Memorial Day Weekend continued

On the way into the Dells for the Memorial Day Parade and program, we saw the albino squirrel again. I had mentioned to Tom not long ago that I had not seen it for a while, but apparently it has survived winter and is doing fine. I understand that there is at least one albino squirrel on the campus at Texas A&M, Justin, so I am not making this up.

Yesterday we saw the fox again, but Tom thinks it is an adolescent male and not a vixen. Since he raised two adolescent boys and had others hanging around the house because he had two adolescent daughters, I will bow to his experienced judgment in this regard.

The small parade was fun, lots of flag-waving little kids with their grandparents and some parents watching from the sidewalks as the veterans, the fire departments, Brownies, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, kids on patriotically decorated bikes and the local school bands went by. One little girl ran out into the street to grab her fireman father marching by, winning a chorus of "aw-w-w-'s" from the crowd. Tom's cousin Jerry is a member of the Lake Delton Volunteer Fire Department, and he was there, too. Jerry has the farm down the road and hates to put on his dress uniform and march in the parade. We spoke with him a bit before it got started and managed to catch his eye by waving when he went by. In spite of himself, he grinned.

The memorial service was short this year and they didn't read the names of all those who had died the way they did last year. I missed that part. As we were leaving, we ran into one of the women who works with Tom (he would probably say she works against him) on the Stewards of the Dells of the Wisconsin River project. She is getting ready to go to China for a year to teach. She has taught for many years in Korea and had come back for a year to help take care of her aging father and stepmother. Now she is able to go east again, and she will head out sometime this summer. While she and Tom were talking, I noticed that the kids on bikes were having their design efforts judged by one of the veterans. He was handing out dollar bills, and as far as I could tell, everyone got a little something. A good thing or we might have had another major conflict erupting in our midst.

At yesterday's cookout I had my first (and probably last) brat of the year, along with ribs, potato salad, baked beans and rhubarb-and-strawberry pie. Today we are going lazy for the holiday itself. Tom picked up some German potato salad and combo bean salad (I guess that means it is more than three kinds of beans) at a local deli and plans to get KFC to round out the meal (and us).

Meanwhile, yesterday I finished editing what I had of Vinko's dissertation and emailed that to him. I wound up spending over five hours on forty pages, so this could be a time-consuming task before it is all over. I graded the latest paper from one of my students -- this one from New Zealand, I think -- in the Carmelite Studies program at the Washington Theological Union. I have also finished all of the introductions I am writing for the Carmelite's July conference and got that out to Mary. I think that will finish off what I am doing for that project. I have not written intros for a couple of people, but she did not send me any information so maybe they are not on my to-do list.

More anon, if there is any anon worth sharing.