Under the Baobab Tree

I arrived at the manufacturing facility where my meetings were being held. Across the street was a industrial brewery. Next door was a Midas muffler suppler (not customer service place, the supplier). There were piles of black snow in the parking lots of these one story industrial buildings. The driver said, "are you sure this is the place?" Oh yes! This looks just right!

I walked in to the corrugated tin temporary-looking "office" building and walked into the coffee room where I saw three men. One nice big burly manly man and two scrawny men. I said, "ah, you must be my men?" They said they were. The manly man was the general manager of the manufacturing facility, scrawny man A was another lawyer, scrawny man B was a scientist. I asked the manly man, "Why is a Middleton a separate town from Madison and which was here first?" He did not know. I started looking for half-and-half for my coffee and he directed me to the non-dairy creamer. "How can you be in Wisconsin and serve me non-dairy creamer?" He said that was a good point and he hadn't thought of that before. He smiled like Santa Claus the whole time. He kind of looked like Santa Claus too, if Santa Claus were still in his mid-40s. I liked him very much.

Santa Claus looked out the window and saw someone coming across the parking lot. "This must be the fourth person you're waiting for? I'm guessing because he's in a suit and carrying a skinny suitcase which isn't normal around here." It was indeed our Fourth Man, another lawyer. He quickly removed his tie.

I kept chattering on about Middleton and what I had learned about Madison yesterday. I described my "Thank you, but I'm having butter" refrigerator magnet. I talked about the Dairy Queen in her milk-colored dress. I said Wisconsin earth is very black. He said, "yes! Our earth is very black. In fact, the next town to the West is called Black Earth, Wisconsin!" I said the place was practically swimming in agricultural products. I said I had consumed "locally sourced mustard" the night before at dinner, which was very good. "Ah! Mustard! Do you like mustard?" Santa Claus asked? Apparently there is a Mustard Museum in Middleton. I am SO disappointed that I didn't know that before because I would have gone there in an instant. I feel cheated.

We took our non-dairy creamer and went upstairs where we locked ourselves in a conference room for the next 8 hours. People came in to talk to us about a number of things mainly having to do with some Western Blot results. Our scientists taught us all about Western Blots and then we looked at a bunch of digital photos of Western Blots and we learned that they are washed in milk and then some sort of horse radish concoction and then they are laminated and pasted into a book. We looked at all the books. We learned everything there was to know about how to perform and read a Western Blot test.

We interviewed four separate people all about the blots. As one of us lawyers began to fade the other would pick it up and keep asking about blots. We asked about failed blots, successful blots, good blots, bad blots, missing blots, super-charged blots, wasted blots, and destroyed blots. At one point when I was leading the questioning -- the topic was proper methods for destroying failed blots -- I said something like, "so, you get a bad blot back and you toss it, destructamundo, and then you redo the sample, or the vial, or whatever you call it, right?" I turned to our scientists and said, to the side with a slight wave of my hand, "am I using the right terminology here?" meaning sample versus vial, of course. He looked at me and said, "destructamundo? sure."

We had lunch brought in and I ate four chocolate cookies the size of my head and one vegetarian sandwich (frowned upon in Wisconsin)

The room got hotter and hotter. Our "interviewees" got more and more technical. At this point we were talking about centrifuges and elutions and ELISA assays and prions. The room got hotter. Way hot. The receptionist came in and said my car was waiting to take me home. We finally stopped.

We walked across the hall to Santa Claus's office and said, "Okay, we're done." Done? he said? "Yes, we're all blotted out. Totally blotto." I guess he hears that all the time because he didn't laugh. He had an empty container of "mixed nuts" on his cabinet and I asked him if that was symbolic. He explained that people gave him empty "mixed nuts" containers all the time and while I was starting to giggle he said he kept bullets in them. Oh. Don't mess around with a manly Wisconsin man. He is a "competitive pistol shooter." I made some grammar jokes. "Are the pistols competitive? Or are YOU competitive?" Santa Claus told me he'd tell me all about it when I came back to visit the Middleton Mustard Museum. Our scientists laughed pretty hard at the competitive pistols and mixed nut containers.

I gave my a client a ride to the airport in my car and the whole way we talked to the driver about the Middleton Mustard Museum. Turns out he was from Osh Kosh. "Gosh! Osh Kosh!" I said. No response. ?! I asked him if Osh Kosh was on a lake. He said yes, Lake Winnebago. I asked him if Lake Winnebago was named after the RV or vice versa. He said neither, it was named after the Indian tribe. I asked him how big it was. He did not know. He said, 'that's pretty lame, I should know." I asked him if he could see across it. Yes. "So then it's less than 7 miles wide." "How do you know that?" he said. "The horizon is seven miles away so if it were wider you couldn't see across it." I have no idea if this is really true but I heard it somewhere once and amazingly every time I pull out this fact about how far away the horizon is, I turn out to be right. My driver looked on his GPS and said, "wow, you're right, it's 6.3 miles wide." How long is it? I asked. "Gosh! I don't know that either!" He said. So I continued -- is it more than 7 miles long? yes. Is it long like an eggplant or long like a baguette? "It's not that long, it has bumps. Like a pear," he said. A Bartlett pear or a Japanese pear? Silence. "Would you say it is more of a gourd shape?" Yes! It's a gourd shape. "You really know your lakes," he said.

So that settles that.

And as luck would have it, the Madison-Middleton-airport-Madison round trip means that I have now circumnavigated Lake Mendota. My work here is done.

P.S. My Dad reports that today is the anniversary of James Madison's birthday -- 1751.