Just Bach Christmas Concert

Today was the last Just Bach concert of the semester, and it was also something of a Christmas concert. Usually we the audience spend most of the time listening to the concert, but today we sang – a lot! We sang a bunch of the chorales from the Christmas Oratorio, and honestly it felt a lot more like Christmas music than the secular tripe they are playing on all the radio stations right now, even if I associate the tune of one of the chorales more with Lent, when we sing it to the words “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” I really love that one, and the one we sing for Advent with the words “Savior of the Nations Come.” Kathbert came too, and sang alto, but I only sang alto on the chorale that I actually know the alto part for, since it was too much for my brain to handle both sight-reading the alto line and figuring out the German pronunciation. Pete the Sailor Man was there too, and the former Lute Player and Banjo Player who needs a new blog name now. I could just call her The Professor…

My band will be playing at the airport on Sunday from 3-5, if anyone has a deep need to hang out at airport to hear free music. We will not be playing our usual repertoire of folk music from America, Ireland, and Scandinavia but all Christmas stuff, of course. Including the Sussex Carol, which in my opinion is the most underrated Christmas carol of all. Why doesn’t everyone know it?

Famous Hat

Adult Swim and Zoo Lights

Sorry that I didn’t blog yesterday – we spent the evening watching a biopic of Elton John that was surprisingly engrossing even though it had these weird fantasy sequences where he would burst into song and people around him would dance. Friday we went to Adult Swim at the Children’s Museum, since I had won tickets courtesy of Great Dane Brewing. We were pretty much the only Gen Xers there – even the people working at the event were all Millennials. We also didn’t have any Hogwarts paraphernalia on; the theme was Harry Potter. I was surprised at how elaborate some people’s costumes were. We did enjoy making mandrakes and a tiny vial of “potion” (i.e., glitter), and the shadow room, where your shadow is set on the wall, is still as cool as I remembered from when I went there with Tiffy’s nieces many years ago. A lot of the place basically becomes a nightclub, so it was hard to escape from the loud music. Most of it was from the 90’s, when the attendees were kids, but just before we left, they started playing 80’s music. You would think the Millennials wouldn’t even know that stuff.

Saturday Travalon and I met Rich, Luxuli, and OK Cap for coffee, then we all (but Rich) went to the annual balalaika orchestra’s Christmas concert, and then Travalon and I drove to Lake Wisconsin. We went to the part where you can see the island, I think it’s called Sunset Bay, and we also went to Sauk and saw some eagles. In the evening I picked up Tiffy, and we joined some other Slow Food people at a French restaurant called Cadre. Dinner was at 5, and this was a mile away from First Unitarian, where there was a Baroque Christmas concert at 7:30. It seemed like a perfect plan… but dinner was very slow, and then the bill got messed up, so by the time we got out of there, the concert was half over. Tiffy and I decided to look at Christmas lights instead, so we went to the house off of Gammon that always has a huge display coordinated to music, and then we went to Zoo Lights. We got there kind of late, and the gate was still open, but nobody was at the ticket booth. We wandered in and looked around, hoping they wouldn’t lock us in. “I can still hear the Christmas music playing,” I said, “so that seems like a good sign.” We saw hardly any other people, except a couple of girls who took a photo of us in front of a tree. We got to see almost the whole display for free (which wasn’t my intention – the entry fee is for a good cause, the zoo itself) before a security guard appeared and shooed us toward the exit. Just then he turned off the music, so it really was time to go.

Sunday after Mass, Travalon and I went to Rich’s house for brunch, then we drove to Lake Wisconsin to watch the Packers game from the bar on the bay with the island. You cannot actually see the island from inside the bar, but you can see some of the bay. The Packers (barely) beat the Bears, then we went to watch eagles, and we saw three flying by the dam and two on the island in the river. Then I talked Travalon into driving around to look at Christmas lights. It’s one of the things I love about this time of year, besides religious Christmas music (can’t stand the secular stuff) and the free Holiday Trolley on State Street. Might as well do something beautiful with these long, long nights!

Famous Hat

Which Fictional Character Am I?

Last night Travalon and I were watching Keeping Up Appearances, and we were delighted to see that the character Onslow was wearing a Packers shirt! A few scenes later he was reading a book on nuclear physics. If you have not seen this show before, I highly recommend it. It is a British show about a woman who is desperate to always seem to be doing the right thing, and her obsession usually ends up making a fool out of her, plus everyone dreads dealing with her. Once, years ago, Ma Hat said that I remind her of this character, which I said was odd because I very rarely care about proper etiquette. She replied, “No, I mean because people want to leave the room when you enter it.” This would be a mean thing for a normal mother to say, but it is par for the course for Ma Hat. She also said I remind her of Lucy van Pelt (from the Peanuts comic strip), presumably because Lucy is mean to everyone. However, I would maintain (and our parish priest would back me up on this) that the fictional Lucy I am most like is Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy, always getting myself into crazy situations, often with my buddy Ethel. So Ma Hat thinks I am like a combination of Lucy van Pelt and Hyacinth Bucket; I think I am more like a combination of Lucy Ricardo and Anne of Green Gables. Feel free to tell me in the comments which fictional character you think I most resemble, and why.

Famous Hat

Postcard Design Flaw

What a crazy day it has been. This morning I found out I got a raise over two weeks ago, so all this time I have been working for more money. That was a happy surprise! Then a bunch of postcards I sent out got returned to us, but they didn’t have any message on them like “insufficient postage” or “return to sender,” so I contacted the mailroom manager, who asked me to send a scan of the postcard front and back to him. This is what happened: it was a design flaw! Last year when the grad students designed this postcard (for a department Christmas party), they put the address of the party very high on the postcard, so when the automatic address machines at the post office looked for an address, starting from the bottom, the lowest one they found was the handwritten one on the back of the postcard, where we actually wanted it to go. This year the grad students designed the postcard with the address of the party in the lower part of the front of the card, as part of the design, but the automatic address machine didn’t know that was part of the design – it just found the lowest address on the postcard (it didn’t care which side it was on) and sent it to that address. So, in effect, we mailed a bunch of these postcards to ourselves because the party will be in our department. It’s too late to do anything about it now – the party is tonight – but had I known, I could have forewarned the grad students when they copied me on an email with the final design. Now I know for the future. And now you, my readers, also know about this hidden danger. The mailroom manager said we are not the only ones – one department got thousands of postcards mailed back to them for the same reason! If he sees this design flaw, he will contact us before mailing the postcards, but he was not in the mailroom the day ours got mailed. The biggest mystery is why only a fourth of these postcards came back. Will more trickle in? Did the grad student who handwrote the addresses write most of them lower on the postcard than the address in the design on the front? Or are they just lost in the mail?

Famous Hat

Soap Shop

Yesterday I talked about rocks, one of the things I bought on Saturday. Today I’ll talk about the soap at the soap shop. There are bars of soap from all over the world, like France and Australia, and bath bombs, which are more Tiffy’s thing than bars of soap. A couple of weeks ago I bought two bars of soap at the soap shop: one they made there that smells like lilies of the valley and has a flower design in it, and one from (I think?) Canada that smells like pine. I did not realize until I got home and unwrapped this bar of soap that, much to my delight, it has a tiny soap pine tree sticking out of the top of the bar. It is so cute! And surprisingly hardy – we have been using it for about a week, and the tree has not broken off, it is just a little bent over. Saturday I bought three more bars of the soap they make at the shop: one with little pine trees in it that smells like pine, one with snowflakes in it that has a refreshing smell, and one with an undersea scene that also smells a little tropical. I figure the pine tree one is seasonal for Christmas, the snowflake one is fit for anytime during the winter, and the undersea scene is perfect for when we are thoroughly sick of winter and dreaming of a warm beach!

Famous Hat

Rock Collection

Nowadays when we ladies collect “rocks,” we mean jewels, or at least overpriced crystals. I’m not sure I put any credence in different minerals having properties that they impart to the wearer – I just find them pretty. But collecting rocks is nothing new for me, since I had quite a collection as a kid. Some were very pretty, and some were cool because they had fossils in them (the little creek in our backyard was a hotbed of fossils of tiny sea creatures), but some were just so weird that I had to bring them home. One looked just like a hard-boiled egg that had been sliced in half the long way, and one was the size and shape of a doorknob with a strange indentation in it that looked just like a keyhole. How did those ever get created? I wish I knew where they were now, but they probably got dumped back out into the Great Outdoors from whence they first came, so you will just have to imagine them. Unless I actually come across them whenever Travalon and I get around to cleaning out our garage, in which case I will be able to post a photo of these really cool rocks.

Famous Hat

Christmas Concert Weekend

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Travalon and I had a plan: that we would go downtown for coffee, then he would go to the Badger basketball game at noon while I hung out with Tiffy all day. However, the day before that they changed the time of the basketball game to mid-afternoon, so he joined Tiffy and me for a leisurely lunch at a Chinese restaurant on State Street before he headed off to the game. Tiffy and I rode the Holiday Trolley, then we shopped at the soap store and the crystal store before having dinner at the Discovery Center and then going to a Baroque Christmas concert at First Congo. The concert was wonderful, and once it was over, we checked the score of the Badger football game and were stunned to see they were beating Ohio State. We went to Tiffy’s sister’s apartment building and found a bunch of people watching the game in the lounge, but by then Ohio State had pulled ahead, and they just kept pulling further ahead. Sigh… Will the Badgers ever beat them?

Yesterday I felt kind of under the weather all day, and that may be why I did not wake up until Mass was starting at our parish. Eventually Travalon and I got going and met Tiffy at Crema Café, then we went to a sports bar to watch the Packer game, but it was too crowded – we couldn’t find anywhere to sit. We went to Waypoint and watched part of the game there, then we took a walk around the area at halftime and headed to the hand bell choir Christmas concert. Travalon did not have any interest in this concert, so he went to the antique store, but Rich joined Tiffy and me. Then Travalon and I hurried to six pm Mass at the student parish downtown, and then we ran into Pete the Sailor Man at the Union, but the line for pizza was too long there. We got one at Bellitalia up near our house instead, and I had leftover pizza for lunch today. The weather has been so pleasant lately – I’m not ready for the frigid temperatures we will have for the next few days! If winter was always as mild as it was this weekend, I wouldn’t even complain about it.

Famous Hat