Seester!!

I was rewarded after the week from heck and gone by a visit from my sister. She drove the 4.5 hours from Anoka to get here on Friday, and left to go back to work on Saturday evening. Her visit was short in duration, but long on quality! We packed in a host of touristy jaunts on Saturday during the day, starting with the Henry Vilas Zoo. Well, actually, we started with Lazy Jane's, if I remember correctly, then went to the zoo. Yes, I like Lazy Jane's, and cannot go a week without it now.

At the zoo, we saw many animals, and most were not sad. The lion was pacing, though, and that's never good. The peacock fluffed his feathers for us, which was nice, and although the goats' feeding time was over, we (and by "we" I mean Traci) still got to pet them. Traci also experienced life as a zookeeper:


Yeah, she's gonna love me for posting that one.

After the zoo, we wandered up to the State Capitol and made it up to the observation deck just in time to grab five minutes of looking out onto greater Madison. It was windy and a little bit scary, but we took some decent photos. Even though I have hat hair and we both look a little demented and it's a little blurry because it's a cell phone pic I really love this photo of us waaaay at the top of the Capitol.


After our run to the highest point in town, we went down to State Street for some more walking and shopping and eating. I introduced her to my Himal Chuli loveliness, and tried to teach her some Hindi with which to order her food, but she wasn't down for that. She thought the food was deliciousness, though, and I'm almost sure she wasn't just saying that to make me happy. We stopped by Art Gecko, where she looked amazing in everything she put on, dammit!, and therefore had to purchase several items. (I made the mistake of trying on the same little dress that she did ... note to self: do not try on the same dress your younger sister tries on, especially if it calls attention to the bust-al region. You will not be happy when you come out of that dressing room and look in the mirror. Trust me. Be happy for your sister, but do not try to wear her clothing.) When we got to the end of State Street, it was time for my dear sister to take her leave. She had a long drive ahead of her and was on call in a matter of hours. But, oh! so nice to see her for a day.

As a postscript to the week:
My master's thesis was approved, everyone signed off on it, and I am officially over that hurdle on my way to the doctorate. I'm happy, it turned out well, and I look forward to continuing to hone my writing in the next few years. After I submitted and everything was accepted, I rewarded myself with this:


A banana mango strawberry blueberry smoothie from a cart outside the library. Sweet, like success.

The week from heck and gone

In the week between family visits, the intermediate Hindi class wrote, translated, shot, and edited a 30-minute video for our SASLI skit day. When we wrote the skit, we had no idea it was going to end up being thirty minutes long. I'm sure if we were more fluent readers/speakers, it would have been about twenty minutes, but most of us read like second-grade doofuses.

Our storyline was great, the script was fantastic, but our class is so unmotivated that it came down to the wire. Literally, I was putting the subtitles in and burning the DVD up until twenty minutes before the program started. And this was after a full week of 16-hour days dealing with the skit. Brutal.

Our skit was called "Three stories for Arjane" and involved a character named Kris Nah (Krishna ... and Arjuna -- get it?!?) telling morality tales to a very unmotivated young lady, Arjane, to get her to treat her friends right, trust the ones who love her, and follow her heart. I got to dress up in a sari and be an old Indian grandmother admonishing her granddaughter to stick up for herself and do what she loves in college, instead of just unhappily doing what's expected of her. YouTube links to come, but for now all I can give you is a photo:

Husband, in the flesh.

Two weekends back my dear husband hopped on a plane and came for a weekend visit. I can't even begin to describe how amazing it was to see him again. I know it had "only" been a month and a half, but since it feels like I'm existing in dog years this summer, that month and a half took a long time.

We didn't make much of a big to-do or do anything overly special for the weekend. We just spent time together. We went to Maxwell Street Days down on State Street. I introduced him to the lovely people at Himal Chuli. We experienced two interesting meals: dinner at Ocean Grill and brunch at the Orpheum Theatre Restaurant.

The Orpheum brunch was okay. Kind of expensive for a buffet with a line that moved at a snail's pace. I thought there would be carving stations and whatnot, but there weren't. I must say, I would have rather ended up at Lazy Jane's. More interesting food, lower prices.

For our fancy dinner out, I was hankering for a piece of fish at a place that understood and could accommodate my gluten/dairy issues. After doing some poking around on-line, I saw that Ocean Grill had a nice gluten free menu. And while the food wasn't stunning or over the top, it was nice. Scott and I both had a grilled piece of fish with the vegetable of the day, asparagus. The fish was cooked very well (in manner, not done-ness), and the vegetables were quite good. The surroundings, once the loud couple from freakin' Hoboken left, were comfortable and appropriate for a nice chill dinner. However, our waiter is what set the meal apart for us. He was attentive without being overbearing, and knowledgeable about the food and the wine. We got into a really great conversation about the characteristics of a few of the wines on the list, and he gave us a little tasting of a handful of the wines before we settled on a glass each. I got a Riesling that didn't bloom too well, or match so nicely (but the name was so showy, I couldn't resist. I guess the waiter should have waved me off, but I was adamant.) Scott ended up with I think a Chardonnay, but it was surprisingly smooth and interesting.

For dessert, we had a sorbet that was called something like "fruit punch," because it had a gazillion types of fruits in it. By this time, Scott and I were a little tipsy, so we had to make the geeky point that, technically, many of the fruits in the sorbet were not fruits at all. For instance, the strawberry is characterized as a "false fruit" according to that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia. Which, of course, we both pulled up on our respective smartphones. The waiter played along, and even re-named it the "false fruit punch" for the couple at the next table. Yes, I laughed so hard when he said that, that I snorted.

Yeah, we're geeks. But the sorbet was divine.

Time.

In the shortened, surreal, summer space of Madison, time seems to go both fast and slow. It happens in class, in the afternoons after class, and on the weekends. There's never enough time for all my homework, or for my fall semester class preps, and certainly not enough time to spend with my lovely visitors and my new friends here. And of course, I can't ever get time for the blog.

So now that I can catch a breath, a flurry of blog posts will commence. You have been warned.