Fruit Faux Pas

Today I did something really embarrassing. People tend to leave food on the table in our break room if it is for general consumption, and today while a coworker was washing her dishes in the sink, I noticed two mugs full of fruit and began helping myself. “What delicious fruit!” I said to my coworker. “I wonder who brought it?” “It’s my fruit,” she replied, and I realized I’d been eating her lunch! Oops, I guess you have to guard your food if it’s on the “public” table! She just laughed and said to help myself, it was too much fruit for her anyway. It was slices of nectarine and red grapes.

Hardingfele, who as far as I can ascertain no longer reads this blog, does send me spam now and then to post. She sent me the following:

Hi, purchasing manager.
Good day!
We are   sexy underwear sales

If you are interested in, may we have your inquire

We can According to customer's requirements or sample production  we will provide free sample to you

 Thanks for your valuable time.

Regards.

website: somethingthathasnothingtodowithunderwear.com

Hardingfele did not say whether she had attempted to acquire her free sample of sexy underwear.

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Rodney vs. the Volleyball Net

Last night I took Rodney for a walk, since I got home from work before Travalon. Some days Rodney does not want to do much more than get outside and do his business, but yesterday he wanted to go on a long walk all over the neighborhood. He took me to a nearby restaurant and enjoyed walking across their volleyball pit with its soft sand, but he couldn’t see the net around the back edge (to keep the ball from going into the river, I suppose), and he walked right into it. Rodney is old and kind of grumpy sometimes, so he attacked the net, biting it and growling. I found that so funny, I just laughed… and then he seemed embarrassed and stopped harassing the net. He walked along and tried walking right into it again, and then he got kind of tangled up, so he was really frustrated with the net and walked the other way. He wanted to get too close to some geese, but I stopped him when they began honking menacingly at us. Then we went home and I fried some bacon for dinner, since Travalon had requested a bacon, mushroom, and Swiss cheese omelet. Rodney LOVED the smell of the bacon and was going kind of nuts. He kept following me around the kitchen, probably wondering, “What wizardry is this? The woman can summon wondrous smells whenever she enters this room!” Of course Travalon gave him a taste of his bacon, so hopefully it lived up to his expectations!

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Road Trip to Sabula

I hope all my readers had a great Memorial Day weekend. Travalon and I started ours off by having a picnic on our dock Friday night. Saturday he had to work in the morning, so I met up with Richard Bonomo, OK Cap, and another lady for coffee. Rich and I went to a gag store to get presents for Cecil Markovitch’s birthday party, inspired by the moustache drinking glasses Kathbert had given him the week before. Rich got him a moustache-shaped baking pan, and I got him an emergency inflatable chicken because Cecil has a habit of giving various sized rubber chickens to B-Boy and Mo-Girl’s little girl. Then Travalon and I went to the candy store so he could get his own presents for Cecil: Canadian breath spray (“live the fantasy!”), a scorpion in a lollipop, and a jalapeno-flavored gummy pepper because of the time he ate an entire jalapeno pepper at Luxuli’s urging. In the evening we went to B-Boy and Mo-Girl’s house, stopping for a little fishing at beautiful Babcock Park along the way, and we had what Cecil called a “feast.” B-Boy grilled pork chops, and Mo-Girl made potatoes and salad and a delicious pound cake for dessert. The presents were not a disappointment – Cecil LOVED the inflatable chicken and the Canadian breath spray. Oh, we all laughed so hard! He got some other funny stuff too, like ice cube molds shaped like dentures, and some good wine and Cointreau. He shared the Cointreau but not the wine.

Sunday after brunch, Travalon and I hit the road, stopping in Galena to walk around with Rodney the Poodle. We got ice cream and went to an all-pasta store, where we got some spugnole pasta in various vegetable flavors, but it was raining on and off so we hit the road again. We drove to Savannah, Illinois and then over the bridge to Sabula, Iowa, a small town entirely on an island. We checked out their (full) campground, and on the water we saw what at first we thought, through the driving rain, were people on jetskis or something. When we got closer, we saw they were actually white pelicans swimming on the water. They were so beautiful! There was a pizza place and a diner on the island, so we chose the diner for dinner but were underwhelmed. Online reviews wouldn’t have helped, because they gave both places four and a half stars, so maybe we just hit them on a bad day. Then we drove to our hotel in Dubuque, stopping at a lovely campground on the river that was mysteriously empty for a holiday weekend – we saw only one tent. We went swimming at the hotel, but preteen boys throwing a ball around invaded the pool, so we moved to the hot tub, only to find a teenage girl there clipping her nails right into the water. Gross! We tried to go to a sports bar across the street, but they had just closed, so we called it a night.

Monday we went to the National Mississippi Museum in downtown Dubuque and checked out their exhibit of Titanic artifacts. We walked along the river walk and saw two paddleboats, one playing a jaunty tune on the calliope. At the end of the river walk is a winery, so we stopped there and enjoyed a glass while sitting outside. We drove to Potosi and had lunch at the brewery, then we went to Belmont and saw the original state capitol building. We stopped in Mineral Point to walk around and discovered the whole town seemed to be at a graduation party for three high school seniors. We even stopped in Paoli, but the Hop Garden was closed, so Travalon just went to the cheese shop. In the evening Rich had Slow Food Bonomo for us regulars, as well as Travalon and Kathbert. We contributed the pasta we had bought in Galena, and everyone else brought delicious stuff, so it was quite a feast. 

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Beautiful Muumuu

I forgot to blog about this earlier, but a few Sundays ago I wore my muumuu to church, and Mo-Girl told me her little girl, who is three, was scared of me because I was “so beautiful!” Wow, even when I was 23 and much closer to beautiful, I never elicited that sort of reaction from people! How sweet! I wonder what she would have thought of me in my wedding dress? Here is a picture, which I have posted previously, of me in the muumuu and Travalon in a sort of matching shirt.

 Last night Rich and I worked out again. First I forgot my tennis shoes at work and had on canvas shoes. Then it took me forever to find my shorts, but I didn’t want to wear the baggy pants that pass for my exercise gear because we had to rubber band them up while we were doing wind sprints on Tuesday. Then Rich forgot his exercise gear at home and had to work out in “civilian clothes,” so we ended up just doing calisthenics and a round of weights, no wind sprints or Strength Training Without Mercy. That’s OK, I swam the night before with Travalon, so I have gotten a good amount of exercise in this week. Let’s see if we can be properly attired next time we work out…

I have been going through my wedding photos and trying to email them to people. Some of my favorites are action shots that aren’t particularly well composed but just somehow seem to capture the spirit of the day, with the riot of colors and the beloved participants. Sorry I can’t post my two favorites, but they have tons of people in them, and I’d have to get everyone’s permission. One is of me getting dressed before the wedding, and the library at our church is full of frilly white and coral stuff and flowers, while the Rosary Ladies and Light Bright are wearing all sorts of lovely springy colors. My other favorite is in the Arboretum, with A-Fooze holding up the train of my dress and Tiffy, Travalon, and various other people hovering about me. Maybe I just love those photos because I feel so adored in them!

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Wind Sprints: Another Form of Torture Courtesy of Richard Bonomo

Rich specifically requested that I blog about this today, and I hate to let him down, so here goes: yesterday he and I went to work out. Is it UGGH Club if it isn’t at some unreasonable hour of the morning? I’m never clear on that, since it stands for Unearthly Gym Gyrations and Horrors, and those could be at any hour. I said it was the first time in a long time that we had worked out at a reasonable hour, because it was neither 6 am nor 10 pm (22:00 hours Bonomo-style). Since it wasn’t just before bedtime, after our usual bout of torture (calisthenics, weight machines, and free weights), we did a new form of torture called “wind sprints.” We walked halfway around the track at the health club (sorry, I have no idea how long each lap is), and then we ran the other half as fast as we could. I am not very fast even at my fastest, and I could not keep up with Rich. Plus, because I am a rather busty woman, there was a clear and present danger of my getting smacked in the face by other body parts, if you see what I mean, so that may have kept my speed down a notch or two as well. We did this for about five laps while another woman jogged at a steady pace and kept passing us. Eventually she walked too, and when Rich commented that we had all given up and gone to walking (since we did one final lap of walking), she said, “It’s still moving. Like I say, at least you’re lapping the people sitting on the couch.” Meanwhile, Travalon was sitting in his easy chair, watching the first season of Charlie’s Angels, but to be fair he has a physically demanding job and had just spent hours at it. My pathetic little hour and a half stint in the gym cannot compare to the exercise he gets at work.

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Wedding Photos

For our first anniversary, I am going to post some wedding photos, since I never got around to it last year. Because I hate to post photos of other people without their permission, these will mostly be of myself and Travalon (who is OK with me posting photos of him), and of inanimate objects.

 Tiffy's bouquet and my bouquet

 my dress and Tiffy's dress

Travalon's and my rings

 the outside of our church

 the inside of our church

 the new Mr. and Mrs. Travalon!

 What a relief that part's over!

These next photos are from the Arboretum, which is where Travalon proposed to me. We had thought the crabapples and lilacs would be in bloom, but they were behind schedule last year. Fortunately the magnolias were still blooming.

Finally, a couple of shots from the reception: our cake and us dancing!

 

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A-Fooze Weekend

A-Fooze is in town with her mother, father, and sister, and it has been so wonderful hanging out with them this past weekend. Friday night Travalon, Jilly Moose, and I drove to the Dorf Haus to join them and Richard Bonomo (who is hosting them) for fish fry. Saturday Travalon and I took another walk across the isthmus, then he left for the Bunny Berigan Festival in Fox Lake, while I went to Rich’s house to join him, A-Fooze, her father, and Kathbert in a game of Frisbee. I brought Rodney the Poodle, and the grass and dandelions in the park by Rich’s house were as tall as he is! Rich made his famous lasagna for dinner, and Luxuli and Prairie Man joined us as well. We must have worn Rodney out, because he slept behind the couch all evening. Sunday after Mass a huge crowd of us went to brunch, then Travalon and I went fishing at a pond out near Cross Plains. Nothing was biting, but we did see two large trout apparently doing a mating dance right by the shore, so maybe all the fish had something on their minds other than food. We also went for a walk at Indian Lake. In the evening Rich had a big bunch over for dinner again: besides A-Fooze and her family, Kathbert, Cecil Markovitch, the single B-Boy, my OTHER choir director, and Rich’s neighbor were there, and Luxuli and Prairie Man came for dessert. Since Saturday had been Cecil’s birthday (but he and the B-Boy were in the air, returning from a trip to Italy), we surprised him with a cake, and Kathbert gave him drinking glasses with moustaches on them in honor of his own prominent moustache. A-Fooze’s parents were impressed with how many words of Hungarian Travalon has learned. Just wait until they have it on Duolingo – then he will be practically fluent! My own Irish ability has really benefitted from that app. Maybe he can Skype them and practice his Hungarian with actual native speakers.

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