House For Sale
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Antelope Canyon
Superb Owl Weekend
We went to a potluck dinner party. This event was originally scheduled for tonight, but then someone realized when the big game was. Bill and Mary, our usual hosts had convened another meeting of Team Kaldis, our longtime charity bicycle team. The team is still active, though most of us in attendance are not. We have all turned old and grey. Catching up with each other, last May’s tornado was discussed. Where we were dining and where many of us live was along its path. We were all fortunate. One member had been cycling in Forest Park as the storm approached and had to ride into the storm to get home. Another perennial topic these days was a memoriam for team members who are no longer with us.
Last night, our culinary offering was a salad, persimmons and pomegranates, a NY Times recipe, with ingredients from our local Schnucks. Many at that party shop at this same store and opinions varied. Compared to the Schnucks that it replaced, it represents a big improvement, but time has not been kind to the place. Gone is the live trout tank. Further west this store is both dwarfed and out shone by newer and larger stores in the chain. My store still outsells all the rest. Perched above the food desert that is the City of Saint Louis, it no longer requires a holiday of a snowstorm to fill the parking lot. This winter, I have had opportunity to be impressed twice with its produce department. Last November, it stocked fresh rhubarb from the Netherlands, so that Harry could have his pie. And in January, I just bought fresh persimmons and a pomegranate from Spain. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”
Bryce Canyon Hoodoos
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Let the Games Begin!
Yesterday, I watched the Olympics opening ceremony live during the day. I enjoyed seeing the kaleidoscope of colors, with giant blue, red and yellow paint tubes pouring out their corresponding-colored fabric at the feet of the dancers below and then hearing Mariah Carey sing Volare in Italian. Not bad for daytime TV. The parade of nations split among four locations didn’t really work for me. Divided by locale four ways, too many of the smaller teams were only further reduced in stature. Watching the parade live, I did get to hear the audience boo VP Vance. I understand that for primetime NBC muted these sounds, so as not to offend any snowflakes.
Turning now to a real controversy that is plaguing these winter games, “Are ski jumpers enhancing their penises to fly further?” Youth and WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) want to know. According to recent news reports, some ski jumpers are allegedly injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid (paraffin) in order to fly that little bit further. Injecting the penis with acid would temporarily achieve a visual thickening of their penis size and give the ski jumpers bigger genitalia at the point their suits are measured by 3D scanners. Larger measurements could theoretically mean athletes being given a bigger, looser suit, which would act like a sail to catch the wind and allow them to make longer jumps. Research from a published scientific journal, said that such a 2 cm change in a suit represented an extra 5.8 meters in the length of a jump.
Adding credence to these latest accusations, are the conclusions announced just this week to another ski jumping controversy. After an eleven-month investigation two Norwegian coaches were suspended for eighteen months because they inserted illegal stitching into the crotch area of some of their best jumper’s suits after an inspection by officials. These changes that amounted to cheating were filmed from behind a curtain and uploaded anonymously to YouTube. They served to make the suits larger and more aerodynamically advantageous, thus enabling longer jumps in competition.
Zion Yellow Warbler
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Will the real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up… Yesterday, I filled out our taxes. I have not filed them yet, but likely will soon. For now, I am letting them ferment. Things went mostly smoothly, mostly. Anyway, our final result came out very well. We owe the IRS some more but will recover most of that debt through our Missouri refund. $140 is smallest additional amount that I will have to pony up since I retired. The only real hiccup in the whole process came when I was gathering data to plug into TurboTax. There were no problems with the 1099s, but when it came time for social security, I hit a snag. In order to get my info, I had to create a new login. I dimly remember that the login that I used last year was going to be obsolete soon. Well, that time is now. This new login required me to furnish a new password, photo ID and facial metrics. By simultaneously using both our PC and my iPhone I was able to accomplish these tasks, but when we tried to replicate these actions for Anne, we hit a snag. Anne got an error code and had to call them. Long story short, they did not believe that she was who she purported to be. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up. Please stand up, please stand up. I now expect ICE to show up and whisk her away to some foreign hellhole. I’m keeping the door locked for now. As a workaround the operator suggested that we try another still available login pathway that uses yet another soon to be obsolete path. That worked, we got her logged in and were able to get the pertinent tax document. Afterwards, Anne found our little adventure in government bureaucracy too taxing and took a nap.