Monthly Archives: November 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Anne was all business today, all kitchen business and no monkey business, especially from me. Unfortunately, events out of our control intervened. The main sewer line backed up this morning and this occurred before any serious grease spilling had begun. This is the second time in two years that this has occurred. I wouldn’t blame Rey if he began to wonder if his Missouri relatives are better suited to the use of outhouses, rather than the new fangled invention of indoor plumbing. I can only say this, “Shit, so much for mankind’s greatest invention, besides Facebook still works.”

Roto-Rooter sent out a man right away, one of the advantages of being ahead of the curve. He cleaned out the line and we were good to go again on plumbing’s biggest day. Even with his speedy work, the whole sewer thing put a crimp in my schedule. Anne does almost all of the work on Thanksgiving, but as the saucy sous-chef, I am expected to help. Anne graciously gave me permission for a bike ride, but time permitted only a miserly 10 miles. Still it was a beautiful day for a bike ride. Dinner went off without a hitch and the turkey was perfect. Happy Thanksgiving all!

Lately, I have been liking other people’s blogs. WordPress facilitates this practice. I find that this is akin to saying hi. You say hi to someone and they say hi back. You like their blog and they like you right back. Generally, I cull through the posts under the photography tag. With half a million posts everyday, there are plenty of good ones to choose from. I found a new blog today, the photogenic side of life. New in the sense that it has only just begun. The pictures posted so far are amazing. What I really loved though, is a link to The SLR Camera Simulator. This highly functional flash App allows for meaningful experimentation with all the standard manual camera settings. It is fun to play with.

My Dinner with …, and Rey

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Cleaning, cooking, bed making and laundry; these were the activities that consumed our first day off of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The old saw says home is where the heart is, for Dave, home is where the washer is. I slipped in a Forest Park bike ride, for 15 miles. I saw Charles, of Charles and Sarah, the two Great horned Owls that have occupied the park, every winter since 2009. It was a cold ride, in a mostly empty park. Good news, Stienberg Rink is open for the winter!

Rey had arrived, just before I returned home. He and Dave relaxed the afternoon away, talking sports and watching TV. Dinner will be at Lemon Grass, Vietnamese, on South Grand. This has become a family Thanksgiving eve tradition. They serve a mean dish of sesame tofu balls that we order as takeout, after eating dinner there. Dan, Dave and Rey will head out to a party, leaving Anne and I home alone again, at least until the wee hours.

“My Dinner with Andre”, was a semi-autobiographical, 1981, indie movie, starring Andre Gregory and Wally Shawn. This two actor movie was set across the white table-cloth of a NYC restaurant. Ostensibly a dinner conversation, Mr. Gregory proceeds to hold court, and then the conversation and eventually the audience captive for the movie’s 110 minute length. After his tour de force performance Gregory never appeared much more on-screen or on stage. Mr. Shawn is most famously remembered as Vizzini in “The Princess Bride”.

You only think I guessed wrong! That’s what’s so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” – but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line”! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha…

I once met Wally Shawn. It was on a flight from Saint Louis to LA. He was in first class. I was not. Back then you could travel from coach forward and use the first class restrooms. I must have eyeballed him too much, because on my last return from the lavatory, when our eyes met, I saw fear in his. It was the celebrity’s fear of the fan stalker that I saw in his eyes. I stayed in my seat for the rest of the flight.

Nexus of a Family Diaspora

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di•as•po•ra /dīˈaspərə/ noun

  1. A dispersion of a people from their homeland.
  2. The community formed by such a people

I might be bending the meaning of the word here and I am certainly excluding the capitalized definition of the word, but I’ll try to make it fit to our situation. Others might be content to just call it empty nest syndrome and move on, but one can have an empty nest when the last child moves out of the house and across town. Maybe far-flung family is a better description? No matter which term you choose to describe it, it aptly describes our family, at least on most nights, but not tonight. Tonight, with Dave’s safe arrival home, we are a family unit whole again. Happy Holidays!

Go West Young Man, I Mean East

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Gray day, smothered in fog, unable to shake off the Monday’s, I find myself feeling like the above Short-eared owl looks, and it is the end of the day. It wasn’t a bad day at work; I just didn’t want to be there today. Tomorrow should be better, lunch with the boys and a party after work, then it is the weekend. Dave should arrive home tomorrow night, and Rey on Wednesday. With Dan and I that makes four men and one woman for the weekend, I’m guessing that Anne will be putting the toilet seat down a lot this holiday.

Anne learned at school today that Dave is writing a paper. One of her colleagues went to high school with Dave and is also a Facebook friend. Hey wait; we’re friends on Facebook with Dave too. Checking it out … What?!? Dave has submitted an abstract for a paper that he plans on presenting in Hong Kong this May. I hope the State of Indiana is paying for this? If so, I feel bad about Anne’s and my alma mater, Michigan State, beating up on Indiana so bad last Saturday, 55-3. Well, at least we let them score.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print, now it’s time for the good stuff, the really salacious stuff. Like the stuff on Huff Post that you dare not click-on at work, and I’m not talking about just the articles explicitly marked, NSFW. [Ed. note: I don’t click on these articles at work.] I’m talking about big breasted celebrities, with their arms around the neck of Father O’Blivion, with lipstick on his collar. I’m talking rude japery and impulse buying. I dare not go any further, because I am trying to keep this blog family friendly.

I apologize for leading you, the reader, on. I feel like the salesman in that old saw, kneeling at his wedding bed, he proceeds to regale his bride with how great the lovemaking will be, all night long. You see dear folks; I’m already banned in Maplewood. I don’t want to be banned everywhere else, except maybe Boston.

I want a good blog, not a bad blog, but I do see how a bad blog could workout quite well, but no, that is not the way I want to go, it would boost readership, but no, and make money, no. [This sentence is running on so long that it is already grammatically obscene.] I just want to be edgy that’s right edgy. Ding, Ding, Ding, word count, that’s enough prattle for tonight.

Quiet Weekend

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Saturday morning, Anne labored mightily, trying to get Dan to church on time, for Bekah’s wedding. He made it and everything went off well. I should have taken a picture of him, because he looked pretty dapper in his new suit. Keeping with the wedding theme, we watched Kristen Wiig’s “Bridesmaids”. It is a comedy about women behaving badly, as counterpoint to the usual fare of men behaving badly. There were a few good laughs in the movie, sort of like an above average Saturday Night Live show, some hits, some misses. On the other hand, Melissa McCarthy as Megan owns every scene that she appears in.

Acting in my official capacity as one of Santa’s little elves, I spent all day slaving for a hot keyboard. No, I was not shopping online. I was being crafty. Anne and I did go shopping together for Thanksgiving dinner. I like to keep the idea of celebrating just one holiday at a time, but ordering long lead items requires some forethought. We’re planning a traditional turkey dinner. Traditional as in cooked in a conventional oven. No flash-frying, flamethrowers of other incendiary devices for us, don’t you know? We’ll have a traditional meal, with a suitable accoutrement of side dishes. By which I mean vegetables and I am not including pizza here, sorry Mr. Cain. We do not concur with the Debt of Education’s policy of leaving no child without a fat behind.

Today’s weather was horrible, a bone chilling 40 degree rainy day. We didn’t bike yesterday, when we had a chance to ride and today it always seemed to be raining, just finishing raining or just about to rain. I did manage to “fix” the front step yesterday, before the rain came. Plagued by crumbling concrete, I’ve repaired it before and likely will again, but the new Quick-crete patch should hold through the winter. The repair improves the curb appeal of the house some, but only completely new concrete will “fix” it.

Last week, the Institute for Highway Safety announced that occupants of hybrid vehicles suffer 25% less injuries then occupants of comparably sized conventional vehicles. This institute attributed this extra safety to the 10% extra weight that a hybrid vehicle carries around with it. The weight of a second motor and the battery packs adds up. Now, none of the news reports that I have read, said that hybrids had fewer accidents, just that when they did have an accident, the people inside it were safer.

The Prius has horrible rear visibility. Every driver, of any car, should always look behind them, when for example, changing lanes. Except with the Prius, I don’t think that that is enough. It has so many blind spots that its driver needs the situational awareness of an ace fighter pilot in a dogfight’s fur ball, just to change lanes on the highway. Balancing this defect, is the propensity of Prius drivers to play the mileage game. The Prius comes equipped with LCD displays. These displays give instantaneous feedback to the driver of their fuel economy. It is all to easy to fall into the mode of trying to maximize one’s mileage, especially on your regular commute, without regard to how this effects the other drivers on the road. At least in the Prius, if you get rear-ended, you’ll never see it coming.

The Civil War in Missouri

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It has been a week since we visited this exhibit, so closure demands that I write about it. The Missouri History Museum is best when it sticks close to home. With its new exhibit, “The Civil War in Missouri”, it does just that. The exhibit ably covers the war, its causes, events, and aftermath. It ranges across the state and across state lines, but mostly remains close to home, close to Saint Louis.

This year marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the start of the Civil War, a fitting point for commemoration. The problem for Missouri is that the war had been going on for some time by 1861. The rest of the country just happened to catch-up with us that year. This head start made for a dubious show of leadership on Missouri’s part.

Saint Louis then and still now was one of a pair of northern bookends, in what was a southern state, the other one being Kansas City. It held fast for the union cause and prevented Missouri’s slide into secession. Bloodshed officially came to Missouri, when union forces ousted secessionists from Camp Jackson, within the environs of present day Saint Louis. A few set piece battles, like Wilson’s Creek, serve only to punctuate what was essentially a guerilla war. A war marked by atrocities as much as fighting.

The History Museum’s exhibit covers all of these issues and more. Hundreds of artifacts comprise this show. Pictured above is the 34 star, 1861 flag. The union never recognized the session of the Confederate states, but did recognize West Virginia’s wartime split from Virginia, giving that flag 35 stars. Rather then just filling in one of the empty corners, that flag’s stars were rearranged, somehow fittingly leaving a hole in the center of that flag’s star field.

Most of the exhibit comes from the Museum’s collection. In every wartime exhibit, there is the cliché bible that stopped a bullet. In this exhibit there is Austin M. Standish’s dented pocket watch. Dented by a musket ball, it stopped the bullet and saved its owner life. More disturbing, for what it signified, there is James V. Johnston’s navel uniform. James was a powder boy on his father’s ironclad. He was also only six years old.

A significant, borrowed item is George Caleb Bingham’s Order No. 11, pictured below. In an effort to control the guerrillas in Missouri, a union general ordered the forced evacuation of the populace from four Missouri counties. Denied local support, this action did much to curb guerrilla activity. It also irrevocably harmed the vitality of those counties.

In addition to the exhibit’s historical artifacts, an array of interactive technology complements their value. Animated maps diagram military actions; Q&A scenarios allow the viewer to determine the loyalty or disloyalty of historical Saint Louisans; using electronic CAD software, design an ironclad, as James Eads would have. “The Civil War in Missouri” will be on display until March.