On the Milwaukee lakefront. A couple hours of perfect bliss on a beautiful summer evening in Milwaukee. Here’s what I ate. (Photos courtesy of our cell phones, but a visual’s a visual.)
I shared this sandwich with my dad, but I got all the peppers. The picture is shitty, but you might be able to tell that the bun was really quite good.
Not a sincere smile in the group, but that’s just because the toasted ravioli was too good for us to want to be bothered for a photo break.
After that, I partook of my sister’s calzone (cheese and spinach), and then we had these parmesan potato chips:
I was very enthusiastic about the Amaretto Puffs:
That custardy cream sauce was quite tasty, but I wish the amaretto had been more apparent in these little lumps of fried dough.
For our second and final dessert (we didn’t have room for the rice balls, after all) we had these pretty sorbetti in frozen hollowed lemons and peaches.
To top it all off, we carried a bag of Koepsell’s away with us. My dad swears this is the best popcorn in the world, and he even sends me their jars of kernels and their coconut oil when I’m at school.
This is exactly the meaning of a festival. Feasting. (The words are pretty closely related, etymologically.) I love taking a day and stepping outside of all health-related dietary considerations, to celebrate. What was I celebrating to-day? Well, being Italian, of course, and being back in Milwaukee! It’s beautiful.
I’m not about to go into my deep personal angst about how I’m afraid I’m slowly becoming an easterner, which I’m pretty sure makes me a worse person. I just want to say that I don’t understand the gas stations out here.
I drove past two gas stations to-day, directly across the street from one another, and one was selling gas for 4.17, the other for 4.19. And there were at least as many people filling up at the 4.19 station! I just don’t understand this. In Wisconsin, if two gas stations are kitty-corner or across the street from each other, they will be selling the same priced gas, almost without exception. Because who wants to be the guy with the obviously more expensive gas? Apparently New York Mobile does!
Who are these people who pick the more expensive gas? Do they really have that kind of brand loyalty? Or just hate turning left across traffic? What is it?
Well, I mean, I know what it is. They’re just all a bunch of nutzos.
Here on the semi-deserted Union college campus, I am sitting in the air-conditioned library, wasting precious time (I have an eye appointment at 4, and badly need to get some work done to-day), I’m taking advantage of the quiet to collect some of my sources. It is a little exciting to me that I’ve come to a point where I have what I think is often referred to as an “instrumental language,” i.e. German, a language I know well enough that I can read scholarship written in it, and thereby increase my pool of secondary information.
Really must get to work.
In a move seemingly unprecedented in Skype history, my mother has selflessly converted her status message to a full-time information relay provider, the Gobo Update System (GUS). This is very exciting for those of us who can’t get enough of the goon, and are constantly disappointed when he doesn’t say hi back to us on the phone (now I’m just sounding bitter). Recent updates include “Gobo is 3 today!” and “Gobo is bored.”
How can you gain access to this fantastic and gripping data stream? Well, you have to make friends with my mom, and then Skype friends with my mom. It’s a small price to ask, really. (Especially since everyone who meets my mom not only becomes friends with her, but most of my friends quickly become better friends with her than with me. Oh, there goes the bitter again!)
I’ll leave you with a photo of the man himself.
I’m getting desperately annoyed with myself as a result of this recent set of posts–something that would probably be well-described in terms of a bad lecture series–so to-day I am going to share something very dear to my heart: dinosaur love.
But first, a word to the wise: The Exhibition Center at the Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut is Closed on Mondays. I’m just trying to save you from the same heartbreak Graham and I experienced. We wanted to go relive our heritage through the aid of dioramas and multimedia displays, but the plan was destined to failure. While it’s true that just being there made us feel closer to our ancestors, and also that we did glean some educational value from the trip, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed not to get to see the huge fossils. But that’s enough blather. I’ll let the pictures do the talking…
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- Graham the Brontosaurus taking things from the top
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- Graham the Brontosaurus prowling in the shrubbery.
Please see my small google album.
Don’t worry, there’s more to come, namely a video that will allow you to partake in our exhilarating educational experience.
To follow up (for courage to face lobsters):
(I love that “love” + “body” = dance)
So much love, so much love in life…
This video would be better if I weren’t such a shrieker.
Remind me why I signed up for the 10 am thursday tour? Did I not realize that thursday morning comes after wednesday night? Well, it didn’t start off well to-day when I pointed at my tour and called them “you people.” I am so retarded sometimes. Don’t tell.
The pointing thing has to go. I’ve got to work harder on that.
Unwilling to explain the loss of my wallet once again, I will quote from a mass-email I sent out to my former and future housemates:
Some of you might know that my wallet is red. Fewer of you know that my car is red. I also have my car at school this summer (and am going to for school next year, and senior year if it still works, too! rock on.) Well, I was certainly noticing the abundance of redness as I placed my wallet on my car while filling up with gas before I drove down to C’s for the fourth of July. I was thinking, “Gee, it blends right in; I could easily forget it there. I should be careful not to do that.” And then, after I’d gotten in the car after filling up, I got this feeling like I wanted to check the gas cap. I just really wanted to get out of my car real quick and make sure I had closed everything ok and all. But I didn’t, because I’m trying to be less obsessive compulsive. Or I was. But since about two hours later, when I realized I never got my wallet off of my car (by that time I was about 20 minutes from C’s), I decided I can be as obsessive compulsive as I damn well please! Forever. G D it! Anyway, despite the 2-hour lag, I don’t seem to have incurred any unauthorized charges, though I should check again to see if something else went through since right before I canceled my credit and debit card. Maybe whoever found my wallet was just douchey enough not to turn it in at the gas station, but then stopped at taking my cash, and left the cards alone. Not that I expected it to be turned in; it just would have been cool, you know?
And then yesterday, when I checked my phone after a meeting with my advisor, there was a message from a State Trooper, informing me that he found my wallet. On the Thruway. My goodness, does this happen often? So, I got very unclear directions (something about a teepee and a road name that, even once spelled, eluded me) and an ex-roommate took me to go pick the thing up. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen. Probably not true. But I didn’t want to touch it, afraid for my hands. I received it in a very efficient fashion from a mad with a face like a bucket of used coals, and we were off again. My Eta Sigma Phi membership card is all but ruined, as well as my Alumni Association card from my highschool (in future, I will always laminate these things), but it’s helpful to have my driver’s liscence back. Now I can get on a plane, get a blockbuster card, oh, do all kinds of things!
I couldn’t take a photo of the rain-and-sun-destroyed wallet. I threw it out; it was too painful (it had been a Christmas present). But here’s a photo of an upside-down bug stuck to an advertisement posted on the door of my building:
