I was looking for a particular photo that I wanted to print, but I couldn’t find it, so I started opening folders I thought I might have moved it to. I never found that specific photo, but I found an interesting folder. Here are some of the pictures from that folder.

This is the most boring one to look at, but it was fun to read.

I think I took this picture in LaCrosse, WI. Ted and I were taking a walk after checking into our hotel and, when I saw this, I thought of Shel Silverstein’s book Where the Sidewalk Ends. This is the place.

Here’s some grocery store art I saw several years ago. Obviously, during the Christmas season. Construction materials: Pepsi, Coke, and Sprite cases.

I found this cartoon.

One of my teachers had this clock in her classroom.

My class site at Pike-Lincoln Technical Center in Eolia had a major fire in 2012. While I was helping my teacher inventory what was left of her classroom, she showed me this. She had a a bunch of red rulers rubber-banded together in a file drawer and they melted down to form this sculpture, which she told me she was going to save as a memento of the fire.

The pile of rulers was lying on its side on the bottom of the drawer and against one side of the drawer, so two sides of the “sculpture” are flat. The large flat side (back of the sculpture) shows the rubber band that survived on the bottom of the pile (you can see where it was in the picture above). It also shows that the melted plastic ran over a pencil and a ball point pen. The markings on the rulers are visible in both pictures. Cool!

This picture was taken at Christmas 2005. The kids were here for my doctoral graduation and someone (probably Kathy or me) gave Thom a Beethoven figure. Kathy and I thought it would be fun to let Beethoven play his “Moonlight Sonata” so we set up this photo op. I still smile when I see it. Maybe Kathy does too. (Remember phone books?)

Continuing the Beethoven theme, I saved another cartoon.

When Ted and I (and Jeff and Kathy) moved to Missouri in 1973, Ted’s office was at Lambert Airport. We bought a house in St. Charles rather than closer to the airport because we knew the STL WSFO (St. Louis Weather Service Forecast Office) was already under construction in St. Peters, a few miles west of St. Charles. At that time, St. Charles was basically a bedroom community for McDonnell-Douglas and St. Charles County was rural, with nothing but farmland and very small towns west of MO Hwy 94. It looked like the pictures below. When the St. Peters WSFO opened in 1974, Ted climbed the radar tower and took pictures of the Cave Springs area around the office.

This photo looks to the northwest. The horizontal road near the horizon (barely visible) is I-70; the diagonal road going to the left side of the photo is Jungermann Road. We moved from St. Charles to St. Peters in 1979 and it was still several years before I met more than two or three cars driving between home and Cave Springs on the two-lane Jungermann Road. Now it’s a 5-lane road and has constantly heavy traffic.

This view faces northeast. In the right center, the black-and-white striped Venture store sign is visible. When Venture was built, it was “out in the country” about six miles west of our house and there were no city lights past MO Hwy 94–just the darkness of rural Missouri. The city lights now extend westward without a break past Warrenton, 32 miles west of MO Hwy 94. In the right foreground, you can see the shadow of the radar tower where Ted is standing with his trusty Pentax camera that he bought in Japan. The WSFO moved from Cave Springs to Weldon Spring in 1993 when it upgraded to Doppler radar.

Here, Ted is facing southeast. When we decided to buy a larger house in 1979, we looked at one in the subdivision visible in the picture. The large building on the left is Cave Springs Lanes. The road running from the left side of the picture toward the lower right corner is Mexico Road. It was a gravel road when the WSFO opened. It’s a five-lane main arterial road now (and paved), and has been for a very long time. Cave Springs used to be described as having three main commercial buildings: The WSFO, the Venture store, and the bowling lanes. Now it’s a major commercial area, offering just about anything you might need. The WSFO building is currently being used by a department of the St. Peters city government. The Venture store was razed, and the site now houses a strip mall with an Office Depot, Northern Freight, Hobby Lobby, and some smaller stores. The bowling ally is still open for business.

The last photo from today’s search was a mystery to me for a few seconds. I’ll give you a moment to look at it and I’ll describe it below.

Those are my sunglasses lying on the poolside picnic table with a lawn chair behind them. They are reflecting the umbrella over the table.

So far, the extra free time I’m finding with the COVID-19 lockdown is still fun.