Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this blogger from the swift completion of his self-appointed posts. I try to post everyday and I do. Sometimes I even post more than once a day. It is generally a pleasure, but sometimes it is a chore. Sometimes life gets in the way, like tonight. So, this will be an abbreviated post, just hitting the highlights sort-of-speak.
Tour de Grove
We biked today and got 16 miles. We rode over to the Grove neighborhood. It was sponsoring the Tour de Grove professional bicycle races. Yesterday, we missed the Loop de Loop, bike races in the U-City Loop. I would have liked to write a whole blog about the Loop de Loop. I like the sound of it, but that will have to wait until next year. We saw Kubie racing in the Women’s Cat 4/5 race. We also checked out the posters at Art Crank.
Art Crank is a charity art project to benefit Bike Works. Bike Works gets bicycles in the hands of underprivileged children. Art Crank is composed of forty artists, each of which designs a Saint Louis and bicycling themed poster. Forty copies are made of each poster, which sell for $40. Last year, everything was thirty. I bought a poster last year. It was all about Pee-Wee Herman’s ‘Best Bike in the Whole World.’ I’ve blogged about it in the past. I intended to get another poster this year, but stuff happened. Basically, we tried following a Trailnet ride, from just the pink dots and lost the trail. Just to get a few more miles. The ride’s arrows had been taking us back home, so that is where we went.
One final bicycling themed story occurred as we were returning through the park. Every Saturday afternoon, the knights that fight with Nerf hold court in their realm of the park. We were passing by just as the melee was breaking-up. I spied one knight mounted atop his bicycle, wearing full chainmail, with a Nerf sword ducked into his belt. I tried to get him to pose for a photo, but he was uncooperative and got away. It would have been a heck of a shot.
Yadier Molina
All of this happened earlier on Saturday. Why couldn’t I have just written it up? Well, we had Cardinal baseball tickets tonight. My boss had gifted them. We had four tickets, so John G. and Joanie accompanied us. Joanie and we drove over to the neighborhood MetroLink stop and as we were walking down to the platform, I heard John call out my name. Cool! So, we all rode downtown together. Adam Wainwright, the Cardinal starter, got shelled. The 7-2 final score doesn’t tell the whole story of how bad it looked. But, it is only a game and we are still the World Champions.
The preceding picture shows Yadier Molina, the Cardinal’s catcher at bat. It is a pretty good action shot, if I do say so myself. OBTW, he is still 0 for life in home runs versus the Braves. This swing resulted in nothing more than a long fly out. Anne reminded me that we had seen his first major league at bats. The first time he stepped to the plate, his batting average was 0.000. He got a hit, so the next time his average was 1.000. He was put out, so the third time his batting average was 0.500. In the intervening years he has managed to stabilize his batting average at a respectable figure and become the well respected ballplayer that he is.
It was so late that I forgot to wish my brother, Frank, Happy Birthday, Ski!