Partial rainout

So the Willy Street Fair was partially rained out and definitely the reduced edition. Like only one stage instead of three and no parade. So I didn’t see nearly the number of people I was wishing for. After I asked Mark for us not to leave for our Yorkshire Dales walking trip until after the fair, because I missed it last year when we were at TIFF. I was scheduled to pour beer at 11:45 and it was still raining, and I was still sopping up the basement, and fortunately I saw that the fair was not opening until 1:00 so I didn’t leave until 12:30 when the rain had stopped enough for me to bike over. Sadly I’m afraid the beer sales at the fair didn’t raise as much as the organizations it supports were planning. At the beer tent I was working at, they hadn’t tapped out any of varieties on Saturday – when the rain started in the afternoon and there was lightning and thunder by early evening, and they had to cancel all the bands after 6:30 – and the licensed bartender we had onsite said that if we tapped anything out Sunday we’d just take the sign down, because there was no use in starting a new keg that we’d be charged for. Later on the weather I heard that we’d gotten just over 5 inches of rain over Saturday and Sunday. TIFF has posted its dates for 2025, September 4-14. Willy Street Fair hasn’t said yet, but if it’s late again, I should be able to do both. Fingers crossed.

Before all that, we went to Chicago for an overnight on Friday, saw a symphony and had dinner with John & Megan at their local wine bar. All good except when we finished and walked out we realized that we should’ve sat outside where it was quieter. That was the part of the week when it was cooling off pretty nicely at night but still 90° in the afternoons. And Chicago the same. Before it got so rainy on Saturday and cooled off. Riotfest got rained on, too.

And now it’s already Saturday of the following weekend, and what have I been doing? Mostly getting ready to go on our walking trip. Trying to cook up all the food in the house so there won’t be too much stuff sitting while we’re gone. Although I went out to pick up a few groceries yesterday and the main thing I meant to get was a quart of Organic Valley milk, the UHT stuff that keeps a long time, so it’d be in the fridge waiting for us when we get back. And I got everything else but forgot the milk. Jeez.

Wednesday was a Jasper day and we stroller-ed over to music class made Mark’s birthday pie and a little one for him to take home. Using the apple pie filling I made the week before.

I only have other people’s Jasper pics.

Monday I worked at the library and we had kimchi fried rice for dinner.

Tuesday was yoga and Westside shopping, kitty litter and kibble. And baking sourdough, though I didn’t take any pictures. I had my long-awaited physical in the afternoon and they’re not pleased with my blood pressure. When I get back from our England trip I’m supposed to do home monitoring again like I did in 2022. I’m worried/not-worried – I think maybe I just can’t give a good reading at the doctor’s office; when I look at my stats from 2022 I was hitting the target where they want me all the time, unlike at the doctor visit when it was about 10 points too high when I got there after biking and then when they took it at the end of the appointment after I’d been doing deep breathing and trying to relax it was 20 points higher still. Of course I left my phone at home, so I was worried about that, and I had nothing to read while they left me alone in the exam room. I was ransacking the cabinets and drawers and my choices were pamphlets on hemorrhoids or menopause. We had bbq chicken sandwiches with coleslaw for dinner.

Wednesday as aforementioned was Jasper and after he went home I took Mark out for birthday dinner at Lallande. Which was good but a bunch of things were not quite what we expected. Like Mark had the chicken and the sauce was quite runny. I had vegetable cassoulet which had a few large hunks of bread with pesto and some goat cheese on top, and the veggies underneath were almost a sauce – no chunks. Tasty but not quite what I expected. I thought it’d more of a vegetable stew with discernible pieces of vegetable, with cheese and pesto and breadcrumbs on top. They were really nice to us, though, and moved us to a quieter table where we could sit side by side on the banquette and people weren’t cutting behind Mark’s chair all the time.

Thursday was busier. I worked at the food pantry and the library. Treated myself to a latte and a slice of apple cake that I baked on Sunday for lunch, sitting on the Capitol grounds. In two spots because flies were biting my legs the first place I sat.

We ate sandwiches for dinner and then went to see the National. I would have liked to see some of both the opening acts, Lucius and the War on Drugs, but it didn’t work out that way. Mark wanted to leave later so he wouldn’t have to sit on the uncomfortable bleachers as long, and we might’ve seen some of Lucius even leaving when we did, but the parking lot we thought we could use, that belongs to MG&E, that they used to open up after hours as free community parking, is now all fenced off. I think because there’s a new city ramp and the city wants the parking revenue. But the city ramp was full when we got there, so we ended up circling the neighborhood looking for a spot and ended up a 15-minute walk away. We could hear the War on Drugs as we walked over, but then we got turned away because we had blankets. That was a trick. On the stadium’s main page where I looked they say blankets are OK, but there was a separate sub-page that you had to scroll way down to, and for this show, no blankets. So another half hour to walk back to the car, ditch the blankets, and come back. So in the end not much more than 2 hours of bleacher sitting, and our seats were actually surprisingly not terrible for seeing and hearing, and it was a good show.

Friday I had the 1-800 Got Junk people coming to take away junk from the basement. It was expensive, but worth it. They couldn’t fit everything into the truck on Friday so they came back Saturday. They were quick and they hauled out a bunch of stuff that would’ve been really hard for me and Mark to move. Like the springs and frame for the old Murphy bed that’s been in the basement ever since we moved in – the alcove in the sunroom where I have my desk, where I am sitting right now, is where the Murphy bed was originally. The Demco shelves, made here in Madison, that my mom bought for my dad’s bound journals in his study in Pittsburgh, that she moved here 25 years ago and have sat in the basement ever since. The Crate & Barrel dresser that I built for Al that had a good run, but the bottoms of the drawers were starting to sag. Another really crappy dresser that I picked out of the trash for kitchen stuff. And a remarkably heavy old yellow wooden filing cabinet from my parents where I stored elementary school papers of the kids. And dried up cans of paint. And old bits of lumber and windows.

It’s not clean yet, but it’s empty.

And oh yea, Friday evening we went to a reception for Willy St. Co-op’s 50th year because I’m a former – and possibly future – board member. It was fun, smaller than I thought it would be, and less food. But interesting to hear about co-op history. And my CSA farmers, Tipi Produce, Steve Pincus and Beth Kazmar, came – really nice to see them in town. Another Steve, who I mostly know through other friends, was the co-op’s first paid staff member, and he made some jokey awards. Steve Pincus got a golden carrot award because Tipi carrots are the best. Holly ___  can’t remember her last name, got a golden eggplant because she was a graphic designer for the co-op early on and developed their Eggie the eggplant logo. And Bob Willard from Ela Orchard got a golden apple in absentia but we stopped by his stand at the Farmers Market Saturday morning to congratulate him, and saw it there. 

There were souvenir cups with Eggie at 50, too, but unfortunately they’re a grey print on a silver steel cup, so pretty hard to see.