Zydeco Fiddler

Last weekend, I returned from Seattle, where I’d been working at the Northwest Folklife Festival. For the last eight years, I’ve worked as the festival’s Signage Coordinator (see posts from previous festivals here). The weather this year was pretty crappy — unseasonably cold and rainy, even for Seattle. But, I still managed to have a great time. Many of my coworkers have been at the festival for many years as well, so I was happy to get to hang out with many of them again. As always, most of my work takes place before and after the festival, and while the event is happening I have plenty of time to listen to music and take pictures. I’ve posted my best shots here; click on the photo above to see the whole gallery.

Tule Plants

We didn’t celebrate on Christmas Day itself, as Veronica wasn’t flying into Reno until that evening. Instead, my mom and I drove out to the Stillwater Wildlife Refuge east of Fallon, hoping to see some migrating Tundra Swans. We only saw one other person at the refuge, and that was only briefly. Most of the time, the only evidence of civilization we could see was the very road on which we were driving. Unfortunately, there weren’t any swans to see, either. The refuge comprises a network of lakes and wetlands, but on the day we were there they were all frozen over. So, no open water to attract migrating birds. We did see a few hawks, some Prairie Falcons, a couple of Great Blue Herons, and one Bald Eagle, but all from a distance. That evening, Veronica arrived following a relatively smooth trip.

Soaring Hawk at Washoe Lake

We had our Christmas on Boxing Day, emptying our overstuffed stockings, unwrapping presents, and eating my mom’s delicious crème brûlée French toast. Then, we headed up to Reno (stopping at Washoe Lake along the way) for some shopping and a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art. The Museum isn’t huge, but it always seems to have very interesting exhibits. The featured exhibition this time was a collection of more than 100 of Rembrandt’s prints. Although he’s known primarily for his paintings, the Dutchman was also a prolific printmaker. Since many of the works are small and have very fine details, the museum provided magnifying glasses to carry around the gallery with you. Not knowing much about printmaking, I appreciated that the curators provided good explanations of the processes, often showing multiple versions of the same print to show how changes in technique can alter the final product.

Us on the Marin Headlands

The next day, we headed over the mountains to the Bay Area to stay with our friends David and Francesca. We had a pretty relaxing visit — one day hanging out in Berkeley, and one in San Francisco. Among other things, we made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s, drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, shopped at the City Lights Bookstore (where many of the beat poets hung out, and one of the best bookstores I’ve ever been to), and visited the Legion of Honor Art Museum (more on that in another post). Our one scheduled event while we were in California was a great one — my mom took us to see Wicked. Veronica had seen it before, but the other two of us hadn’t. The pseudo-clockwork set was very cool, the show was funny, and the singers were amazing. The lead roles were being played by the standbys, but they were great; except for the program, I wouldn’t have known they weren’t the regulars.

I didn’t take all that many photos on the trip, but click the thumbnails above to see my smallish gallery. I’ll leave you with a picture of Veronica behind bars at Battery Spencer, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge:

Entering the Cave

Over labor day weekend, my dad drove up to Wisconsin for a visit. Among other things, we hit the farmers’ market, went for a bike ride, and attempted to tour the Capital Brewery (but, they were closed for a private event). But, one of the coolest things we did was a visit to the Cave of the Mounds in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The cave, which has no natural openings of significant size, was discovered in 1939 during a limestone quarrying operation. Quarrying was halted, the cave was quickly developed, and public tours began the following year. Though not a huge cave, the tour took about an hour. Highlights included a six-foot long cephalopod fossil in the cave’s ceiling and some interesting multicolored cave formations.

Purple Asters with Bugs

Cave of the Mounds also offers a couple of short above-ground trails, which we walked after emerging from the cavern. The trails offered myriad beautiful plant life, lots of insects and spiders, and not a few birds. I wasn’t able to get any decent bird pictures, but I did get a few good flower and bug photos. Veronica gets the buf-spotting prize for the day; she found a katydid blending in with leaves, a couple of sizable grasshoppers, and a bunch of daddy-long legs, all of which seemed quite content to stay put long enough to be photographed. Click here to see all of my above and below-ground photos from Cave of the Mounds.

Also, here are some of my previous wild caving pictures taken in Tennessee caves: Camp’s Gulf Cave, Indian Grave Point Cave, Cave of the Skulls, and Christmas Cave.

Team 701: Musicology Mayhem

Yesterday morning, Veronica, our friend Patrick, and I participated in the Devil’s Challenge Triathlon at Devil’s Lake State Park, about an hour northwest of Madison. We entered as a relay team — I swam (1/4 mile), Patrick biked (15 miles), and Veronica ran (3 miles). We decided earlier this summer that we wanted to attempt a relay triathlon, and had been more or less training since then. We took a trip to Devil’s Lake last weekend to scout out the course and to do a dry run. Still, having never done this sort of thing before, we weren’t quite sure what to expect on the actual day of the race. We left Madison at a quarter to 6 yesterday morning so that we’d have plenty of time to park, pickup our registration packet, and warm up before the 8 a.m. start. We got there with plenty of time to spare, and set about mentally and physically preparing ourselves.

A Later Swim Start

At the race, individual triathletes were organized into starting waves, largely by age and sex divisions. A funny thing about relay teams like ours, though: we were put in the very first wave, which is otherwise reserved for elite competitors. So, you have the fast, hardcore, experienced people grouped with people who aren’t up to doing the whole triathlon themselves. I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense; relayers are free to expend all their energy on each leg of the race, whereas individuals have to pace themselves.

Swimmers Exiting the Water

So, I lined up on the beach with the elite athletes and the other relay swimmers. Since we were the first ones to go, all the other athletes and many spectators were behind us, cheering and making noise. When the starter horn went off, we all ran out into the water towards the first buoy. Not having had the chance to observe any starts, I just followed the people in front of me. The lake was very shallow (I could have walked the whole swim course), so the decision of when to switch from running to swimming was an important one. There was a big crush getting around the first buoy, then the pack started to thin out somewhat. Through most of the swim, I had plenty of room to maneuver. After rounding the second buoy, I swam shorewards until the water became too shallow to get a good stroke. Once on shore, I had to run up a short flight of stairs and sprint a fair distance to where Patrick was waiting with his bike.

Patrick Rounding the Last Curve

I made pretty good time in the water, so much so that Patrick wasn’t quite ready when I arrived. While he threw on his helmet, I transferred the neoprene timing chip anklet from my leg to his and ducked out of the transition area to find Veronica and my towel. After drying off and changing, I grabbed my camera, and started shooting pictures of other competitors. When the first cyclist came roaring down the final hill into the park, I wished Veronica good luck and set off to catch Patrick. From the spot I picked, I couldn’t see very far up the last downhill curve. But, a couple of pro photographers were standing farther up the hill, and I used them as an early warning system; when they reached for their cameras, I knew a cyclist was approaching.

Veronica Running

After Patrick came tearing by, I went to try to catch Veronica at the start of her run. I didn’t get any good pics then, but I managed to catch her later at the finish. Once she’d run across the line, we all hung out for awhile waiting for the results to be posted. We ended up doing pretty well for our first time out: 9th out of 38 relay teams. We were 6th in our division (co-ed relays). I beat my target time (8:00) by more than a minute, Veronica beat her target by nearly three minutes, and Patrick came very close to his target (he would’ve beaten it if his front derailleur hadn’t malfunctioned mid-race, leaving him with only his big chain ring for climbing hills). Our final time was 1:26:43. You can see all the results here (they put us under Veronica’s name, rather than that of our team: Musicology Mayhem). All in all, it was a lot of fun, even if we did have to wake up at 5 a.m.

Click here to see all of my photos from the race. Soon, we should get a link to the pictures taken by the pro photographers. If there are any good ones, I’ll link to them as well.

Golden Gate Bridge

The week before last, I headed out west to visit my mom in Nevada. We spent one day at Lake Tahoe, swimming, sunning, and Shakespeareing. We saw Much Ado About Nothing, which was far better than last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next day, we drove to Napa (by way of Fry’s Electronics) to visit friends Mark and Dawn. We weren’t there long enough to actually tour any wineries, but we did take a scenic drive through the vineyards.

Most of our time, though, was spent in the Bay Area. We again stayed with friends David and Francesca (and their daughter Maria) in Oakland. Our intent was to have a relaxing visit, so we spent quite a bit of our time there just hanging out and doing some shopping in Berkeley. I made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s on Vine, and picked up a good supply of Molinari salame — one of my favorite foods in the world — at Genova Delicatessen. I also made a trip to Forrest’s for a bassoon pickup (more on that soon).

Sphinx Outside the de Young

My mom and I only went across the bay to San Francisco on one day, but we squeezed in quite a bit. We started off at the de Young Museum to see the traveling King Tut exhibit. We got there early, and managed to see much of it before the crowds arrived. The exhibit included many artifacts associated with Tutankhamun’s probable ancestors (his precise lineage is uncertain), as well as those from the tomb of the boy king himself. Unfortunately the most famous Tut artifact, his gold funeral mask, no longer travels outside Egypt. But there was certainly no shortage of other breathtakingly beautiful objects to see.

Golden Gate Park Band

We spent about an hour and a half working our way through the exhibit, then spent some time elsewhere in Golden Gate Park. We took a stroll through the Japanese tea garden, although since we’d just stopped at the de Young’s cafe, we didn’t actually have tea. Then, we walked over to the Temple of Music, where the Golden Gate Park Band was setting up for an afternoon concert. That afternoon’s concert consisted of all Broadway tunes, and we stuck around and listened for a little while.

Kiteboarder Under the Bridge

We’d brought a picnic lunch with us, and we drove out to the beach to eat it. It was overcast and hazy, but still nice to sit on the sand and enjoy the sea breeze during our meal. After lunch, we headed over to the Golden Gate Bridge. We parked at bridge level and walked down a steep path to the waterfront near Fort Point. The clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the bridge’s towers, which made for some dramatic photo opportunities. Many sailing craft of all sorts were out on the bay that day, taking advantage of the brisk wind. We spotted a group of kite boarders zooming across the water. A couple of the more daring ones were playing under the bridge and even beyond it in the open ocean.

As usual, click the photos above for larger versions, or check out the whole gallery here. The gallery contains a panorama of the city across the bay I stitched together from five or six separate pictures. The version in the gallery isn’t very big, though. Here’s a much larger version.

Tiger Through the Trees

Last Saturday morning, Veronica and I headed to Madison’s free Vilas Zoo. We met our friends Yi Hong and Steve there shortly after opening time, hoping to beat the crowds. Little did we know that the Green and Gold Training Camp was going on that morning, and hundreds of little Packers fans and their parents had descended on the zoo. Luckily, the crowd mostly stayed occupied with things other than looking at the animals.

Iguana

Although we’d been to the zoo a couple of times before, we’d missed out on a few animals and areas. This was the first time we saw the tiger in its enclosure; previously, there had just been signs up saying “Exhibit Closed.” We also ventured into the herpetarium, in which you can get pretty close to some of the snakes and reptiles (see left). A new Children’s Zoo with a playground and carousel opened a year or so ago, but we hadn’t realized that the area actually houses more animals — a red pandas, a pair of meerkats, some white cockatoos and a huge African porcupine.

Click the photos above for larger versions, or check out the whole gallery here.

Click each pic for a larger version

Chris and Veronica

Friday evening was Veronica’s performance at the guitar festival. She and Chris, the guitarist from UW, played first on the festival’s opening concert. I glanced through the program booklet, and I’m pretty sure that Veronica was the only non-guitarist performing all weekend. The two of them did an excellent job — they played two movements of Mauro Giuliani’s Grand Duo Concertant. I’m looking forward to hearing the whole piece on Chris’s recital in a couple of weeks.

Sue the T-Rex

On Saturday, we got up relatively early and checked out of the hotel. We were able to leave our bags there while we headed off to the Field Museum. Our main objective at the Field was to see their temporary Real Pirates exhibit. We arrived fairly early, so we were able to breeze right in to both the museum and the pirate exhibit. The exhibit follows the history of the Whydah, a slave ship turned pirate ship. So, it starts out detailing the ship’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade of the early 18th century, then picks up with the story of Sam Bellamy, the pirate captain who captured her in the Caribbean. The exhibit does a good job of explaining the various sorts of lives at sea — those of a slave, a pirate, and a sailor in the King’s navy. The exhibit is peppered with artifacts from the Whydah — cannon, pistols, pieces of eight, etc. The ship sank off Cape Cod in a storm in 1717 and was found by a team led by Barry Clifford in 1984. Partway through the exhibit, I was a little disappointed at the artifact to diorama ratio, but a whole section about the recovery of the ship and conservation of its artifacts set that straight.

We visited the Field a couple of years ago, so many of the exhibits were fresh in our minds. We did go through the dinosaur hall again, though (I’ve always been a dinophile). We also spent some time in a couple of small temporary exhibits, one featuring ancient jewelry from around the Middle East, and another of photographs of the massive Hindu Kumbha Mela pilgrimage. Sadly, we didn’t have the time or energy to see the other big temporary exhibit, The Aztec World.

A Colorful Wall Across the Street From Our Hotel

We made some great food choices throughout our visit, thanks in no small part to the Yelp.com iPhone application. Yelp lets you search for businesses near your current location and provides user-supplied ratings and reviews for them. Aside from the deep-dish pizza we had the first night, we had a delicious breakfast at the Bongo Room, great very fresh sushi at Oysy, and delectable Cuban sandwiches at Cafecito. We even found an impressively stocked independent liquor store where we were able to buy a bottle of Goats Do Roam red and a bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate, thus bypassing the allure of our hotel room mini-bar.

The only snag in our trip came at the end. When we attempted to purchase our return trip Metra tickets at Union Station, the agent informed us that on the weekend, trains don’t go as far as the station where we’d parked the car. Whoops. We got on the train anyway, figuring we’d find a cab to take us the rest of the way. But, we remembered that our friends Lesley (of Le Triangle d’Or) and Keith were in Elgin that weekend visiting Keith’s family. They agreed to pick us up and ferry us to the other station. Even better than that, they invited us to stay for a delicious dinner with Keith’s parents and sister. So, what appeared to be a snag turned out to be serendipitous!

As usual, click any of the photos above to see the whole gallery.

Museum of Science and Industry

Last week was our much-needed spring break. Veronica was slated to play at the Mid-America Guitar Ensemble Festival (at Roosevelt University) with a guitarist from UW, so we used that as an excuse to spend a few days in Chicago. We landed a great hotel deal via Hotwire.com and stayed at the Chicago Hilton, which overlooks Grant Park and is walking distance from the Art Institute of Chicago‎, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and lots of other cool stuff. The only downside of our ritzy downtown digs was that parking was $43 bucks a night. So, we parked in Elgin (at a rate of $1.50/night) and took the Metra commuter rail into town.

We rolled into town on Thursday afternoon, hoofed it from Union Station to our hotel, and settled in. For dinner, we hit Lou Malnati’s — a local pizza chain. I have to say that I’ve never been a fan of Chicago-style deep-dish, but this place changed my mind. Our main event for the evening was going to a taping of the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” We listen to the show religiously, and had been talking for awhile about seeing it live. We showed up about twenty minutes before the doors opened, and it was already packed. Luckily we’d already bought tickets, so we just joined the throng waiting to enter the auditorium.

The show itself was a blast! The panelists (for this show: Tom Bodett, Kyrie O’Connor, and Paul Provenza), host Peter Sagal, and scorekeeper Carl Kassel came onstage to a darkened room, flashing lights, and the Chicago Bulls’ entrance music. Carl even ran out, waving his arms and high-fiving the panel. The show itself took somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours to record. Quite a bit gets cut before the show airs, but it was all funny. Perhaps the funniest moment was something not written for laughs at all. The bulk of the show’s material was about the current economic crisis, with lots of talk about failing banks and shady deals made by said banks. At the end of one of the show’s segments, Peter started doing his little spiel about the show’s sponsors — one of which is LendingTree.com. When he got to the line “When banks compete, you win,” everyone erupted in laughter. He had to re-do that bit twice to get a laugh-free version.

U-505

We spent most of Friday at the Museum of Science and Industry, which occupies one of the only remaining buildings from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The museum has lots of cool stuff, and strikes a pretty good balance between activities and exhibits for kids and things for adults. I spent a lot of time marveling at how they got various things into the building: the entire Pioneer Zephyr streamlined train, a Boeing 727, and a German submarine U-505. I especially enjoyed the Transportation Gallery, the U-505, and the exhibit of Ships Through the Ages. The museum was packed with school groups, so we didn’t get to see everything we would have liked to. But, that means we should have plenty of things to see the next time we visit.

A Goose in a Tree!

After exiting the museum, we walked all the way around it to see the rest of the building and to look at it across the remnants of the lagoon from the World’s Fair. The building itself is quite cool, with lots of columns, statues, pre-distressed friezes, and domes. See the gallery for more exterior shots and close-ups of some of the architectural detail. As I was taking pictures across the lagoon, Veronica pointed up at a tree — there was a large goose sitting in it! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goose in a tree before, and one of its companions walking around on the ground seemed confused by it as well.

I’ll continue the story soon. Meanwhile, click any of the photos above to view the rest of the photos from our weekend.

Swimming Bear

A little over a month ago, Veronica participated in the Zoo Run, a charity 5K/10K run/walk benefiting Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo. I tagged along to provide moral support and to hang out at the zoo while she ran. We arrived at the zoo fairly early, so we had some time to walk around and look at the animals. Most of them were just waking up themselves, and weren’t very active. A notable exception to this was one of the polar bears. He (I’m making an assumption based on size) was passing time by swimming laps in a small pool within his enclosure. A small waterfall pours into the pool, and he seemed to like swimming under that on his back. Upon reaching the other end, he’d swim back underwater and repeat the process. Only once did we see him get out, and the only briefly. He shook off some water, walked around a bit, then did a belly slide back into the pool for some more laps. I’d like to think that the bear looked happy as he was gliding through the water, but I can’t imagine that such obsessive behavior is a sign of good mental health.

Standing Flamingos

I watched the beginning of the race, then went back to wander the zoo. By this time, the animals were becoming a little more active. I walked by the polar bears again, and the big one was still swimming. I also stopped by the giraffes, penguins, flamingos, and a few others. The lions were asleep in a secluded part of their enclosure, and none of the other big cats were on display. I didn’t have a whole lot of time, so I didn’t venture into the aviary, the reptile house, or any of the other enclosed exhibits.

Running Librarian

I thought that I’d timed my meanderings so that I’d arrive at the finish line a few minutes before Veronica (the race route formed a loop, so I had far less distance to travel than did she). But, she beat her goal time by so much that I missed her! I managed to snap a few pictures close to the start of the race, but unfortunately none at the end. After the race, we went home for some from-scratch blueberry pancakes, which she’d certainly earned (and which I certainly hadn’t). Click any of the pictures above to see the whole gallery.