Japanese Bridge

Japanese Garden in a Snow Storm

Japanese Snow Covered Walkway

Japanese Waterfall

Main Reflecting Ponds

Reflecting Ponds and Climatron

Slushed Covered Stone Bridge in the Japanese Garden

Snowy Stones

Winterberries

Happy New Year! I’m off to the races for another year of blogging blather. When I awoke this morning, my first thought was that tomorrow morning is going to be awfully rough. It will be my first day back at work in over a week. On further reflection though, I had the thought that I could temper the pain by not staying up as late as I did on New Year’s Eve. We eschewed our regular First Night festivities (weather), in lieu of a quiet dinner followed by an evening at home. Joanie joined us and we had dinner at Black Fin. The place wasn’t exactly rocking when we left and they had plans for a New Year’s Eve party later that night, but the night was still young. At home, I treated the girls to “Magic Mike”. I think that they liked the ‘dancing’. Maybe next year, Dance Saint Louis will be expanding upon its repertoire. 😉

It snowed almost all day yesterday, but we have surprisingly little snow to show for it today. That’s because it remained above freezing until after midnight. Maybe First Night would have been feasible after all? We ran errands in the morning and then I drove Anne to her physical therapy at SLU in the afternoon. The PT patients have even better parking there than the handicap. Later last night Anne was commiserating that scheduling PT on New Year’s Eve might not have been such a good idea. Mike, her therapist always leaves her feeling a little worked over afterwards.

While Anne was in PT, I ducked down Shaw to the garden. It was snowing like gangbusters then, big fat, fluffy wet flakes. It made for a nice, if challenging photo-op. At times the thick snow caused my camera to malfunction. When the SX40 powers up, it goes through a little auto-focusing dance. I think that the falling snow confused it enough that it decided to shut itself down and reboot. Fortunately, I had another camera to fallback upon. The Japanese Garden at the far end of the botanical gardens is the most picturesque part with snow. There weren’t many people at the gardens, but most were triggering their shutters as madly as me.

After rounding the far end of the garden, I came upon the Japanese carp feeding bridge. I reached into my pocket and what did I perceive, but a shiny quarter for the fish food dispensing machine to receive. Rare is the moment when with money, I am so well changed. Rare still when the carp are for me all by myself. With a hand full of pellets and my still working camera in the other, I made to the railing and began slowly dropping brown pellets. One-by-one on to the water they fell, making a train on the bubbler’s swell. But wait, where were the bright-colored fish with all their mouths agape? Where was the writhing and thrashing and striving to gobble this ambrosia that had cost me so dear? As they drifted away on the bubbler’s tide, on water undisturbed from below, I had to ask, “Hey, where are my fish?” In afterthought, I’ve come to surmise that those fluffy thick flakes that looked so pleasing and managed to confuse one camera must have also distracted those mouths below.