Ted and I have greatly enjoyed the friendship that has developed over the past seven months with our friends, Mike and Mary Jane, and the feeling is mutual. It was bittersweet to share our last get-together in early May during the final days of their mission in St. Louis as they prepared to return to their home in Utah. As always, we had a great time together.

For our farewell evening, Ted and I invited Mike and Mary Jane to dinner at our house. On a previous visit, the four of us had talked about the wonderful things you can make with rhubarb: sauce, pie, jam, etc. I asked if they’d ever had rhubarb kuchen, and they said, “No, what is it?” I know a lot of people who don’t like rhubarb (or have never eaten it), but the four of us all admitted to growing up with and liking rhubarb. Early May is rhubarb season so, as long as I was freezing rhubarb, I set some aside to make a rhubarb kuchen for our final group dessert.

Mike’s reaction was totally unexpected. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes light up like Mike’s did when he saw the kuchen. “Is that rhubarb?!” he asked, in a tone of disbelief. It was extremely flattering to the person who baked it for Mike. (Ahem. Me.) Mike ate two pieces and smiled through every bite. Mary Jane asked for the recipe so she could make it in the future.

Our evening together stretched out a little longer than usual because none of us wanted to say good-bye. When it was finally time for Mike and Mary Jane to leave, there were hugs and then repeated hugs. We’ll keep in touch and we hope to see each other again in the future, but it won’t be regularly like it’s been over the past seven months. Bittersweet is real: wonderfully happy friendships with emotionally difficult partings.

P.S. My rhubarb kuchen recipe is from my grandmother. Our son, Thom, liked it so much, he always ordered it for his birthday cake. Luckily for him, his birthday falls in rhubarb season.

Fall 2024 was so warm that our daffodils sprouted in November. They grew to almost 4 inches tall before it became cold enough to discourage them from getting taller. At the time, I assumed they were a lost cause for spring blooms. “If the bulb has sprouted and then the weather becomes too cold for it to keep growing,” I reasoned, “it probably won’t re-sprout in the spring.” I resigned myself to missing our cheerful row of daffodils in Spring 2025. Happily, I was wrong. When the weather warmed up, the daffodil leaves started growing where they left off in November and produced full-sized plants with full-sized blooms. Conclusion: Daffodils are extremely hardy!

While we always look forward to the daffodil blooms, Ted and I are tired of deadheading and pruning the many roses a 2010 landscaper planted around our property. Last fall and this spring, Ted dug out all but four of those rose bushes, ran them through his wood chipper, and replaced most of them with annuals. The remaining roseless area was a large. empty bed at the garage corner of the house. We had curbing and landscape rock put into that bed several years ago, and we didn’t want to remove it, so we needed to replace those prickly roses with something big to fill that space. We chose a lilac bush. It won’t need nearly as much care as roses did, and the blooms smell wonderful when we walk near them. You can see in the photo that it has lots of room to grow before it will need pruning.

The redbud tree we planted a few years ago started dying late last summer and gave up the fight over the winter. The nursery folks were greatly surprised to hear that a redbud tree didn’t survive, since redbud trees are indigenous to Missouri. We like seeing the redbud blooms in the spring, so we decided to try another one. We had a few blooms from it this spring and we look forward to lots more in the coming years. The new redbud is the little one behind the landscaper on the right. It has some growing to do to catch up with its dead predecessor.

As I was talking my daily walk on May 5, I saw this pretty cloud. Someplace east of us, thunderstorms were forming.

On May 15, I was driving to the mall to do some shopping and saw this huge cloud. I stopped to take a picture of it and to call Ted, telling him it would be worth his time to go to the top of the hill behind our house (less than a half-mile away) to give his meteorological heart a thrill.

From near our house, the above cloud looked pretty amazing but when I got to the mall, which is on high ground with a big parking lot and no trees to block the view, I was awestruck. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! This cloud extended 180 degrees from north to south on the eastern horizon. I have never seen a cloud that covered half of the horizon! Obviously, a line of thunderstorms was developing–probably in Illinois.

About an hour later, when I finished shopping, the sun was setting and it cast a rosy glow on the same cloud formation. The cloud still covered 180 degrees of the horizon and the thunderstorms were still developing. When I got home, Ted and I checked the radar and saw a solid line of severe thunderstorms stretching from just southeast of St. Louis to Chicago. Wow!

The next day, May 16, I needed to do some shopping at the Galleria in the Central West End area of St. Louis. There were some weather watches posted, but the storms were not expected to reach our area for another two hours–more than enough time for me make the trip and to be home before the storms hit. When I finished shopping, I checked the radar again to see if I should run some errands in our home area or if I should go straight home. It looked iffy, so I decided to make the call when I was closer to home.

The skies were gray when I left the Galleria, indicating an impending storm, but the weather didn’t look dangerous. As I drove farther west, the sky became very dark for a while but then became lighter when my route turned to the north. About halfway home, the rain hit. It was pretty heavy, so my wipers were working rapidly. I made the call to go straight home and to finish my errands after the storm. When I was about two miles from home, the wind hit, blowing sheets of rain across the roads. About a half mile from home, the hail started falling. It was pretty small hail–about 1/4-1/2 inch in size–but I didn’t want hail damage on my new car. With no other cars in sight, I admit that I exceeded the speed limit for the half mile from that point to our garage, where I could put my car under a roof, safe from the hail. It was a good call to skip my home-area errands!

Here’s how the hail looked in our pool. It fell hard enough that some pieces of hail bounced when they hit the surface of the water, then fell back down into the water. It looked like white jumping beans. Our largest hail was 1.5 inches, in flat pieces. Hail covered our lawn, but not completely.

After the storm, I went to Target (I had a lot of errands to do that day) and I overheard a lady and her husband telling a salesperson that they lived only a few miles south of Target and had an 18 to 24-inch accumulation of hail on the ground! The lady said she had gardening buckets outside that were filled and then covered with hail! Their 5- or 6-year-old daughter piped up and said, “It was really deep!” Their largest hail was baseball-sized.

When the hail stopped falling, the wind became apparent. Fortunately, we live in a valley between two hills–one behind our house and one across the street from the front of our house, so we tend to be sheltered from wind. Today, however, the wind blew the pool water surface as if it were a lake (without the whitecaps).

Meanwhile, east of us, a tornado struck very close to the Galleria Mall, where I had been shopping 30 minutes earlier. Looking at the radar when I got home, I saw that I basically drove around the tornado development area (where the skies became very dark) and, thankfully, didn’t need to take cover during my drive home. These are photos of the wedge tornado that struck St. Louis, taken by a camera in the Gateway Arch. The lower photo is darker because the tornado is closer and the air is filled with more debris. The red arc-shaped structure in the lower left corner of the photo is Busch Stadium.

A wedge tornado has a width equal to its height. This one was an EF3 tornado a mile wide, moving at 55 mph, with winds of 152 mph. It traveled 8 miles through the Central West End of the St. Louis area, destroying a 20-block area and damaging roughly 5,000 buildings. It struck along the north side of Forest Park and caused extensive damage to the St. Louis Zoo, which is temporarily closed as a result. The tornado initially touched down in Clayton, then tracked 23 miles to the northeast into Illinois. Sadly, there were 5 fatalities in St. Louis due to the tornado.

An EF4 tornado struck Lambert Airport in April 2011, and the damage in that area was visible for years. This tornado struck a more commercial and more densely populated area, so I suspect the recovery will, again, be a lengthy process. A few weeks ago, Jeff wrote a mission letter suggesting that we all look for the small miracles that occur in our lives each day. Today, my pretty big miracle was leaving the Galleria Mall when I did and arriving safely at home.

Tonight, Ted and I went out for dinner. The restaurant parking lot had only a few empty parking spaces, so I picked one and pulled in between two pickup trucks. My Hot Mama car looked more like Baby Car.

I buy all of my spices from the Spice Shop where they are fresh and less than half the price of the grocery store offerings. The Spice Shop buys the fresh spices in bulk and puts them in clear plastic containers for sale to customers. When I switched from grocery store spices to Spice Shop spices, I saved my empty grocery store spice bottles and filled them with Spice Shop spices.

We updated our kitchen in 2023 and I ordered a built-in spice rack in the cabinet door over the countertop where I cook and bake. With my spice jars obviously displayed whenever I opened the cabinet door, I wanted some uniformity, so I bought new jars.

Those jars were a disappointment. They were plastic, and my labels didn’t stick very well. They also warped for no apparent reason and became oddly shaped, with large dents on the sides. I searched all over for the kind of jars I wanted (clear glass, square, spice-size, removable shaker caps under the lids) in the quantity I needed (25-30 jars) online and ordered them.

After washing the jars, I started transferring my spices to my new jars. That little blue funnel came with the jars. The containers of spices on the right are from the Spice Shop.

Now I have what I wanted when the spice rack was installed in 2023: an attractive and uniform array of spices.

One day in early March, Ted decided spring was coming, and he thought it was a good time for him to clean the solar lights that we put around the pool. It was a raw, cold, rainy day (see his puffy winter jacket and the wet driveway beneath his car). He backed his car into the driveway so that he could work in the relative comfort of the garage. If it had been up to me, I’d have waited for a warm, sunny day, but he’s a hard, dedicated worker, and he got the job done. That’s my man.

For my 60th birthday, Kyra made a special picture of her and me and she attached 60 Hershey’s Kisses around the edges to form a frame. I’m the one with the short hair. 😉 Note that, in the picture, she and I are holding hands, indicated by the single extended arm. ♥

Ever since Kyra gave me the picture, I’ve kept it on display on the top of the “grandchildren toy cabinet.” Kyra was surprised to learn that I still have the picture. I shared the candy kisses instead of saving them for posterity, but I treasure the picture.

When our two sons were little, they loved playing with Lego. In fact, Thom still does. Among other things, he builds Lego flowers and mini-figures and he and I still exchange a Christmas Lego set every year.

Lego has changed over the years. When our sons were little, Lego came in a variety of individual pieces–red, white, black, blue and yellow bricks in a variety of sizes. Now, it’s hard (impossible?) to find simple Lego pieces like that unless you order them online (order the exact number of pieces you want of each type/color) or have a nearby Lego store that sells pieces in bulk. Everything else is a set of Lego that builds an individual item or a small community of related items. Following directions has become more important than imagination.

We still had a box of Lego pieces in our basement. It’s bits and pieces of lots of things, but there are quite a few pieces. Ted and I have kept the Lego because our grandchildren always liked playing with it. One year, we bought a Lego box to store the pieces. When Jeff mentioned that our great-grandson, Ollie, loves Lego and that he (Jeff) was trying to think of some kind of Lego Ollie would like, Ted and I told him we could send our entire box of Lego to Ollie as our gift for his fourth birthday–after all, some of that Lego was originally Jeff’s (Ollie’s grandpa), making it what would now be called “heritage” Lego for Ollie.

That turned out to be a great idea. A four-year-old can swish piles of Lego pieces around with his hands, pick out what he likes, and stick some pieces together.

After Ollie’s birthday, Alex (his dad) texted the photo below to me. He said Ollie thanks us for the Lego and wants us to see the boat-plane he built. Lego. The perfect gift, filled with imagination.

Author’s note: Lego will probably never die. It’s plastic, so it won’t decompose and, even if you step on it, there’s more pain inflicted on your foot than on the Lego piece.

Tornado watches and warnings are normal in our area in the spring. Most of the time, we don’t get anything worse than a thunderstorm, possibly with some minor hail and/or strong wind. One time, we had tennis ball-sized hail, and one time an F1 tornado blew some shingles off several roofs less than three miles from our house. Every two or three years, the threat might be dangerous enough that Ted and I go to the basement to be close to our shelter and to watch the basement TV in order to stay aware of where the storms are.

So far, we’ve never gone into our shelter because of a storm, but we came very close to doing that on March 14 this year. On that evening, an unusually powerful storm system passed through our area with devastating severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, destructive winds, dust storms, and wildfires, causing 25 tornado-related deaths.

Prior to the storm, we moved our lawn furniture against the house to keep it from blowing around in the wind, and we weighted our hot tub cover with firewood because the wind was trying to lift it off the hot tub. An EF2 tornado moving southwest to northeast entered the Greater St. Louis area and crossed a runway at Lambert Airport, but we are were lucky. We are roughly 15 miles west of the airport and only had severe thunderstorms, nickel-sized hail, and high winds (60 mph gusts). Our only damage was a few 1.5-inch-thick tree branches that were blown off our trees and fell into our yard.

Our record stands: We’ve never actually huddled in our tornado shelter, but it’s always ready for us. Our go-to place for a tornado is the basement closet beneath the stairwell. The stairwell is in the center of the house (no nearby windows) and the basement walls are underground, so it’s our safest place. We keep that closet empty of storage items, except for our survival things. Survival items include some old quilts that we can put on the hard, cold, concrete floor, or cover ourselves with, or take to the community shelter if our house blows away.

Author’s note: My mom made this patchwork quilt for me when I was in college. I remember many of those fabric pieces from clothes she sewed for herself and for me. The orange/pink blanket she used for batting (look at the worn front edge of the quilt) was a wedding gift to her and my dad. The quilt is worn out from use, but I’ll never throw it away. Maybe it will even save my life someday if a tornado strikes our house.

Ted and I have a printed list on the bulletin board in the kitchen that tells us what to gather if a tornado is possible. The list includes things like our electronics and chargers, our glasses, cash, car keys, medications, my good jewelry, Ted’s hearing aid batteries, our bike helmets, etc. Everything else is already in the shelter.

The tote bag under the bottom closet shelf has clothing for both of us: a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, underwear, socks, and jackets. These are all clothes we don’t wear any more, but we might have to take shelter in our pajamas, and we’ll need something to wear when we start cleaning up the mess. We also store our hiking shoes in this closet because we’ll have to walk over a lot of broken stuff after the tornado passes. In addition, we have a weather radio, several battery-operated flashlights and lanterns (we check the batteries every spring), water bottles, and a first-aid kit. Our bike helmets will protect our heads, but we have old pillows in the shelter to cover the helmets and to (hopefully) break the impact of anything that falls on our heads.

Since we moved to the Midwest 47 years ago, we’ve never needed to make use of our shelter, and I’ll be happy if we never do, but we’re ready. Climate change is increasing the severity of storms around the world. This year, we came uncomfortably close to putting on our bike helmets and crouching in the shelter with the door closed.

Over the weekend, Kathy came from Kirksville, and Kari’s family members–including Sky, who was in town for a few days–came from nearby to spend some time with Kyra and Hannah. The “Secret Hitler” game produced so much raucous play for most of the afternoon that it seemed like a shame to break it up for dinner.

Theo brought along one of his sketch books and we all had a chance to ooh and aah at his many drawings and witticisms. I requested that the artist gift his grandmother with a drawing. I didn’t give him any specifics beyond that, but he seemed agreeable, so I’m looking forward to seeing what he draws for me.

Kathy’s birthday is coming up, making this weekend a good time to celebrate with her and to save the shipping costs for her gifts. Her favorite birthday cake is funfetti angel food with a Dream Whip / instant pudding frosting. It’s an easy dessert, so I made a birthday cake for her.

Everyone who wasn’t scheduled to work (we missed you, Dean and Dylan) joined us for a birthday dinner for Kathy, and we all had a piece of cake for dessert.

Kathy thought this piece was a good size for her. The story behind that is years old, but it always makes Kathy and me laugh at the memory. Another time, in the long ago, Kathy was here for her birthday, and I made this cake for her. A few pieces were eaten, but most of the cake remained. We were both hungry for a snack, so we decided to have a piece of cake.

That piece was so good, we decided to have another piece. That piece was just as good, so we kept going–one piece at a time for each of us–until the entire cake was gone. We ate nearly a whole cake for an afternoon snack–and we enjoyed every bite! In our defense, it’s an angel food cake, and everyone knows you can squish an angel food cake into a tiny little ball, so we didn’t really eat as much as it sounds like. At least, that’s what Kathy and I choose to believe. We’ve never done that again, but the memory it is still one of our favorite shared times.

After Kathy and Sky left to go back to their homes, we had one more day to spend with Kyra and Hannah before taking them to the airport for their flight back to Montana. The weather was nice, so we decided to go to Historic Downtown St. Charles for a walk through Kister and Frontier Parks along the Missouri River. After that, we walked through the downtown area with its boutique shops. Kari had the day off from work, so she joined us.

Spring is here and the redbud trees (background) and tulips are blooming.

Hannah asked Kyra to take a picture of her sitting in the park.

After that, I took a picture of the two girls sitting together, showing off their long hair. Kyra said her hair has been growing for eleven years! The FedEx truck kind of spoils the mood of the picture, but, in spite of that, the girls look like good friends–which they are.

After our time in the park and downtown, the girls needed to pack up their things, so we went home. When they were ready to travel, we had dinner at Dewey’s–Ted’s and my favorite pizza restaurant–on our way to the airport.

We had so much fun with Kyra and Hannah that we hated to see them leave. It was hard to say good-bye at the airport, but it makes us want to be together again soon for more good times.

Unfortunately, the adage “April showers bring May flowers” was true this week. The weather forecast for Kyra and Hannah’s visit to our area includes rain every day until they leave, when the weather will become warm and sunny. We lucked out with the rain today–most of the time. There was a pause in the light showers while we walked from the parking garage to the Gateway Arch grounds, so we had time to take a picture of Kyra and Hannah posing with the Arch in the background.

Then we took a group selfie, also with the Arch in the background.

We had extra time before our Tram Ride to the Top ticket reservations, so we walked past the Arch entrance to the Mississippi riverfront. Hannah’s interest in fashion design inspired her to pose for Kyra to take some pictures. I like the bright red umbrella and Kyra’s purple jacket against the green and gloomy background.

The Arch grounds were in bloom. and looked very spring-like. The blooming trees, shrubs, and flowers would have looked even better in spring sunshine, but after winter, everything about spring is beautiful, rain or shine, right?

Here we are in our Arch tram car on our way to the top of the Arch–600+ feet above our starting point.

On a clear day, the view from the top extends for miles; today, we could see downtown St. Louis. The red curved structure in the left of the photo below is Busch Stadium, the home field for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.

The green-domed building in the center of the photo is the Old Court House. This was the site of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision which held that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not and could never become citizens of the United States. If they were not citizens, they could not sue in federal court. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories, effectively invalidating the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36o30′ parallel, except for Missouri–a decision that escalated political tensions leading to the Civil War.

All that green grass in the photo covers the Arch grounds. The 2018 update to the Arch included covering I-70 (the road running horizontally across the photo) and making it possible to easily walk from downtown St. Louis to the Arch. The light-colored semicircle around the fountain is the glass ceiling of the Arch entrance. The visitor center, museum, and tram access are all under the ground between the entrance and the Arch itself.

Two minutes after I took the photo above, the fog and the rain moved in.

Less than two minutes after that, the fog and the rain moved out again. Talk about quick weather changes!

There are countless varieties of Arch souvenirs in the gift shop. This Arch is made of, not Lego, but 1,930 pieces marketed as “Mini Building Blocks.” Note the smaller Arches sheltered by the large one (not included with the 1,930-piece building set).

Here’s a close-up of the Old Court House which is no longer used as a court house. It houses a museum with a large Dred Scott decision exhibit among other things, and also serves as the ticket and tourist information center for the Arch and the Tram Ride to the Top. (We bought reserved tickets online in advance.)

We lucked out again when we left the Arch and went back to the parking garage–it was still cloudy, but without even a drizzle of rain in the air! Our next stop was the Science Museum in Forest Park. Check the sign in the lower center of the photo below.

As we walked around the Science Center, we saw this chicken-and-egg riddle. The answer is at the bottom of this post, as calculated and agreed upon by eight of our family members the next afternoon.

When we left the Science Center, we had just enough time for a quick stop at the Art Museum in Forest Park. At that point, our dry weather luck ran out. The heavy rain competed with our umbrellas and jackets while we walked from the car to the museum entrance. I think all of us were wet almost to our ankles from the puddles and spattered by rain to our knees.

We had some time to dry out on our way to dinner–authentic Italian food at Mama’s on the Hill in South St. Louis. It’s too bad this selfie is a little blurry, but you can tell we were all happy with our delicious meal and another great day together.

Riddle answer: 36 eggs–assuming the hens work around the clock and that each hen lays 3 eggs in 3 days–1.5 eggs/1.5 days.

Ted and I were excited when Kyra told us she’d finally saved enough money to come to our home for a visit–something we’ve all been looking forward to for quite a while. The event became even better when we heard that her BFF, Hannah, was coming too. The girls met each other when they were two years old and have been friends ever since. Ted and I have seen Hannah with Kyra so many times over the years that we think of her as another granddaughter.

Given the girls’ arrival time in St. Louis, and given the quality of airline food, we knew the girls would be hungry when they arrived, so our first stop was at Blueberry Hill for lunch.

When Ted and I were at Blueberry Hill with the Bryans, we didn’t have time to look at all the displays in the restaurant. Today, we did.

Joe Edwards, the owner of Blueberry Hill, has his picture taken with every celebrity who visits or performs at his restaurant. The photos include four U. S. Presidents. The walls of the 10,000-square-foot building are covered with those photos and with Edwards’ collections. We saw photos of three Presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. On this wall, you can see Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Snap, Crackle, and Pop. It would have been fun to be there when the cereal trio showed up!

Edwards began collecting things when he was seven years old. He started with comic books, records (he has over 30,000 records in his collection and alternates them in the jukebox), and baseball cards. At 10, he started collecting toys, sheet music, and oak furniture. (Oak furniture?! At 10?!) At 12, he says, it was vintage lunch boxes; at 16, Wurlitzer juke boxes. Now he has collections of Star Wars, the Simpsons, Howdy Doody, Elvis, PacMan, Pez dispensers, etc., etc. and the largest collection of Chuck Berry artifacts and historic memorabilia on display in the world. The center boxes in this display are some of Edwards’ vintage Pez containers. (There were many, many more in other displays.)

These are some of Edwards’ Howdy Doody memorabilia.

There are two live performance venues within the restaurant. One is the Elvis room. Although every wall in the restaurant is covered with displays or photos, there may be fewer individual celebrity photos than you think. Throughout the restaurant, we saw duplicate photos of a number of people, and the left wall below has the same arrangement of photos as the wall in the photo above, with Obama, the Clintons, and Snap, Crackle, and Pop in the same positions with the same adjacent photos. Oops!

The Duck Room, named for Chuck Berry’s famous “duck walk,” is the other live performance venue at Blueberry Hill. Chuck Berry was the first pop music star to perform at Blueberry Hill, and he made 209 consecutive monthly appearances. Chuck’s home was in this area, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame which passes in front of Blueberry Hill. Check out the chimeras near the ceiling on the right in this photo.

Remember this old video game? At Blueberry Hill, it’s a wall decoration.

I couldn’t tell if this giraffe lamp was carved out of oak and therefore qualified as oak furniture for Edwards’ collection; if not, maybe it was part of a “giraffe lamps” collection.

Kyra and Hannah sat on planes (two flights) for over three hours, plus a two-hour layover, and then in our car and at lunch. When we finished eating and looking at the restaurant displays, we were all ready to take a walk around the Delmar Loop, where Blueberry Hill is located. As we walked, we saw some outdoor murals. If you look closely at this photo, you can see that the gray blocks on the sidewalk have St. Louis Walk of Fame stars on them.

I especially like the Maya Angelou quotes in this mural. The quotation with the yellow background on the left is from Angelou’s book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It says, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” The quotation on the right says, “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you are.”

Kyra and Hannah needed to wake up very early to be at the airport for their flight(s) to St. Louis. Then they had hours of travel followed by a lengthy lunch and a restaurant tour so, after our walk, we went home where they could unpack and chill out before we had dinner together. You can tell by the outdoor photos that it was a gloomy day, but not for us. For us, being together made it as much fun as a sunny day!

Today, after Jeff and La returned from church, the four of us had a lengthy and interesting discussion related to solving several national and world problems. Jeff has a unique idea for getting rid of daylight saving time (in which no daylight is actually saved) as well as standard time. Ask him about it.

When we felt the world was in order, we had lunch and headed for Salvation Mountain.

According to the handy brochure, Leonard Knight began creating Salvation Mountain in 1989 in Niland, CA, near Slab City. His building materials included adobe clay, straw, tree limbs, tires, windows, and lots of colorful paint. All of these items were found lying in the desert or at the local dump. Leonard’s plan was to paint the mountain twice a year, hoping the thick layer of paint would keep the site in good condition so that many people could see it for many years. (That explains the plethora of paint cans around the displays.) Perhaps not surprisingly, Leonard’s first mountain collapsed. As he began rebuilding it, he proclaimed, “No, God, You build it.” Today, we saw the result.

In 1994, Imperial County attempted to have the mountain torn down, but members of the art community all over the United States and around the world united to save the monument. In 2001, Salvation Mountain was designated a National Folk Art Site; in 2002, it was named a National Treasure in the Congressional Record; and, in 2007, it was featured in the film Into the Wild. Leonard believed people need to start loving God more. He often said, “Love is universal. Love God, love one another, and just keep it simple!”

Salvation Mountain is a colorful sight in its brown desert surroundings. Notice the waterfalls, the rivers, and the Sea of Galilee.

I don’t know how much mail God gets, but here’s a mailbox for it. The lumpy multi-colored blob on the right is the museum.

This is a close-up of the museum entrance. It’s closed because there is a danger that the top is going to cave in. The arrow in the photo points to one of many cracks in the dirt structure. If you look, you’ll see several more cracks. There are plans to repair the museum and to re-open it, but Salvation Mountain is dependent on donations and volunteers and cannot be repaired at this time. A public charity, Salvation Mountain, Inc., was established to continue maintenance on the site. No government aid is accepted.

You can “follow the yellow brick road” to the top of the mountain. Jeff and La went all the way to the top via this route.

I made it across the first river before the edge of the yellow brick road came too close to the edge of the mountain for my comfort. I wasn’t in a Jack and Jill tumbling mood, so I chickened out and backtracked. I don’t like to be at the edge of high places unless there’s a large, firm platform under my feet with a protective railing around me. Luckily, on the other side of the mountain, there was a more gently ascending dirt trail to the top. Ted accompanied me to the top via that less scary route.

The Salton Sea was visible from the top of the mountain. It’s the flat, narrow light blue streak running across the upper center of this picture. The Salton Sea is a shallow, land-locked, highly saline lake that lies on the San Andreas Fault. In the 20th century, it was a resort destination, but contamination from fertilizers and clouds of toxic dust, plus evaporation, caused die-offs of fish and birds in the 1980s.

There are a number of vehicles–cars, trucks, farm machinery, a boat, etc.–on the grounds. All of them (except the boat) have flattened tires and all of them are colorfully painted with scriptural messages.

This is a view of Slab City, a community adjacent to and north of Salvation Mountain. Slab City took its name from the concrete slabs that remained after the World War II Marine Corps Camp Dunlap training camp was torn down. The community is known for attracting people who want to live outside of the mainstream society (i.e., off the grid).

The trailers and campers behind Leonard’s “flower garden” in this picture might be a southern suburb of Slab City. Some of the volunteers who maintain Salvation Mountain live here.

On our way back to El Centro, we stopped in Calipatria, a “low-down” town. At 184 feet below sea level, it is the lowest incorporated town in the Western Hemisphere. (Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park is lower at -282 feet, but no one lives there.) The local joke in Calipatria is that its residents have to pray harder because they are closer to hell.

Calipatria’s claim to fame is its freestanding flagpole, at one time, the World’s Tallest Flagpole. At 184 feet tall, its flag flies at sea level. It can be seen from as far as three miles away and, as the sign says, it’s “Dedicated to good neighborliness”–a kind and friendly ideal.

Note: Calipatria’s flagpole is no longer the tallest flagpole in the world. Currently, the world’s tallest flagpole is 662.57-ft. tall and was built in Cairo in 2021. The 400-ft. tall Acuity Insurance Flagpole in Sheboygan, WI is now the tallest flagpole in North America. It is also one of the world’s tallest free-standing flagpoles.

Calipatria’s flagpole has an interesting backstory. The flagpole was built to honor Takeo Harry Momita and his wife, Shizuko Helen Momita. The Momitas were a Japanese-American couple who lived in Calipatria. They and their three children had been incarcerated at the Poston War Relocation Center in western Arizona during World War II under Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The order imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese descent–two-thirds of whom were American citizens.

When Mrs. Momita was killed in a car accident and Mr. Momita was hospitalized for injuries he sustained in the accident, Calipatria residents operated his pharmacy for him and collected $500 for Mrs. Momita’s funeral. Mr. Momita said his wife would not want an elaborate funeral. Instead, he offered to donate an additional $500 of his own savings toward something the city wanted but could not afford: a flagpole reaching up to sea level.

The story made national news and donations poured in. President Richard Nixon sent a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol, and Pacific Southwest Pipe Co. of Los Angeles offered to erect the flagpole at cost (about $10,000).

What a nice way to end our visit with Jeff and La. In the past five days, they took us to all the interesting places I’ve been writing about and they were outstanding tour guides. We had lots of good times together, good food wherever we ate, good family time, and loving hospitality. It was great to spend this time with them.

It was exciting to arrive in El Centro and to see where Jeff and La are living for a year. The temperatures in San Diego were in the upper 60s and low 70s, but in El Centro–located in the Colorado Desert (part of the Sonoran Desert) in the Imperial Valley, and 42 feet below sea level–the temperatures were in the 80s. I loved it! The Imperial Valley is very flat because it used to be an inland sea. I guess that explains why the area is now below sea level. 🙂

We spent the morning playing games. Jeff and La introduced Ted and me to “Cover Your A$$ets,” which was a fun game. We plan to buy it for ourselves after we get home. We went out for a late lunch at one of Jeff and La’s favorite local restaurants, Burgers & Beer. It was a hopping place, even after the usual lunch hour. Our server was very nice, and the food was delicious. Fortified by our burgers and fries, we headed for Pioneers’ Museum, about an hour’s drive away.

An important factor in the permanent settlement of the Imperial Valley was the building of one of the most impressive irrigation systems anywhere in the world. This made the area one of the most productive farming regions in California, with an annual crop production of over $1 billion. Pioneers’ Museum celebrates the many ethnic communities that settled in this area and made it the community it is today.

We arrived at the museum only an hour before closing, so the ticket master (the only person on duty) allowed Jeff and La to enter for half-price, which was the same as the senior discount for Ted and me. It’s an interesting museum. We each went our own way to look at the things that interested us in the one hour remaining before we had to leave.

This is a player piano. You can see the music scrolls above the pedals. Wouldn’t it be nice to have decorated pianos like these today? (I’m not sure, but the second picture might be a spinet harpsicord with horizontal strings.)

This car was part of a display about the people who came to the Imperial Valley during the Dust Bowl years. The yellow object on the right is a gas pump from the 1930s.

Here is a beautiful piece of tapestry. I think I’d enjoy making something like this, although I’d choose a different design.

Compare this to the cash registers we see in stores today. Which to choose: cash register beauty or computer speed?

There were two cabinets filled with hatpins. This is one group of them in one of the cabinets. Women in the late 1800s and early 1900s carried hatpins for protection against men who harassed them. (That might still work, judging by these hatpins.) Using hatpins as weapons led some cities to pass laws limiting the length of hatpins. You probably can’t get any of these past security at the airport today.

When I entered the second floor of the museum, this cabinet was directly ahead of me. My first thought was, “I’ll bet it’s a sewing machine cabinet.”

I carefully opened the top and there it was–the drop-down sewing machine hidden in the cabinet when it’s not in use.

The first sewing machine I bought had a drop-down cabinet. I had the cabinet retrofitted for my new sewing machine, but the new model is too large to fit the cabinet if it’s dropped. I store the sewing machine in a closet and set it into the cabinet when I use it.

This antique sewing machine is like the one my mother had when I was a young child. Mom started teaching me to sew when I was nine years old. (I made a sleeveless yellow blouse). She must have replaced her treadle machine before that because I only remember sewing on her electric Singer sewing machine (exactly like the one I bought as shown in the link above), never on her treadle machine. Note the photographer, trying to get the perfect shot.

Holtville, CA, in the Imperial Valley, is known as the “Carrot Capital of the World” because of its annual Carrot Festival and its large carrot harvests. The multi-day festival is held in late January or early February and includes a parade, a carnival, cook-offs (of carrot-based foods, I assume), and other activities. Also included in the festival is the crowning of the Carrot Queen, the Princess, and the Junior Princess, as well as the crowning of the Citizen of the Year. Here are an historic photo of a carrot harvest and photos of festival memorabilia.

As we were driving home from the museum, we passed an open semi trailer truck nearly overflowing with a load of carrots. Really.

Another display that interested me was the picture brides. Most of the picture brides were Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean. Their pictures were paired with husbands selected by a matchmaker, similar to the concept of mail-order brides. Picture brides were often poor and hoped that marriage would provide economic prosperity for them, allowing them to send money back home to their families. It was not unusual for picture brides to be educated at the high school or college level, and thus more emboldened to seek out new opportunities abroad. By 1920, over 10,000 picture brides had arrived in the United States, and over 15,000 arrived in the then-territory of Hawai’i.

This photo shows a picture bride with her husband.

You can read the story about another couple below. They exchanged pictures of themselves with each other (corner pictures), and when the match was deemed satisfactory, they were married by proxy. The woman said that, at first, she was disappointed when she met her husband because he was much older than he looked in his picture. They settled in the Imperial Valley and were married for 50 years until the man died in 1964.

Coming around a corner in the museum and seeing a Holstein cow caught me by surprise. Even more surprising (and kind of funny) was the accompanying tribute to “The Cow” (below).

Before we left the museum, Jeff found himself in the Holtville Jail. He managed to escape and drove us home, where we took a late afternoon walk around the neighborhood.

Our last sightseeing stop today was the Desert View Tower on our way to Jeff and La’s apartment in El Centro. Jeff and La notice the tower when they drive back and forth to San Diego, and they’ve been curious about it.

The 70-foot tall tower was built in the 1920s and was dedicated to the pioneers and to the highway and railroad builders who opened up this area. At first, it served as a roadside advertisement for a restaurant and bar located on the old road across from the tower. It currently houses a museum, has a hurricane (aka observation) deck on its upper level, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The museum is described online as a “collection of unique trinkets that you can purchase.” That’s exactly what we saw on the first floor. There were two older men sitting inside the tower on the first floor. They were very talkative as we walked around the circular room looking at the trinkets. None of the trinkets appealed to any of us and neither did the $6.50 per person admission fee to climb to the hurricane deck, so we walked around outside a little bit. There was, indeed, a desert view.

The cacti around the building were pretty in the late afternoon sunshine.

Are these desert wind chimes?

Here we are, ready to leave the historic Desert View Tower to go to Jeff and La’s house where we made individual mini pizzas for dinner. It was another day of fun together.

Jeff and La have tried several times to stop at La Jolla (pronounced “la hoya”) Beach to see the sea lions, but have been unsuccessful. The problem is parking. Only street parking is available within a reasonable walking distance, and lots of people want to see the sea lions. As a result, Jeff and La have never found a parking place and have gone home disappointed. Until today. Maybe Ted and I were good luck charms because we found a parking spot very close to the beach and here we are, happily spending time at La Jolla Beach with the sea lions.

That’s Jeff standing at the sidewalk railing. It’s pupping season for the sea lions, so humans are not allowed on the actual beach at this time.

That lumpy dark line along the shore is a gathering of sea lions. When you watch the video, look at the right one-fourth of those sea lions. You’ll see a mama sea lion waddling out of the water with her pup behind her, then heading back into the water to follow her pup who wanted to play some more before sunbathing.

These sea lions have picked a prime spot for sunbathing. During the time we were here, you could see that the tide was going out because the rock in the photo below emerged from the water. As the water level dropped, more sea lions headed for this rock, but these had the best (i.e., highest, driest) spots for lying in the sun.

All those black things on this piece of rock are barnacles. The arrow points to a tern. He was pecking at and eating the barnacles.

It was interesting to see so many sea lions and pups go in and out of the water and roll around on the rocks, so we stayed to watch them for quite a while. Then it was lunchtime. Jeff and La pulled out their cell phones to search for a nearby restaurant. It looks like I’m hoping and praying that they find somewhere to eat soon.

When I realized Ted was taking a picture of us, I looked up and smiled.

My prayers (?) were answered. We headed for one of Jeff’s favorite sandwich places and a new restaurant for Ted and me: outdoor dining at Cheba Hut. I told Jeff I prefer warm sandwiches, and he assured me that Cheba Hut toasts their sandwiches. It was the first time I’d ever had a warm PBJ. Yes, even the PB and J were warm! Good food for good times!

Before leaving our San Diego hotel this morning, Jeff posed with the restaurant’s giant waffle.

Our first sightseeing destination today was Annie’s Canyon Trail, which includes a loop through a slot canyon. The trail has a sign warning hikers that some of the trail is very steep. As we set off to explore the canyon, we hoped the steep part was the steps at the highest point of the trail. The photos below might look as if we’re deciding which way to go, but there was only one way through the canyon. We were just looking around and taking some pictures before moving forward again.

Ah, now we’re getting to the “slot” part of the slot canyon.

Unfortunately, my injured ankle is not yet completely healed. Walking on the uneven rock on an increasingly steep upward slope was making my weakened ankle hurt. I was having fun and wanted to see the rest of the canyon and the view from the top, but as the pain became worse and the trail became steeper, I decided I’d rather turn around than aggravate my ankle and miss out on the fun for the rest of the day and maybe even the next day because of continued ankle pain.

Turning around might be the smart thing to do for me and for those who discover that the slots are too claustrophobic for them, but it isn’t easy. As you can see in the photos, much of the trail is only one person wide and is essentially a “no passing” zone. That meant that, as I went down, other people needed to find a wide space, plaster themselves against the canyon walls, and wait for me wriggle past them on my way downward before they could continue upward. I was grateful that they were all very nice about it. I apologized for their inconvenience and got lots of “No problem” and “Don’t worry about it” responses, accompanied by smiles. Ted and Jeff both chose to go back down with me, although I was fine with the idea of going by myself while they enjoyed the rest of the hike. That left La to complete the loop trail by herself and then tell us about it later.

At the end of the loop, the trail continues along a marshy area. We saw this pretty flowering tree.

As we were admiring the view from the trail, we noticed an osprey sitting on a dead tree branch. One of the other people looking at the osprey noticed that he’d caught a fish. It’s the silver strip under his feet on the branch. A man in the crowd mentioned that where there’s one osprey, there are always two and, sure enough, his mate came back, circled, and cawed back and forth with him a bit before she flew away. I think she was telling him she could do without the crowd of people watching and would be back later after we’d all gone away.

The fish wriggled under the osprey’s feet for a few minutes. When it was still, the osprey enjoyed his lunch. It was kind of sad to watch the fish die and then be eaten, but that’s how all animals survive, right?

After a pretty hike with a survival-of-the-fittest ending, we headed for a happier experience with nature. Coming up: La Jolla Cove.

Our last tour stop of the day included a beautiful drive over the Coronado Bridge to Coronado Island, with a pretty offshore view of San Diego. Coronado Island is the home of the historic four-star Coronado Hotel, a rare surviving example of an American architectural genre: the wooden Victorian beach resort. It is the second-largest wooden structure in the United States. (FYI: The largest is Tillamook Air Museum in Tillamook, OR.) The Coronado Hotel was designated a California Historical Landmark in 1970 and a National Historic Landmark in 1977. The 1959 movie Some Like It Hot–starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon–was filmed here, highlighting the hotel.

In case you’re wondering, in summer, the lowest room rates begin at $500. In addition, there is a $50 resort fee, a $15 per day Historic Preservation Fund fee, and a $75 per day valet parking fee if you arrived in your private car. Rates drop as low as $350 for rooms in the off-season. Question: Which part of the year is the off-season in sunny, warm San Diego?

These colorful surfboards stood outside the hotel. I hope those hotel fees allow you to use a hotel surfboard without an additional charge.

There was a (sand-covered) sidewalk along (guess what?!) Coronado Beach, so we followed it for a short way and passed this lifeguard station.

It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was shining over the ocean.

I’m guessing that a motorcyclist had fun doing a wheelie here on the beach.

On our way back to the car, I noticed this beachcomber. I hope he found a little treasure to brighten his day.

We ended our day with dinner at Outback to celebrate Jeff’s and La’s February birthdays. Happy birthday to both of you. ♥♥

After our pizza lunch at Phillipo’s, Ted and I and our tour guides, Jeff and La, headed for Balboa Park. This park is one of the oldest sites in the United States dedicated to public recreational use. It housed the 1915-16 Panama-California Exposition and the 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition. What a beautiful place! The architecture is awesome, and the park setting is perfect for it. The park and its buildings were declared a National Historic Landmark and a National Historic Landmark District in 1977, and were placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

This building houses the San Diego Museum of Art, which features European, Asian, American, and Latin American art. It is best known for its collection of Spanish Old Master paintings.

Here’s a close-up of the sculptures over the main entrance to the art museum. The three central sculpted figures are Spanish Old Master painters Diego Velázquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Francisco de Zurbarán–perfect choices for this museum.

This building includes the Visitor’s Center and restaurants, as well as banquet and wedding venues.

We didn’t go into these buildings, but I admired the decorative sculpting on them.

The park includes this large, unique greenhouse with a variety of plants on display.

As we walked around the park grounds, we saw this Southwestern museum. It’s name translates to “Cultural Museum of the People.” With permission, I took pictures of some of the art on display.

I don’t know the purpose of this building, but it’s definitely “eye”-catching! (Insert groan here.)

I am not knowledgeable about art movements and/or styles, but I’m sure these concrete picnic tables and benches represent a specific artistic period. I thought they were interesting to look at, but are they comfortable? Notice that no one is sitting on any of the benches.

Finally, here are the four of us, enjoying Balboa Park on a warm, sunny February day in San Diego.

Our first sightseeing stop with Jeff and La today was the Cabrillo National Monument. I’ve never heard of Cabrillo, but I’ve learned that Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo led the first European expedition to explore what is now the west coast of the United States. His contemporaries considered his expedition a failure, but Cabrillo’s writings provided a glimpse of the west coast of North America from a newcomer’s perspective.

Later Spanish explorers used Cabrillo’s records to navigate the Pacific. They learned from Cabrillo’s expedition that a wide, slow current flows from north to south along the Pacific coast of North America. Although this current provides a quick way to reach North America from Asia, it is nearly impossible to travel north, as Cabrillo and his crew found out.

There was heavy ocean fog when we arrived at the monument site. We were on a bluff at the edge of a peninsula, but we couldn’t see the water.

Here we are at Cabrillo National Monument, . . .

. . . and here’s the larger-than-life statue of Cabrillo, including fog in the background. La, Jeff, and Ted are standing on the left of the statue.

The historic Old Point Loma Lighthouse is near the statue of Cabrillo. It was one of the first eight west coast lighthouses to be constructed by the U.S. government. At 422 feet above sea level, its light could be seen from both the ocean and the bay sides of the peninsula.

We drove down the bluff to the beach to see tide pools. It was still a little bit foggy when we arrived.

I love watching the ocean waves. Watch the white cap of the back wave move from left to right as it approaches the shoreline.

This isn’t a good beach for swimming, but it’s picturesque.

I took a geology course in college and learned about sandstone, so I knew the rocks at this beach were sandstone. These circular formations, however, fascinated me. Professor Google told me they are masses of mineral matter, usually cemented by iron oxide. They form in the sandstone layer and appear as rounded shapes when the surrounding rock erodes.

I thought these blocks of strata were interesting too.

The layered appearance of this sandstone is what I’m more familiar with. Jeff stands triumphant on the top of this bluff.

Jeff, La, and I are looking for sea life in the tide pools on this rock.

We found a wide variety of sea shells embedded in the rocks.

The arrow in this photo indicates a living, moving amoeba in a tide pool. I think the black objects to the right of the amoeba are barnacles.

These black circles look like shiny rocks, but look closer. They are pools of water. When you realize that, you’ll notice the upper edges of the holes the water is in; the reflections of those edges on the surface of the water; and–especially in the pool in the lower right–the smaller stones and sea life in the bottom of the hole beneath the water.

Here we are, having a good time at Cabrillo National Monument Beach.

After Cabrillo, it was time for lunch. We went to Phillipo’s for pizza and salads. Does this make you think a slice of pizza would be good right now?

We all enjoyed it.

Outside of Phillipo’s, there was a chair on the sidewalk large enough to hold three of us. It begged us to climb aboard for a photo op, so we did. We did not need to hold anyone liable (see the warning on the front of the step to the chair).

Wouldn’t you know it?! The day before Ted and I were scheduled to leave home to visit Jeff and La in warm and sunny San Diego, we had snow during the day and overnight. It was only 3 inches–nothing like the big January storm–but Ted cleared the first 2 inches from our driveway and sidewalks late in the afternoon, and the last inch in the early morning (7:00 a.m.) before we left for the airport. The roads on the way to the airport were slushy and a little slippery, but not too bad. The forecast low at our house today was 0 degrees; the forecast high in San Diego today was 68 degrees. Yes! I’m ready for some warm weather!

We boarded our plane on time, but then sat at the gate for about 90 minutes waiting for “paperwork,” as the pilot described it. It could have been stressful, but the pilot and co-pilot came into the cabin, and they and the flight crew chatted casually with the passengers. Those who were tired of sitting (and knew there were 3+ hours of sitting coming up on the flight) stood in the aisle and talked with each other. It was kind of like a pre-flight social hour (-and-a-half)–much better than 200+ grumpy people due to a flight delay. We kept Jeff and La posted on our status so they wouldn’t be waiting 90 minutes at the airport for our delayed arrival.

After Jeff and La picked us up, our first stop was Ocean View Beach. Yes! It was wonderful to see sand, sunshine, and the Pacific Ocean instead of snow!

The most interesting thing at the beach was a grassy area filled with people who (apparently spontaneously) played music and did acrobatics. I took some videos of them. In this one, watch the woman in the center of the picture (wearing a pink leotard) as she flips above the man. You can hear the drums if you turn on the sound.

In this video, another woman holds a man’s hands and does a handstand over his head.

Finally, here’s a tightrope walker. Several people tried the tightrope; this guy did jumps and, at times, stood on one foot.

When we finished walking and watching on the beach, we headed for a nearby farmers’ market. The palm trees were a clue that we weren’t in cold (today) Missouri.

There were a lot of colorful vegetable, fruit, jewelry, and floral displays at the market.

Then, it was time for lunch. We went to one of Jeff and La’s favorite San Diego restaurants: Hodad’s.

Hodad’s definitely has atmosphere. The walls are covered with license plates, and the benches are covered with stickers and more license plates. Each of us was given a souvenir sticker when we left the restaurant. Does the surfboard table say “California” to you?

We found a Missouri license plate on one wall.

I’ll bet that you can find the “ELVIS” license plate without an arrow.

Here we are, waiting for our delicious food. We had burgers, fries, and shakes–an All-American Hodad’s lunch.

On our way back to the car, we saw these pretty bird of paradise flowers. Our first day with Jeff and La was fun. And warm!

In the reading I’ve done over the past several months, I’ve found some ideas that I found very thought-provoking. The first three are rather bleak; the last three are more positive.

This quotation is taken from FDR’s January 1937 Second Inaugural Address during the Dust Bowl years:

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. . . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

In 2022, Louisiana had the highest state poverty level at 18.2 percent and our national poverty rate was 11.5 percent. We still have a long way to go to properly care for “those who have too little,” even while the wealthiest people become increasingly wealthy and legislators look for ways to decrease poverty-directed support programs such as Head Start, free school lunches, Medicaid, SNAP qualifications, etc.

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This paragraph comes from a Jodi Picoult book. I don’t remember which one, but I think it might have been Great Small Things.

Start with the sentence The unborn baby is a person. Replace the words unborn baby with the words Immigrant. African-American. Trans woman. Jew. Muslim.

Jodi Picoult

Ted and I have traveled in 36 countries and have been in all 50 of the United States. While each destination is unique, the one thing we have found that they all have in common is that people are the same wherever we go. Every individual is a person with whom we have more commonalities than differences.

This was made very clear to me when I worked with one of my professors as a graduate assistant. He was involved in a project to develop community schools in the poorest areas of St. Louis City. At those meetings, I heard people say that living in a poor neighborhood (most would call that area a ghetto) was an advantage because you could afford to buy a home. Combined with that, they wished their neighbors would keep their homes and yards neat so the neighborhood would look nicer. Parents were adamant that they didn’t want their teenage sons to be killed by or because of drugs, and they prayed their daughters would not become pregnant in high school. These values clearly align with those in the most expensive neighborhoods.

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In Percival Everett’s 2024 book, James, there is a paragraph where James discusses truth and lies. Pay attention to the last sentence.

, , , “But dey was stealin’ from dem folk. Tellin’ lies lak dey was. He weren’t neber no pirate.”

“Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?”

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”

Percivall Everett in his book “James.”

Yes, we all do that. Sometimes it doesn’t matter; sometimes it matters a lot.

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In her 1992 poem, “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver says:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

I’ve never thought of my life as wild, but I love the way Oliver makes me feel like my life can make a difference and that I should not waste it.

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Gilbert K. Chesterton makes the same point.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I think the majority of us feel there is nothing outstandingly special or important about our everyday lives, but Chesterton feels differently about us. When I think about it, he’s absolutely right.

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Finally, just to simplify your literary life, I’ll close with the words of John Gardener.

There are only two plots in all of literature: (1) A person goes on a journey; and (2) A stranger comes to town.

John Gardener

Now I’m wondering if our lives have only those same two plots. My journey through life has brought me much–love, family, friends, happiness, sadness, education, fun, skills, experiences, and so much more.

The strangers I’ve met have all been interesting in one way or another–sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Some of them have been important to me for a relatively short period of time; others are lifelong friends. Nearly all of them have added to my experience and to my life’s journey.

I think Gardener is right: our lives and our stories are shaped by those two plots.

I have some wonderful friends, and I’m glad we express our feelings for each other. Recent friendship messages have warmed my heart.

Liz and I met at work and became friends in the middle 1990s. Our friendship has become more meaningful over the years because we know that we can trust each other with our deepest feelings and opinions and receive judgment-free support in return. As co-workers, we had adjoining offices, and because we worked in the same division, we often attended the same conferences at the Lake of the Ozarks–a three-hour drive away. We always looked forward to the drive time together because it was an uninterrupted block of three hours in each direction when we could share laughter, troubles, and everything in between. At Liz’s retirement party, I was talking with one of her friends and the lightbulb came on for her. She said, “Oh! You’re Liz’s Lake friend!” This is Liz and me. (Liz is the taller one.)

Last September, I was able to see my friend, Eileen. We had adjoining dorm rooms during our freshman and sophomore years in college and have been BFFs since then. I faint at the sight of blood, but Eileen, a nursing student, convinced me to give blood at a campus blood drive. I did it, and when I got back to the dorm, I knocked on Eileen’s door. When she opened the door, I proudly told her I had given blood without fainting–and fainted at her feet! Does that make us blood sisters? After our September 2024 visit–55 years later–Eileen sent me this message. (Note: we both look much younger–check the photo of us in the link–than these ladies.)

This sentiment describes me and these two friends–even though none of us has ever been in legal trouble.

English is a weird language. I enjoy the weirdness, so I’m taking this opportunity to present some of my favorite English weirdos.

I’ve posted this one before, but I thought it would be fun to include it with a set of other weird examples.

Brown’s son joined Brown’s company, so Brown decided to change the name of the company to “Brown and Son” and to have a new sign made for the shop. When the sign maker showed Brown the new sign, Brown complained, “It’s too crowded. There should be more space between Brown and and and and and Son.“

From Steve, who sent this to me

This one came from Jeff.

I don’t remember where I found this one. It will make sense if you read it correctly.

All the faith he had had had had no effect on him.

Unknown

Jeff also sent me this weird, but grammatically correct, sentence. I think you’ll agree that the correct use of a comma clarifies the meaning.

I posted this English spelling rule a long time ago. Mandy, one of my office co-workers back in the day before I retired, sent this to me. In case you’ve forgotten, the rule says “I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A, as in neighbor or weigh.” Mandy imagined this mug filled with beige caffeine. Weird.

Moving on from weird English grammar and spelling rules, let’s go to the trivia question of the day on a recent local news broadcast: Which English word has the most definitions? It’s not something I ever wondered about, so I didn’t have a clue. The answer on the program was “set.” I went to Professor Google to verify the information and got these responses.

Well! That was inconclusive! I dug a little deeper and found this.

How many definitions can you give for “run” and/or “set”?

If all of these weird English grammar and spelling examples are too confusing, just follow this advice.

Mike and Mary Jane like history and so do Ted and I, so we had an “historic” day together. We met for lunch at Blueberry Hill, a St. Louis landmark restaurant and music club that opened in 1972.

Blueberry Hill has rooms for eating, for parties, and for weekly live musical performances. One of the rooms is named the Elvis Room; another is named the Duck Room in honor of Chuck Berry’s duck walk. Chuck Berry, the first person inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, inaugurated the Duck Room and played 209 consecutive monthly concerts there–doing his duck walk, of course. Many famous musicians have played at Blueberry Hill, and the walls have hundreds of framed pictures of the owner with each of them, as well as with four U.S. presidents.

The owner of Blueberry Hill started collecting things as a child and displays his collections in (again) hundreds of showcases throughout the building. His collections feature every kind of pop culture memorabilia imaginable, including Howdy Doody, the Simpsons, Chuck Berry, Star Wars, jukeboxes, lunch boxes, toys, and more.

Today, the four of us came to Blueberry Hill for lunch. We plan to come back on another day to explore the restaurant’s museum-like rooms and displays. You can’t always get a level photo with a selfie, but Mike managed to fit all of us in his picture.

These are the walls in one of the restaurant’s rooms.

Here’s a wall in the room where we were seated. In case you missed it, I added an arrow to the picture of Elvis for your convenience. 🙂

The St. Louis Walk of Fame honors people from the St. Louis area who were either born here or who spent their formative or creative years here. The more than 170 honorees are from all walks of life and areas of achievement and have made major contributions to the city’s cultural heritage. The Walk of Fame sidewalk passes Blueberry Hill, so we saw some of the stars as we entered and left the restaurant. Below are stars for Chuck Berry (musician), Bob Costas (sportscaster), and Stan Musial (baseball player).

Our primary destination today was the Missouri History Museum, housed in the original 1913 Jefferson Memorial building. The memorial was constructed with proceeds from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and stands at what was the main entrance to the fair. This was the first national monument to Jefferson. (Why would St. Louis build the first monument to Jefferson? Think Louisiana Purchase.)

A replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane hangs over the atrium area. The original airplane is housed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. and is one of that museum’s most popular attractions.

Our main interest at the museum today was the updated 1803 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, commonly referred to as the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair exhibit. (The Exposition wasn’t finished in time for its scheduled 1903 opening.) The fair was held from April 30-December 1, 1904. The model of the fairgrounds in the photo below is built on a 1:400 scale. The fairgrounds covered 1,200 acres of the present-day 1,300-acre area of Forest Park, with the Palace of Agriculture alone covering approximately 20 acres. The fair featured over 1,500 buildings connected by 75 miles of roads and walkways. Over 19 million people attended the event.

Many of the fair exhibits focused on themes of racism and imperialism. This 2024 update of the museum’s exhibit includes information about those themes, rather than “sweeping them under the rug” and focusing only on the entertainment, new consumer goods, and architecture featured at the fair.

Here are some statistics about the 1904 World’s Fair.

There have been many claims that the ice cream cone was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair, but that’s not true. Several places claim that invention in the late 1800s, but the 1904 World’s Fair greatly contributed to the popularity of the ice cream cone.

Ted and I saw a wall like this in North Dakota. Just as in North Dakota, these stories and comments were fun to read.

So what makes St. Louis unforgettable? Read on to discover four writers’ opinions.

History can be fun. We all had a great time enjoying Blueberry Hill, a bit of the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and the Missouri History Museum.

Ted has been in a clean-up mood and has gone through all kinds of things in our storage room, including old photos. He found these two, and the memories they brought us were so-o-o-o good.

Kyra looks like she’s about three years old in this picture. I sent her a copy of the photo and she mentioned that she has some strange-looking bangs. I think it’s a rite of passage for toddlers to cut hair. Hopefully, they don’t run with the scissors.

I think this picture was taken in 1995. Ted and I took Kathy and Kari on a road trip that included Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan.

I don’t know where the other photos of that trip are, but maybe Ted will find them. I found these images online for any of my readers who have not been to Sleeping Bear. The lake is 450 feet below this sand dune. Look at the tiny people on the dune for a perspective of its size. The girls and I went down to swim in the lake.

This is how we went down to the lake. If you take long steps, the drop is so steep that each forward step + gravity = a lot of distance downward. The airborne time gives a sensation of flying, so getting to the lakeshore was a blast. Climbing back to the top was harder, although we saw some cross-country teams running up the dune for practice. I know we went other places on this trip, but Sleeping Bear is the only one I remember.

One of Ted’s Facebook friends posted a closed caption speech that I think is amusing–and pointed–enough to share here.

On December 10, 2024, Canadian Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, let Trump know exactly how she feels about him suggesting that Canada become the 51st state. She called Trump’s language about the U.S. acquiring Canada “insulting,” and went on to suggest that some of the United States’ most left-leaning states join Canada, where their policies will be more welcome. The text of PM May’s speech below is in her words; the punctuation is mine. I did not fact check her speech.

Sorry, Mr. Trump. and I really also take offense to your idea that Pierre Poilievre wasn’t good enough to lead the Conservatives. Wayne Gretzky–I mean, he’s great; he is the Great One. He skates to where the puck is going, and it’s not going to MAGA. The puck is on the Canadian ice rink, and by the way, Mr. Trump, please, before making public pronouncements that Wayne Gretzky should run for Prime Minister, give yourself–or get yourself–a briefing on the nature of parliamentary democracy. [It is] a Westminster parliamentary system and a constitutional monarchy where no one runs for Prime Minister. We have elections for members of Parliament. We don’t get to pick and choose among our billionaire friends for who gets a seat at the cabinet table if they’re not elected a member of Parliament. Our system is different from that of the United States of America. I suggest that Mr. Trump find one of his grandchildrens’ schoolbooks and look at the year 1770, which may explain a few things to him about why our system of government is different.

I don’t want to belittle Mr. Trump, but on the other hand, hey, Donald, have we got a deal for you! You think we want to be the 51st state? Nah! But maybe California would like to be the 11th province. How about it, California? Oregon? Washington? We’ve got geography and common goals, and not only that, we’ve already got a carbon trading system between California and Quebec. We’ve got some strong alliances on our West Coast from British Columbia. There’ve been a lot of academic papers on the idea of Cascadia.

So, California Governor Newson, and Washington State Jay Inslee, and newly-elected governor of Oregon Tina Kotek, how about it? Want to put a referendum to your citizens?…This is what you get: free health care–universal free health care. No more one-year-olds who suddenly fall off the Medicaid list and their parents are in the news because they’re trying to do a GoFundMe so they can get their daughter to a doctor. Universal free health care.

And guess what–those gun laws that your Congress is too afraid to pass? Because of the National Gun Law lobby, we already got our strict gun laws. That’s why we have the safest streets around the world….By the way, [according to] the most recent stats, 5.9 out of every 10,000 people is killed in a fatal gun incident [in the United States], versus 0.88 per 10,000 in Canada. That’s because we have strict gun laws. California citizens, Oregon, Washington–safest streets here. We already have good gun laws and women have a right to an abortion under our universal health care system.

But, you know, we don’t have to stop here, Donald. Think about it. You could get rid of all these states that always vote Democratic. You know what else? We’ll take Bernie Sanders off your hands. [He can be a] proud new Canadian citizen of the great province of Vermont. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, we’d love to see you. Our Maritime provinces already have deep links and ties [with you].

Well, enough kidding around. But honestly, President Trump, get used to it: Canada is a sovereign nation full of guess what–proud Canadians. We’re not jingoistic. We don’t bow a lot. That’s one of the things that we kind of have in common with Jimmy Carter. We’re not a big nation for braggarts and bullies. We actually like to think we’re of service to the world. We could do better. We can always do better, but we love our country. And it’s a country. It’s a nation. And we do not aspire to be the 51st state.

Canadian MP, Elizabeth May

During an interview following her speech, MP May added, “If it was a joke, it was never funny and it ends now.” Other Canadian leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have also spoken out against Canada becoming the 51st state, saying, “There isn’t a snowballs’ chance in he** that Canada would become part of the United States.”

2024 was, physically, a long haul for me. First, I had a TKR (total knee replacement) in April. Then, in late July, when I was two weeks away from finishing physical therapy for my knee, I injured my ankle (same leg as the knee replacement) doing PT for my knee on a leg press machine. My ankle had significant, but not severe pain, so I bought an elastic sleeve and wore that to stabilize the joint. After two weeks, when the pain continued to increase, I made an appointment with my orthopedist.

He ordered an x-ray, diagnosed the injury as a “severe posterior tibial strain,” and provided me with what he called a “strappy”–a very firm elastic sleeve. In the photo below, my foot enters at the top, my heel protrudes from the sock-like portion of the strappy on the left, and my toes extend through the opening on the right. The straps wrap all the way under, over, and around my ankle in opposite directions. Together, the straps and the sock portion of the strappy provided three layers of very firm support around my ankle, in every direction of ankle movement.

I was instructed to wear the strappy for a month and then to try walking without it. I had only minor pain with the strappy in place, but there wasn’t much improvement in my original pain level when I took the strappy off, so the doctor ordered an MRI. That revealed a partial tear in the tendon near my heel (the posterior tibial tendon). The prescription for that was to completely immobilize my ankle by wearing a boot for a month. After a month, I saw some improvement, but there was still significant ankle pain, so I wore the boot for another month. (If you’ve ever worn a boot, you know how much fun that was, right?) By then, my ankle didn’t hurt, but it felt very fragile–as if exertion might re-tear the tendon, so I went back to the strappy for another month. (BTW, during all of this, my knee felt great!)

I experimentally took the strappy off on Christmas Day and kept my activities at a low level for a week to test my ankle. Five months after injuring it, my ankle feels healed, but it’s incredibly weak, so it tires quickly. After all, for five months, it did very little work, having been supported by a variety of devices for that entire time. When the big snowstorm arrived on January 5, I pushed the snowblower for an hour-and-a-half after the first part of the storm and for another hour-and-a-half after the backside of the storm without pain in my ankle–probably because my snow boots provided support for my ankle.

With the knee pain becoming severe in December 2023, then the TKR in April 2024, and then the July 2024 ankle injury that didn’t heal until December 2024, I’ve done minimal physical exercise for over a year! I don’t think I’ve ever been this weak or this out of shape in my life!

On January 1, I started walking for exercise again, and my ankle is becoming noticeably stronger. At this point, I can comfortably walk a mile outdoors before my ankle starts to protest with weak muscle pain. I’ve been told that: (1) a tendon tear does not heal to its original state; and (2) if my ankle was supported for 5 months, you add that time for the injury to heal–i.e., another 5 months. That will be Memorial Day.

Meanwhile I’ve also started doing Pilates again and I’m looking forward to biking when the weather gets a little warmer–two activities I had to give up a year ago because of my knee pain. My doctor, my physical therapist, and my Pilates instructor all say it will take 4-6 weeks to see obvious improvement in my overall strength and fitness, and 8-12 weeks to reach the level I’m accustomed to having. Twelve weeks will be March 31. I can’t wait!

It feels wonderful to be active and even better to be pain-free. Hurray for me!

♫ Happy days are here again! ♫

Ted and Kari like to get together for an afternoon of Scrabble. Kari has time off from her organic farm work in January, and Kathy gave Ted a new Scrabble game for Christmas, so the two of them decided it was time to play Scrabble again.

Scrabble afternoons are a special father-daughter time.

Photo credit: Theo

Ted and I enjoyed the 1996 movie “Twister.” Of course, it was far from meteorologically accurate, but that outrageousness made it fun. When the loosely-described sequel, “Twisters,” was released in July 2024, we went to see it for more fun. Again, it was definitely not scientifically accurate, but it was an enjoyable two hours. Shortly after the release of “Twisters,” I saw this meme.

Former President Jimmy Carter (October 1, 1924-December 29, 2024) was generally unappreciated during his term as President of the United States–including by me. As time went on and Carter demonstrated his beliefs in countless humanitarian ways, I began to respect him more and more.

Until he died, when the news outlets reported the things he accomplished during his presidency, I didn’t realize what an impact Carter had quietly made on our country and on the world. In 1977, the first act of his presidency was to pardon Vietnam draft resisters; the Camp David Accords (1978) are the longest-standing peace agreements in the Middle East and are still in place today; the Salt II talks with President Brezhnev of the Soviet Union resulted in the nuclear arms reduction treaty. As President and throughout his life, he worked constantly for global human rights.

Carter was determined to put principles over politics, regardless of the political consequences of his actions. Political analysts believe this is most likely what cost him a second term as President. He wasn’t a great politician, because his goal was not to be politically correct, but to lead a life of purpose. The accolades made in his honor after his death reflect a person who achieved his goal and can only be described as an exceptionally fine human being.

The low temperature at our house during the extremely (for us) cold weather that followed our January 5 snowstorm was -2 degrees. Our high temperature last summer was 104 degrees. That’s a 106-degree range over the past six months! Neither the high nor the low temperature recorded on our thermometer is a record temperature, so our range is even greater. Ted and I like the variety in our weather, although I’m far more partial to warm weather.

During the last week of December, the St. Louis National Weather Service Office issued a special weather statement advising the area of an upcoming major winter storm, beginning January 5 and bringing the likelihood of freezing rain, sleet, snow, and even thunder snow, followed by a period of extremely cold weather, with temperatures 20-30 degrees below normal. One of the friends I saw that week knows that Ted worked as a lead forecaster for the NWS. After greeting each other, she said, “I’m so glad to see you. I want to know what Ted says about this storm they’re talking about.”

Well, usually Ted tells me it probably won’t be as bad as it sounds, and a week out is hard to forecast for specific areas because air currents can move a weather system north or south a few miles, making a huge difference in which area(s) will get rain, freezing rain, or snow. This time, I told my friend, Ted started major storm prep six days in advance of the forecast storm. (1) He started the snowblower to make sure it works. We haven’t used it for at least two years and, if it needed repair, there were a few days to get it fixed before the storm arrived. It worked fine, so (2) he filled two one-gallon containers with gas for the snowblower. (3) Then he filled the gas tanks on both cars. Our main supply of firewood is outdoors, but we keep a pile of firewood in the garage so it will stay dry and be ready to use in the fireplace. (4) Ted hauled in as much wood as we had room for into the garage so that we could (a) enjoy a fire on the cold evenings and/or (b) heat the family room with the fireplace and stay warm if freezing rain broke the power lines. (5) He and I planned menus and made up a grocery list; then (6) he offered to go to the grocery store to stock up before everyone else went on the weekend. (7) We dug out our boots, heaviest jackets, and thickest gloves, and then, . . . we waited.

Our first snowfall of the season (November 30) was pretty, but minor. Neither we nor our neighbors needed to shovel our driveways, because the ground was warm enough to melt the snow on them. We had an unusually warm November (23 days above 55 degrees) and December (10 days above 55 degrees). It was so warm that our spring daffodils sprouted and are about 3 inches tall. In the photo below, you can see that some of the trees on the far left and far right of the photo still have leaves on them, and the bushes growing at the edge of the woods across the street are still green. You can’t see the grass, but it was still green too.

On January 5, just as predicted, we had thunder snow, and the major weather event that inspired all of Ted’s prep work looked like this. We saw some lightning and heard some thunder, and the heavy snow fell rapidly.

The snow stopped falling by mid-afternoon, giving us a break before the back edge of the system circled around to hit us with another punch later. The smart people (only we and two other neighbors) took advantage of the break to clear Part 1 of the storm. The yardstick is hard to read, but it says 7.5 inches of snow. The photo looks like the snow slopes downward into a valley-like depression in the center, but it was level, just like it looks at the road across the upper center and in the foreground of the photo.

I enjoy using the snowblower, so I cleared the driveway. It took both of us to find it. Ted helped me identify the edges of the concrete and I pushed the snowblower as he directed. You can see my boundary paths on both sides of the driveway. Then I cleared the middle.

When I finished clearing the driveway, Ted took over with the snowblower and cleared the sidewalks and the patio, then used a shovel to clear the porches and the corners. When he finished, he told me he was still having fun (like a kid playing in the snow), so he cleared two neighbors’ driveways–first Claudia’s (our age, widowed, and doesn’t have a snowblower), then Peggy’s (93 years old). Peggy hasn’t driven for a number of years, so Ted cleared only one side of her driveway to allow her family–most of whom live nearby–to get to the house when they come to visit.

It was really hard for me to clear the driveway, especially on the upward slope going toward the road. My feet kept slipping while I pushed the snowblower, and I had to fight it to keep it moving in a straight line. This is the reason.

I broke up some of the icy bottom layer and examined a chunk of it. No wonder my feet kept slipping–I was walking on a layer of frozen rain topped with a layer of sleet! In NWS-speak, Ted would say, “The forecast verified.” That means it was right on the money. We had everything in the forecast: freezing rain, sleet, snow, and thunder snow, followed by extremely cold weather.

Everything is clear. Or as close as we can get to clear. It was time to go inside to wait for Part 2 of the storm.

Part 2 (the back side of the storm) arrived overnight and dropped another 4.5 inches of snow on us.

Because we had already cleared snow once, the snowbanks made it easier for us to see where the edges of the concrete were this time.

This storm dropped a total of 13 inches of freezing rain, sleet, and snow on our neighborhood. (If you’re doing the math from my measurements above, the “error” is because the yardstick didn’t penetrate the ice/sleet at the bottom, and I took this measurement in an area without that layer.)

I cleared our driveway again. It was much easier than yesterday with roughly half as much new snowfall. Ted cleared the sidewalks and the patio and shoveled out whatever the snowblower couldn’t do. Then he cleared Claudia’s driveway again. Someone else cleared Peggy’s.

As I said earlier, the smart people went outside during the break in the storm and cleared the first 7.5 inches of snow–plus some of the freezing rain and sleet. Unfortunately, two of our neighbors did not, and they both had a hard time trying to clear 13 inches of ice, sleet, and snow.

Kevin (foreground) doesn’t have a snowblower, so he was using a shovel. I noticed him struggling while I was working on our driveway, and Ted said while he (Ted) was clearing our sidewalks, Kevin was lifting and dumping a shovelful of snow, then stopping to catch his breath before lifting another load. Ted took our snowblower to Kevin and let him use it instead of his shovel. (I didn’t want to put boots on to go outside to take a picture. Pardon the window screen.)

When Kevin finished, he took our snowblower across the street and helped Larry (blue jacket) and Maxine (partially hidden by Larry’s blown snow) clear their driveway. We don’t get enough snow in our area to make it worth a super-size snowblower, so this storm was hard work for everyone. Even MoDOT is understaffed and has many new, inexperienced plow drivers. In spite of MoDOT employees working 12-hour shifts for 6 days, the road in front of our house wasn’t cleared until the third day after the storm started. Meanwhile, our snowblower cleared five driveways: ours (twice), Claudia’s (twice), and Peggy’s, as well as part of Kevin’s and part of Larry’s. It’s a trusty little machine!

Needless to say, countless businesses were closed for several days and schools were closed all week–Monday through Friday. We didn’t even have mail pick-up or delivery for 6 days–Monday through Saturday. I guess the USPS does stop for (freezing) rain, sleet, and snow! Maybe not for dark of night.

We had a few days of very cold weather and some sunshine before Storm #2 struck. Looking out of an upstairs window on one of those days, I saw these icicles.

While he was outdoors, Ted took a picture of more icicles.

I went outside too and couldn’t resist a photo of our fluffy-looking lawn furniture.

The weight of the ice, sleet, and snow really stretched our pool cover straps. When we close the pool for the winter, we drop the water level below the circulation jets–about 16-18 inches below the pool deck surface. A pool antifreeze is added to the remaining water when we close the pool. The pool cover sank under the weight of the ice, sleet, and snow. The dark splotches on it in the photo are ice–the result of unfrozen pool water that soaked through the sunken permeable pool cover, then froze in the cold air, adding more weight to the cover. The cover will spring up again when everything on it melts.

Storm #2 arrived on January 10, four days after Part 2 of Storm #1 left the area. If you compare this photo to the first one in this post, you’ll notice that all of the trees are now bare and the bushes at the edge of the woods are no longer green. The extremely cold, and sometimes windy, weather was too much for them to hold their fall leaves any longer.

Storm #2 didn’t bring much snow–only 2 inches. Still, we had 15 inches of snow in six days, an unusual occurrence in St. Louis. Interesting fact: Anchorage, Alaska has had only 2 inches of snow so far this winter.

Sometimes, we can leave 2 inches of snow on the ground and let the sun melt it in a day or two. This time, it was so cold that the snow wasn’t going to disappear any time soon; it would just get packed down by the cars and freeze. Ted used the snowblower to clear our concrete for a third time in less than a week. This is not typical of St. Louis snowfall!

With a clear driveway, and clear roads at last, Ted made a quick run to the grocery store for a few items. We didn’t need bread (remember that we stocked up a week ago as part of storm prep), but it looks like a lot of other people did.

After all our work clearing snow, we had time to relax indoors. While the temperatures dropped, we spent every evening with a cozy fire in the fireplace.

Here’s the good news for those like me who look forward to spring: March 20, the first day of astronomical spring, will be here in just 56 days. Meterological spring (March 1) will arrive in only 37 days. Come on, Spring!

~~~~~~~~~~

Note: The heavy snow and cold weather prevented the snow from melting as quickly as usual. We had at least one inch of snow on the ground for a consecutive 16 days, the 16th-highest number of days on record.

St. Louis’ all-time record for at least one inch of snow on the ground is 66 days in January-March 1978. At that time, the NWS gave daily live weather reports as a service to KMOX radio. When Ted’s boss gave one of those reports in February, he was asked how long the cold and snow were going to last. His answer was, “I hate to say it will be awhile before it warms up, but five of our forecasters went to Florida this week.” Our family included one of those five forecasters. We were vacationing at Disney World during the kids’ cycle break from their year-round school schedule.

For Christmas, Ted and I decided to give ourselves the gift of the Missouri Botanical Garden Glow followed by dinner at a restaurant. Just as we didn’t have time to walk and admire the holiday lights and decorations on Historic Main Street before Christmas, we didn’t have time to attend Glow before Christmas either. Like Historic Main Street, Glow opens on Thanksgiving Day (timed tickets required for this event) but remains open through the first weekend after New Year’s Day.

Here’s the entrance to Glow.

The grounds’ 79 acres were covered with light displays. At an ambling and admiring pace, it took us about an hour-and-a-half to walk the entire path on a clear, calm winter evening with temperatures in the mid-30s. A variety of large St. Louis area corporations sponsored many of the light displays.

I couldn’t help wondering how the decorators managed to cover the trees in the picture above so thoroughly with lights. The trunks and bases of the trees looked very authentic, and the display title included the word “oak” in its name. The leaves were oak-shaped, but the trees were not. Curious minds want to know, so I took a close look at the branches to see how the lights were attached. That made it obvious that the trees were not actually rooted in the garden, which led me to wonder how the installers transported and stored the “trees.” I looked even closer and now I know. Check the assembly lines indicated by my arrows in the two photos below. The trunk is comprised of two pieces, the large branches attach to it, and the smaller branches attach to the larger ones. Some assembly required. 🙂

Artificial or not, the little patch of trees was a pretty display. Maybe we should buy one or two of these for our own holiday lighting.

I remember this display from our Glow visit in 2023, but I still like it. The tree is one of three set in an emptied reflecting pool, and the multiple layers of lights over it create an illusion of water below. (The illusion probably disappears in daylight when you can see the web of the lights’ electrical wires in the empty pool.)

Some of the displays are static; others are not. This one (another photo of the blue tree above) is not. I took a short video to capture some of the lighting changes. A variety of holiday music plays throughout the park. Turn on your audio if you want to hear some of it.

Here’s another light display.

I didn’t think a still photo did justice to this display, so I took another short video. Again, you can listen to the music if you want to. It’s easy to see why we chose Glow as our Christmas gift.

When we reached this point, we were nearly back at the main entrance where our walk began.

We decided to have our Christmas gift dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory in the Chesterfield Valley–about halfway between the Botanical Garden and our house. By the time we arrived, the crowd had thinned, our server was very nice, the pasta was delicious, and we finished our meal with the Factory’s signature spumoni ice cream.

Now our 2024 winter holiday season is over. We went to the International Women’s Brass Conference concert, celebrated with our family, spent time with friends, enjoyed the holiday lights on Historic Main Street, and had a beautiful evening at the Garden Glow. It was a nice way to end 2024 and to begin 2025. Happy new year!

One day last October, Ted and I were cleaning and doing the laundry. As I passed the front door, I noticed two people–a man and a woman–walking away from the door. Their car was parked directly in front of our house, as if intentionally–not like the canvassers who park out of sight and then troll the street. Thinking they might have car trouble or need help, I opened the door and called to them, asking if I could help in any way. They laughed and said, “No, we know your son, and he suggested we stop in to say ‘hello’ to you.” They had rung the doorbell, but with the vacuum cleaner running, we hadn’t heard it. Luckily, I passed the front door and saw them before they left.

We introduced ourselves to each other and I chatted with them for a few minutes, then asked if they’d like to meet Ted as well. They enthusiastically said “yes,” so I went to the house and called to Ted. The four of us continued talking with each other and none of us seemed ready to part, so I invited them inside. We enjoyed each other’s company so much that they stayed at least another hour, and we made plans to get together again soon.

The backstory is that Jeff and La are currently serving a mission for their church. While they were attending mission training last spring, they met Mike and Mary Jane (our visitors), who were assigned to a mission in the St. Louis area. At that time, Jeff told them we lived in the St. Louis area, but he didn’t tell us to expect visitors, so meeting them was a happy surprise for us. Before they left, we took a group photo. Here you can see me, Ted, Mary Jane, and Mike.

Mike and Mary Jane asked for suggestions about things to see while they are in St. Louis. One of the places we mentioned was The Hill–an Italian community in the city, well-known for its Italian grocery stores and restaurants. It’s the birthplace of Joe DiMaggio, Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, and Jack Buck–three major league baseball players and a baseball broadcaster–who grew up together on The Hill and were all inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. We met at Mama’s on the Hill for dinner and had another wonderful time together. It was even better than our first visit, so we decided to meet again.

Mike and Mary Jane invited us to their home for dinner and introduced us to two other missionaries who lived in the same apartment building. The six of us talked nonstop for at least three hours, and Mary Jane commented to me that “We’ve become fast friends in a hurry, haven’t we?” I agreed.

Another of our suggestions for things to do in the area was to visit Historic Main Street in St. Charles (close to our home) during the holiday season to see the lights and decorations. Their daughter came for a holiday visit and the three of them planned to go to Main Street. We invited them for dinner at our house after they finished viewing the holiday decorations. We also invited Kari’s family, but the guys were all working, so only Kari could join us. It was fun for Mike and Mary Jane and for us to meet one of each other’s children–in this case, daughters. It was a small holiday get-together with friends and family members, and we celebrated with Christmas candy and cookies for dessert.

The downside of this friendship is that in May, Mike and Mary Jane’s St. Louis mission will be finished and they will be returning home to the Salt Lake City area. We will still be here. Luckily, we have grandchildren in the SLC area, so there’s a possibility of the four of us getting together again when we visit our grandchildren, and we’ve all expressed a strong desire to keep in touch with each other.

You never know what’s going to happen in your day. One day, a few months ago, we unexpectedly made new friends.

Ted and I always enjoy walking on Historic Main Street in St. Charles when the holiday lights and decorations are on display from Thanksgiving until New Year’s. We didn’t have time to do this before Christmas, so we went on the Saturday after Christmas. The lights and decorations were still there, but the international Christmas characters, the carolers, and the drum and fife corps no longer perform after Christmas Eve, when a parade sends Santa on his way to deliver gifts to all the good boys and girls.

In winter, the sun sets early enough that the lights are pretty by 4:30 p.m., so that’s when we went. We discovered an advantage to being there on a Saturday winter evening: the shops were open until 9:00 and we could see their merchandise through the windows. We regularly shop at several stores in this area, but we haven’t been in all of them, so it was fun to see what they sell and to make plans to visit some new places the next time we go to Main Street.

The boutique shops on Historic Main Street are all in old houses–some dating back to the 1600s–and people live on the upper level of many of the shops. I think every single shop had decorations and/or holiday lights.

The trees along the street were also decorated, making this a pretty place to walk on a beautiful winter evening. You can tell by the number of parked cars that we were a small part of the crowd looking at the lights–even after Christmas! I was lucky to find a parking spot. (Someone left, so I pulled in.)

The downtown parks had Christmas lights in the trees.

The trees in Frontier Park at the Missouri River glowed with holiday lights along the Katy Trail (foreground).

This tree had a small sleigh and presented a cute photo op for the parents of this little boy.

St. Charles apparently keeps and re-uses its decorations for many years. In 2017, the same sleigh was placed beside a tree along the riverfront in Frontier Park. Our family group attended the Christmas Eve parade that year and I took a photo of Dylan pretending to pull the sleigh, Sky holding the pretend reins, and Teddy along for the ride.

As always, Christmas is special whenever it’s celebrated with family and friends. Kathy and Annette arrived on the afternoon of the 23rd and stayed at our house. Dean and Dylan had to work that day, but Kari and Theo joined us for the afternoon and dinner. I served baked potato soup–winter comfort food–with Cherries on a Cloud for dessert. The photo shows the entire dessert, not one serving–it’s large enough to cut into twelve pieces. (It’s a baked meringue shell with a marshmallow / cream cheese / whipped cream filling, topped with cherries.)

Kari’s family hosted us for the family Christmas celebration. Sky and Adelle were able to come from Rockford, IL to celebrate Christmas with our family on Christmas Eve and with Adelle’s family (nearby) on Christmas Day. Dean had a cozy fire in the family room, and everyone shifted from room to room throughout the afternoon and evening, forming a variety of interesting conversational groups.

With ten of us, there were a lot of presents under the tree. (Note the unique tree topper.)

For dinner, Kari prepared a family favorite that we describe as “ham dinner.” It includes baked ham, mashed potatoes with delicious ham gravy, green beans, and Waldorf salad. I made a marshmallow and whipped cream torte with a chocolate crumb crust for dessert.

After dinner, it was time to open the gifts. (Some of us had colds and others didn’t want to catch a cold, thus the masks.)

Even the cat(s) had some gifts. You can see the milk carton cat bed in the photo. The cat looks cautious because it is watching a wind-up toy move around in unpredictable patterns and the cat isn’t sure what to do about it.

The next morning (Christmas Day), Kathy and Annette went to Columbia to celebrate the holiday with Annette’s son, and the rest of us relaxed. Everyone at Kari’s house was busy with individual activities for a while in the afternoon, so Kari came over to spend a little time with us. Naturally, we talked about how nice the family Christmas had been. In the evening, Ted and I settled in for a movie with a Christmas cookie snack. A good time was had by all during this special season. Merry Christmas!

With Thanksgiving falling as late as possible this year, Christmas arrived in a hurry. Even worse, we had a major weather change in early December, which sometimes triggers laryngitis for me. This time, I had an unusually bad case and felt terrible for a week, setting our Christmas preparations behind schedule. As a result, the only community holiday event we attended before Christmas was the Holiday Brass Concert at a church in St. Louis County.

I attended the concert with a friend last year and it was so good, I wanted Ted to hear it this year. It’s presented by the International Women’s Brass Conference and includes brass and percussion instruments. The IWBC presents four performances each December in the Manchester United Methodist Church. The church seats 1,200 people, and all four concerts sell out every year. Ted and I bought our Dec. 2 tickets in early June as soon as they went on sale. The concert is indescribable. No photos were allowed, so I’m going to describe some of the concert highlights, but words cannot begin to do justice to the experience.

The church is beautifully decorated for Christmas and has excellent acoustics, both of which greatly contribute to the experience. There is a large balcony above the sanctuary, flanked by a smaller balcony on each side, as well as a large balcony above the rear of the nave. An outstanding choir I estimated at around 80-100 members performs in the back of the sanctuary, and musical pieces are performed in the aisles, along the side walls, and in the corners of the nave, as well as in all the balconies. In addition to every variety of brass instrument, there are marimbas, alphorns, bagpipes, a piano, and soloists. A sign language interpreter is present during vocal musical pieces.

Except for the final selection, the entire group of musicians does not perform simultaneously in a concert-style seating arrangement, nor do they always perform in the front of the nave. Selections are performed by smaller ensembles of 4-12 musicians at a time, with individual musicians participating in multiple ensemble combinations. While one ensemble performs somewhere in the building–sometimes vocally, sometimes instrumentally–the next moves silently and invisibly into place at another station. As soon as the first ensemble finishes, there is time for brief applause before the next ensemble begins. With each musical selection followed by a piece performed in a different area of the nave, the music seems to surround the audience. The variety of ensembles and performance locations is a highlight of this concert.

The selections and the quality of music are impressive. Four alphorns played “Silent Night”–two in the front balcony and one on each side of the rear balcony; the bagpipers played as they came down the center aisle; for one song, the choir entered from the rear and spread along the two side walls.

Even a video would not capture the experience of this holiday concert. The best I can offer visually is a picture of a man in Halifax, NS playing an alphorn. Even so, his alphorn is white, not brass-colored. An alphorn varies from 9.5-13.0 feet long and, at full volume, can be heard over several kilometers. (A friend of mine knows an alphorn player and asked him if the instrument comes apart for transporting it. The answer is that there is a case for it, but it does not come apart.) Imagine one of these horns playing from each of four balcony corners simultaneously. Awesome!

Ted and I have already marked our calendar to order our tickets in early June for next year’s IWBC Holiday Brass Concert.