Monthly Archives: September 2009

Pokeberries a Self Portrait

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Anne with Poke Berries a Self Portrait

Anne took this picture of herself on Sunday afternoon just after she had participated in the Red Thread Project. I think that she was a little giddy. I am hoping that posting this picture will help motivate her to do a guest post? She took a lot of great pictures of the event. Anne wants everyone to know, well at least me, that she bought the eight dollar a skein yarn today for fingerless gloves as opposed to the sixty dollar a skein yarn, that was featured in Vogue.

Rey called last night, he is coming to Saint Louis. He is coming with one of his co-workers from Knoxville. They plan on getting to Missouri on Thursday. His friend and co-worker is from near Saint Louis, thirty miles south of us in the city of Festus. I expect that we will see Rey sometime on the weekend. We look forward to his visit and OBTW, have you all heard that the Cardinals clinched their playoffs berth?

Oh boy, my new replacement desktop showed up today. I’ve got Windows doing its many little setup tasks, updating its software, while restoring my backed up files, all the while I am typing this post. Long live the new PC!

Away We Go, is the name of a movie that came out on DVD this week. Anne and I saw in the theater and enjoyed it. It is a poignant comedy. Here is a brief synopsis:

A couple who is expecting their first child travel around the U.S. in order to find a perfect place to start their family. Along the way, they have misadventures and find fresh connections with an assortment of relatives and old friends who just might help them discover “home” on their own terms for the first time.

It stars John Kaminski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (SNL) as the young expectant couple. This road trip of a movies launches them from one dysfunctional family to the next. My favorite episode is when they visit a new age couple of friends. This vignette features Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight). Here is some choice dialogue:

Maggie Gyllenhaal to her character’s husband: They bought us a stroller.

John Kaminski: What’s wrong with a stroller?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I LOVE my babies. Why would I want to PUSH them away from me?

Folke Filbyter

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Folke Filbyter

Swedish legend portrays Folke Filbyster as the pagan founder of the Folkung Dynasty.  His grandson was kidnapped by Christian monks.  Folke spent twenty-five years searching for him on horseback and later finds him in the King’s service.  The artist, Milles, depicts this quest by showing his terrified horse fording a treacherous stream and a frightened Folke counterbalancing the horse’s movements.  His cognomen Filbyter is believed to mean “foal biter” and refers to a man who castrates colts with his teeth.  Maybe this is the real reason that his horse is terrified.  Anne and I saw this statue on our walk, on Saturday morning.

Over a week ago Anne and I rented the documentary, earth.  It was originally released into theaters, earlier this year, on Earth Day. It is the first film in a new Disney nature series.  Narrated by James Earl Jones, the movie tells the story of three animal families and their journeys across this planet.  earth combines action, scale and location and captures intimate moments of our planet’s wild and elusive creatures.  It is a gorgeous movie.  It was five years in the making and its production values boasts over one-hundred and fifty days on filming from the air.

On NPR’s On the Media, a news show that tries to tell the behind the scenes stories of the news business, there was an expose this week about nature documentaries.  Instances of fraud that were illustrated in the article include such notable nature documentaries as Wings of Migration.  Many of the birds that were filmed while in flight were not wild birds at all, but instead were farmed raised birds and they weren’t migrating.  March of the Penguins made the assertion that the penguins that were filmed, mated for life, they don’t, it was an editorial decision to lie.  Monogamous penguins were thought to be more marketable then their real natures.

So what constitutes the difference between a fraud and a legend?  Is it simply the passage of time?  earth was not mentioned at all in the On the Media  article, but it still suffers from association with its competition.  There was one thing that all three movies were true to and that was their beautiful nature photography.  It was only with their narrator’s voiceovers that two of them got into trouble.  Maybe like the silent statue of Folke Filbyster, the viewer should be allowed to invent their own stories and ask their own questions.  Like, how the heck did a statue of Folke Filbyster end up outside the fire station in downtown Clayton?

Sunday in the Park

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Nun on a Bicycle

After Saturday’s off and on again rain, Sunday dawned cool, but cloudless.  Anne and I had talked about doing the Bicycle Fun Club ride, but Anne didn’t think she could fit the Fun Club ride in and then make her Red Thread Project meeting at one.  So we decided to take it easy and just ride in the Park.  So, we slowly rode around the Park, taking pictures as we went.  On the way out of the Park, we stopped off at the Demun Kaldi’s, for pumpkin pie lattes.  Mine was much better then the Starbuck’s pumpkin spiced latte that I had in Seattle.  At the coffee shop, we bumped into another Anne on Team Kaldi’s and her husband.  The four of us were all wearing the exact same team jerseys.

Anne and Anne both recounted the same experience that they had each independently had, at the end of the first day of this year’s MS-150 ride.  As each Anne returned to the tent that night, she was met with exclamations of how glad her teammates were that she was not hurt and then news that a teammate named Anne had had a bad bike wreck that day.  Each Anne’s thoughts soon turned to the other Anne.  As it turned out this year’s team had a third Anne.  This was her first year with the team and not very many members knew her.  Last week, or maybe the week before, this third Anne sent the Team an email detailing her injuries and explaining that she is feeling much better now.

After we returned home, Anne went off to her Red Thread Project meeting.  The weather today was so so beautiful, so … I decided to do some more biking and re-launched towards the Park.  It was warmer and much more crowded then it was during the first go around. Everybody and their sister was on a bike.  Including two nuns that I saw.  They both wore full nun’s habits, with wimpels and helmets on top.  Anne got eighteen miles and I got thirty-three miles today.

Dancing in the Streets

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Saturday morning Anne and I walked to the Clayton Diner in downtown Clayton. Our original plan was to walk to the Clayton farmer’s market, but about the time that I learned that it was no longer at its original site, but had moved further away, we were walking by the Clayton Diner. So we stopped for breakfast. It is a diner, plain and simple. The food was just OK. At least it was smoke free. Afterwards we walked home and manage to beat out the rain. Our morning walk was all the exercise that we got that day. The rest of the day’s rains precluded our plans to bike over to Grand for the Dancing in the Streets Festival.

Joanie called while we were waiting out the rain. She and Pat were heading over to Grand for the Dancing in the Streets Festival and wanted to know if we wanted to go with them. We begged off because of the rain and told them that we would meet them there later. An hour later the rain ended and we drove over to Grand Center. Our first stop at Grand Center had nothing to do with dance, but was at the neighboring Earthway’s Green Home Festival. It was basically a block of tented booths, mainly vendors and nonprofit groups, but they were handing out some free stuff.

We eventually made it to the Dance Festival and hooked up with Joanie and Pat pretty quickly. The pictures in the gallery with this post are ordered in the order that we saw the different acts. In the two hours that we were there we actually saw more acts, there are just the most photogenic of them. The first group that is pictured is the African dance group. This group is unique in that it is one of the few dance groups that had males in the company. The acrobats of Duo Adamo, started their performance directly behind the crowd that had just watched the African dancers. They performed an aerial strap routine. Immediately after the acrobats were done the crowd was asked to pirouette again as yet another act commenced behind the crowd. I must commend the stage managers of this dance festival, throughout this sequence of acts they managed to pull off their stated goal of creating an interactive audience experience. This third act was reminiscent of that Antwerp railway station YouTube video. The music started and people started jumping out of the crowd and into a highly choreographed dance routine.  Well it never quite reached the same level as on the YouTube video, but hey this was only the afternoon crowd.

In addition to the more formal acts there were also wandering street performers, like the green guy. They added to the festival’s atmosphere. The next three photos are from the tap stage. They represent a selection of the acts that we watched. I don’t know the actual name of these acts, so I’ll identify them by the song that they danced to. Naturally, I selected the Push Bike girls, with their bicycle handle bar props. The Good Ship Lollypop girls were the youngest dancers to perform. The Boogie Woogie Gals From Company B were probably the oldest dancers that we saw perform. The blue dressed ballet dancers were very impressive. Finally, the last group that we saw perform, we remembered their name, they were The Cloggers.

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

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IMG_0251

“It’s the Economy, Stupid”, was purportedly scrawled upon a blackboard at Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign headquarters. It was true then, it is still true today. I am taking time today to commemorate the anniversary of last year’s financial meltdown. If you all recall, last year at this time this country was in the heat of another Presidential campaign. As a backdrop to this campaign was the biggest economic downturn freefall in the world since the Great Depression. At one point, a year ago, some pundit had joked that if the Dow Jones index continued at its current pace, it would hit zero in just a matter of weeks. There was real fear in this country, just one year ago. Do you remember it?

Anne and I had not spoken to our stock broker since before last year’s crash. Thursday night we met with him for the first time in years. Our IRA accounts have rebounded about 50% of the way from the beginning of this year’s low, from their high at the end of 2007. That still leaves us with losses, albeit just paper losses, but still substantial losses from our all time high. We were heavily invested in stocks. This investment strategy led us quickly down last year’s rollercoaster, but it also quickly led us, at least partway, backup this year‘s. The long and short of this story is that we decided to rebalance our investments. We are no longer so heavily invested in stocks, but have now diversified into other investment vehicles. Wiser, but poorer we slough on.

Pictured above is Carpobrotus edulis, a creeping, mat-forming succulent species. It is more commonly known as the Ice Plant. It is an invasive species in the United States that had originated from South Africa. It is quite prevalent in the Monterey, California area. The picture of it with today’s post is from this Spring, when I was last out there. Today’s header is from this summer. It shows the Soo Locks Boat Tour boat rounding Round Island. I wonder if Pete was on this cruise?

Frank’s Camera

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The preceeding video is a claymation creation from my utter brother, Frank.  Unlike the preceeding two movies, that were posted this week from brother Chris, this one is brand new,  plus it has sound.  It represents a new hobby of Frank’s.   He promises that there will be more movies made as he gets better.  This was just a first attempt.  He built the dog puppet using an aluminum wire armature with clay added on top of it (see picture below). He hopes to do a regular show on the web.  I went onto YouTube and found these two other, lesser creations, Dog Dump and Green Guy, that he has made.  As you might expect, Frank is into dogs.

Also of possible interest to readers is that last week (or the week before?) Frank visited Ann Arbor.  He visited with old friends from when we use to live there.   They went to Barton Pond and the old house off of Huron River Drive.  He was also able to retrieve the long lost movie, Return of the Wart Hogs, that one of his friends had kept all of these many years.  I look forward to posting it.

Claymation dog skeleton
In other news, I got a call from the computer repair  store.  They had bad news, a fried motherboard.  The replacement cost of the motherboard looked to be more than buying a new computer, so I said thanks, but no thanks,  About all that I’ll get for my sixty dollar deposit is a backup copy of the hard drive.  I’ll be ordering a new refurbished Dell desktop tonight … Done, for only $400!  Specifications include, an Inspiron 537 Minitower with Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor (2.5 GHz), 4 GB RAM and 500 GB disk.  OBTW, the repair guy that I spoke with earlier today, suggested that I look for the exact same model that I had crashed.  I check on the Dell site and they were charging a whopping $1,600 and for an older inferior model.