Fifty years ago today, Ted and I were married. Tomorrow, we’ll get started on the next fifty years.

My mom and I designed and made my wedding gown. I cut the appliqués and sewed them and the lace on by hand. My bouquet was similar to my mom’s wedding bouquet.
We’re still this happy together.
You can see rice in the air. It definitely brought us prosperity, fertility, and good fortune.
We never had a chance to finish eating the first piece of wedding cake we cut for each other. It was a sour cream chocolate cake, and every crumb was eaten because people came back for seconds.

I had some shopping to do in downtown St. Charles today, so I checked out the riverfront. This is our (gasp!) third dry day this week, so the rivers have gone down a little bit. (We had two dry days, then rain, then a dry day today and one more coming tomorrow. After that, the forecast predicts rain for six consecutive days.)

The Missouri River is very wide right now. Beneath the trees and just left of the center of the picture, you can see the top of a park bench above the water. In 1993, the river covered the road and the parking lot, and stopped rising just before it reached the back doors of the shops on Main Street, about thirty feet behind where I stood to take this picture.
The Katy (M-K-T Railroad) Depot is above water now. The brown ground is grass covered with river silt, and marks last week’s high water point.
The bandstand still stands in water. If you look closely, you can see the water used to be three steps higher on the bandstand–almost up to its floor.

What a rainy spring we’re having! At the end of March, the TV weathercaster told us that the St. Louis area was already a full month ahead on rainfall for the year—and it hasn’t stopped. At this time, most river levels in Missouri are at their second-highest—second only to the record flooding we experienced in 1993. Levees are failing because they are so water-logged from standing water. St. Peters was under two tornado warnings two days apart just before we left for Zaque’s graduation in Colorado. Thankfully (for us), the tornado that hit Jefferson City the night before our trip dissipated six miles west of us.

As Ted and I drove through Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa on our way to and from Colorado, we saw standing water everywhere. Kansas has many new wetlands, and that was nothing, compared to Nebraska and Iowa, which can nearly qualify as large lakes! I-29 was under water from Council Bluffs, IA to St. Joseph, MO, so we had to take two-lane roads west of the Missouri River to get home. As we crossed the river at St. Joseph, we received a “tornado emergency” warning on our cell phones because a tornado was sighted west of Kansas City, heading for St. Joseph.

Everyone else was forced to use the secondary roads as well, so traffic was heavy. At times, the rain reduced visibility to less than a quarter-mile.

The day after we got home, we had another severe thunderstorm warning in our area. When it passed, we went out to do some errands, and saw this tree across the road about two miles from our house.

Make it stop! We want to have at least two dry days in a row so we can clean and seal our concrete, but we’re still waiting.

Guess where we went today.

That’s right, we went to the bike store—again. My bike doesn’t like to downshift, but it does like to slip the chain off the gears. Ted’s bike downshifts most of the time, but not always, so we went back to the bike store for a diagnosis. We must have ridden our bikes a lot more than we remember because Ted’s derailleur needed adjusting, and mine was worn out and needed to be replaced.

As we waited for the bike guy to test ride our bikes to check out the problems, we looked around and saw the unicycle stools above, some model bicycles, and the perfect bikes for (very) young riders.

This scale model Schwinn is similar to the bike Ted had when he was a kid.
I’ve never seen a bicycle built for six, but the bike guy assured me it’s a real thing. All the parts–pedals, brakes, kickstands, wheels, etc.–work.
Here’s a model of a rickshaw.
The wheels on these little bicycles are hard plastic (not inflatable), and the bikes are just the right size for two-year-old cyclists.