This is what you should do if you ever find yourself in a room with four orcs

Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the miles, maybe it was me, maybe it was that I asked her to look fierce for the picture, nah it was probably the heat. I woke up in the Lou this morning, still with a body clock set to Pacific Time. Consequently, our usual dawn launch bike ride was launched closer to the crack of noon today. It was hot out, but hey this is Saint Louis, what else can you expect. We bicycled over to Tower Grove Park for this year’s rendition of the International Festival. This is a great festival, but some how it always manages to be so ungodly hot. This year was no different. We ended up stopping off at the gardens for a wee bit of a cool down, both ways. On the way out, we caught a sale of the garden’s daylilies. We had the luck to arrive, just when they were going on sale, buy one, and get one free. I’ll plant the roots tomorrow morning. We saw the Rack + Clutch, Free-Range Fashion step van again and I managed to cajole Anne into at least looking inside. When we finally arrived at the festival, our first stop was the Model UN booth, where Bobbi was hanging out. She went to high school and played D&D with Dan. I know what she would say if told, “You’re in a room with four orcs.” I can hear her now, “I smell bacon!” Our next stop was the Scottish booths. There were about a half-dozen of them. It is here where Anne posed with her six-foot two-handed claymore. Looking fierce, dear! They had a listing of the clans and their septs and under Clan Farquharson could be found Sept Finlayson. They also were doing sheaf tosses. I got a good picture of this game. We ate in Afghanistan and then set out to explore the rest of the world. Of particular note in our explorations was an East Saint Louis African music and dance troupe, headed by a guy nick-named Sunny, who trained under Katherine Dunham. Sunny was also the name of Dunham’s older brother.