My Birthday Weekend
At any rate, I had a good weekend celebrating my birthday. As I mentioned earlier, I was fortunate to get five days off. I've taken full advantage of them, and have used them to get to know this area better.
Fall is rapidly approaching here. The leaves are only starting to change, but the weather has dramatically become different. Yesterday, the highest temperature never broke 60 degrees, and today is looking to be even cooler. I've been told by a native Wisconsonian that there may be another period of warm days, the so-called "Indian Summer," but besides that period I can expect mostly cold weather, perhaps even snow by October. I was really hoping that there would be warm weather further into the fall. I'm hoping the expert advice is very wrong.
Anyhow, as fall has certainly arrived, there have been quite a few festivals in the area. We took advantage of a couple of them last weekend. Jess and I went with a couple of other travel nurses to the Cranberry Festival. Strange as it may sound, I actually thought it could be fun. I envisioned tours through cranberry bogs, lots of cranberry related foods, fall games, that sort of thing. After all, I believe that Wisconsin is actually the largest or second largest producer of cranberries. So the four of us made the hour and a half drive up to the little town of Warrens, WI, on a crisp and slightly overcast fall morning. Right away, I started getting a bad feeling about it. The festival itself was obvious, with crowds streaming towards streets lined with stalls. After the first fifteen minutes of browsing, it became suddenly obvious to me that this was no cranberry-related festival. There were few if any items at all that were related to the fruit. I realized that we'd come instead to an arts and crap, er, crafts market. It might have been very large, strewn down several streets and crowded with thousands of people, but it was still arts and crafts. And I have an intuitive dislike of arts and crafts.
Then we came upon the food section, where there were vendors of all sorts of crafty foods, like meat jerky, cheeses, sauces, dips, and so on. Hey, if I'm going to be at a craft fair, I might as well enjoy it, so I descended onto the samplers like a vulture to a pancake squirrel. The tables were all handily side by side, so I just continued down the line, sampling every food item set out. There is a fine balance to it, for the vendors are wary of folks who feed but don't buy, like myself. So I had to wear an expression of torn indecision, as though I was trying to decide just which jerky or cheese or sauce I would spend my money on. This actually allowed me to resample some items, as though to make a final comparison before dishing out my money. By the time we arrived in the nut tent, though, I couldn't keep up the ruse, and scarfed down nuts of all sorts like they were going out of style. This didn't go well, as the vendor started following me as I began a second round of the tent. I stood under her gaze, pondering at the contents of one of the bags of cracker mixes before I finally fled. By then I was stuffed. I didn't even need lunch.
As tedious as being a cranfester was, it was fun to be outside on a nice fall day, and to hang out with some other travelers. Later, after returning to Madison we went to a late show at a local comedy club downtown, the Comedy Club On State. There were four comedians, culminating with a comedian from Las Vegas. It was a hilarious show, and my face hurt by the time we left. I feel like we haven't taken full advantage of Madison's downtown, since we are a good twenty-five minutes of driving from there, so it was fun to go to the show, and then stay out until 2 am.
Sunday we went to another festival, the much more promising New Glarus Octoberfest. New Glarus is actually a charming little town south of Madison, home to the New Glarus Brewing Company, which has been one of our favorite breweries up this way. They pretty much hosted the festival, so obviously there was good Octoberfest beer to be had, as well as brats, polka music, and beer-cheese fondue, melted in a big vat right at the festival and served free over bread to everyone around. It was quite excellent. New Glarus itself is a very nice town. Apparently it was settled by Swiss immigrants and retains that style of buildings, but in an authentic way and not the nauseating reproduced fashion that you mostly see in the US. We plan on visiting the town this fall just to see it without the festival, in all of its fall colors.
Monday, I had the day to myself, which I spent fishing, a story I wrote about in a blog entry that day, no point recounting the lack of success I had. Yesterday, my birthday, Jess and I went out to Spring Green, a little town west of Madison. It was the town that Frank Lloyd Wright built his summer home in, the Taliesin House. She took me there to go on a guided tour, which turned out to be more interesting than one might think. I knew nothing about Frank Lloyd Wright, other than the fact that he is America's most celebrated architect and that he had a complicated personal life, which I gathered from hearing about the book Jess just read, Loving Frank. Apparently, at this same house, his mistress, her two kids, and four other people were axed and then burned, along with part of the house, by a crazed employee. That made the tour more intriguing to me. We didn't get to see the chalkmark outlines where the bodies were found, though, the tour was focused instead on the creative juices and architectural wonders that came Mr. Wright and that house, which was rebuilt and served as his retreat. As little as I knew about his work, the tour was interesting, and I took a lot of pictures of his house, which was pretty amazing.
Finally, last night, we went out for sushi with a couple of other travel nurses, then out for drinks in the bar conveniently walking distance from our apartments. There are pool tables, shuffleboards, air hockey tables, and several other games, all of which we played until we closed the place. Which is to say, it was a nice finish to my birthday weekend.
Until next time, be safe.
