong reality as it creeps ever earlier in the spring and later in the fall. When I was young, it started in April and ended in October, but this year it started earlier than ever in March, and it's not going to end until late November. People wonder why we have so many issues in this country, and there may be a very simple answer: constant sleep deprivation! I remember in Ireland when we toured a farm, and they were horrified that farmers in the US wake up at like four - they said, "We get up at seven! Why would they need to get up that early?" A valid question indeed.

So I was grumpy, and I still needed active minutes, but the bass line in "Hurt You So" by Jonny L always makes everything right. I ran around the house for about a quarter hour, and now I feel so much happier. But will I be able to sleep after all that vigorous exercise? We'll see...

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Finding My Way Through a Building... for Science!

 

Yesterday I was going to blog, but I didn't have much to say. I was just going to post a photo of the stuff I'd bought this weekend. However, the photo got stuck somewhere between my phone, the Cloud, and my computer, so then there was nothing to blog about. It did show up today.

I worked on campus today, and at lunch I took a walk at the Allen Centennial Gardens, where there was this interesting tulip.

The gardens smelled so good because of all the flowers blooming there, and then on the path I walk on my breaks, there were golden currants with their scent like exotic spices.

Right after work I participated in a study about using assistive technology for visually impaired people. They also wanted people with normal vision, I suppose as a control group, so I was happy to do it. It was actually kind of fun: they took me on four different circuitous routes, every other time without the headset that showed labels like "Bathroom" and "Lockers," and every other time with it. At the end of the route I had to draw a map of what I'd seen along the way, then they took me back to the starting point by another route and I had to do the first route as fast as I could. I did pretty well without the headset, but when I had to wear it, I had trouble producing the maps. However, I still had no problem retracing the routes. Maybe I am really good at navigating. Like, without the headset I could remember for the map where we turned left or right, but maybe the headset was too distracting, so my maps were mostly straight lines. But in real life I could remember which way we'd turned as I was trying to follow the route. And they even paid me to do this! I'm telling you, I should have been a sailor - I can navigate well and never get seasick. What use are these skills while holed up in a dingy office creating spreadsheets?

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