Company

Had a visit this weekend from Elijah and Liv, stopping by in Madison on their way from Oregon to Iowa. It’s the end of their spring break, and it was briefly almost spring-like here. We took advantage of it by cooking outside.

Yes, that’s John along for the ride. Here’s Crystal putting one of our precious creations on the grill.

Taking advantage of the nice(-ish) weather seems to have been a good idea. Today: rain, thunderstorms, floods.

A life of leisure.

We took a long weekend for spring break this year, because Crystal doesn’t have much vacation time, and went to New York. Upstate New York, I hasten to add – we flew into Elmira (it is too a real airport), late Friday night.

Liz picked us up, and we spent the first night in her new place. She has a new little tiny baby kitty to go with her new place:

This is Rebel, or Reba, or Reb, or Gah!-Somebody’s-Eating-My-Foot. She’s nothing but trouble. Especially if you’re sleeping on the floor.

Saturday morning we got really purposeful about leisure time. We borrowed a cabin from Crystal’s parents’ friends. It’s on the shore of Seneca Lake, it has running water, electricity, and a wood stove, and it’s really nice. We have a tradition of going camping with my family, and so we keep calling this camping, but it’s hard to defend. Beth and John and Kate and Liz and Crystal and I all headed over to Schuyler County on Saturday morning; Lynn and Mike joined us later on in the day.

We had good weather. This has been a tough winter in Wisconsin, and so 45 and cloudy felt pretty nice to us. We even went down to the dock for a while. Rogue (Liz’s not-so-little tiny baby doggie) went swimming, but I couldn’t garner any enthusiasm for joining her.

Mostly, though, it was an indoor weekend. I personally was careful to accomplish nothing of consequence, which is why I was so enthusiastic about the jigsaw puzzle. And there was a game of Scrabble gone very wrong. And we cooked and ate and washed dishes.

We went back to Liz’s place on Monday, after re-winterizing the cabin. Flew home on Tuesday afternoon. Crystal squeezed 30 hours of work into Wednesday – Friday. I’ve been reading up for my thesis, and grading some exams. Spring BREAK!

There’s nothing more exciting

than hearing other people complain about the weather, so I haven’t been blogging about our truly spectacular winter here.  There’s a political angle on this that makes it worth noting, though: if the  mayor keeps doing things like this, we’ll keep electing him no matter how badly he screws up public transportation.

Women’s hockey: Minnesota State at Wisconsin

We went out to the Kohl Center tonight for the first round of the WCHA playoffs.  UW took a 1-0 lead halfway through the first period, and then looked terrible for the remainder of the period.  It took some excellent goaltending to keep Minnesota State from scoring.  They came out much stronger in the second, scored a couple of goals, and cruised to a 5-0 win.

We went to Cornell games for so many years when we lived in Ithaca, and they were such a bad hockey team.  I think we saw them win once, but we probably saw them get shut out half a dozen times.  It’s fun watching a good team, and Wisconsin’s a really good team.  Their passing is unbelievably crisp, and they break up plays so well – it’s hard to get the puck out of your own zone against them, let alone into their end.  And they put so much pressure on opposing goalies – they put 41 shots on goal tonight, against a pretty decent team.

The game was surprisingly physical throughout, like the referee had decided to retire the body-checking call for the playoffs (yes, in women’s college hockey, body-checking is a two-minute minor).  It turned a little nasty at the end, with a Minnesota State player taking a game misconduct for cross-checking a Badger across the throat after play had stopped.  I’ve never really seen anything like it in women’s hockey.

Nice win for the Badgers, though, and they eliminate Minnesota State.  They move on to the WCHA Final Face-Off next weekend in Duluth, which I won’t be attending.

Live music: Quintron and Miss Pussycat

Always something new, music-wise. We went out to the Rathskellar last night and saw Quintron and Miss Pussycat. Quintron plays the keyboards and the drum buddy, and sings. Miss Pussycat had laryngitis last night, so she was limited to maraca duty. Their keyboard sound is absolutely massive. The drum buddy is kind of hard to explain – maybe you should just watch the video. It’s got a pretty huge sound too, in person – the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. Quintron sings kind of long swamp-rock songs, some of which contain freak-out sections. He did a lot of voice-box work last night, with the help of the drum buddy.

He reminds me a little bit of a northern Nick Cave. For one thing, they have a similar vocal delivery. But I also have the suspicion that if you took their songs apart into their individual components and laid them out and examined them, what you’d have would be a little trite, or maybe not that interesting, but you’ll never get a chance to do that, because they’ve assembled those components into a crowbar which they are using to beat you. Nicely.

After Quintron’s performance, Miss Pussycat put on a puppet show. I couldn’t see it very well, because I was sitting on the Rathskellar’s putrid floor behind Quintron’s keyboards, but I think it ended with Santa Claus coming to the rescue with a machine gun. I was not that into it.

The Black Lips played next, but we skipped them. The Rathskellar was packed and obnoxious, and last week was kind of a long one. Still, Quintron: unique, awesome, worth seeing.