Turkish Pavilion

Posted on October 31, 2020 by RegenAxe

Friday, we returned to Tower Grove Park. It had been quite a while since last we walked there. Plus, it had been a while since we had seen the sun, making our walk doubly enjoyable. I brought along the drone, while Anne looked for birds. I love being able to photograph again all of the sights around town from a new angle. Several of the pavilions were hosting costume parties, where people kind of, sort of maintained a social distance. With no wind to speak of and the temperature in the mid-fifties, it made for a very pleasant day.

Today, Halloween, the weather is expect to be even finer and we plan on getting out to a park again to enjoy it. This year, we have elected not to participate in today’s pagan holiday. Instead, we’ll draw the shades and hunker down. Today’s word for the day, latibulate, tells it all. It means to hide in a corner in an attempt to escape reality. That is not to say that a few little goblins won’t ring our bell in an attempt to exorcise us from any devilish candy. I’ll miss seeing the little ones all decked out, their corny jokes or their stage fright when they try to utter those magic words, “Trick or Treat!” These are scary times that we are living in now.

With a year like this one, you don’t need stories of some fanciful and frightening dystopian future to entertain yourself with. 2020 has all of that covered. Just, read the news. That will make your hair stand up. You may have goblins and ghosts, Freddy and Jason, but none of those old tropes scare me, because I’ve got politics and plague and if they don’t scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what will. I hope and pray that we make it through this year and to the next, because even with a full moon tonight, things are looking pretty dark out.

Happy Halloween!

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Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on October 30, 2020 by RegenAxe

Anne went to the hospital yesterday. She had some blood drawn and had to take a cognitive test. Yeah, that one. Apparently, probably because a certain someone has blabbed about it all over the news, they no longer use person, woman, man, TV, camera, as the five words to remember and parrot back. Instead, she got: face, velvet, church, daisy, red. In case you were the least bit worried, by the end of the test, she was certified a very stable genius. Although, in another part of this test she was asked to recite as many words as she could in thirty seconds that begin with the letter “F”. Her problem was that there is a certain word, a wirty-dord that comes to mind. A word that she did not want to recite, but this being 2020 and all that, a word that kept reaching for the tip of her tongue. According to the tester, she would not have been the first one to recite it.

In case you were wondering, Anne had volunteered to participate in a medical study, called SEABIRD (Study to Evaluate Amyloid in Blood and Imaging Related to Dementia). For the price of her time and a few teaspoons of her blood, she got a t-shirt. Do they really measure blood by the teaspoon? The Red Cross still measures it by the pint, so I guess so. Anyway, the purpose of this study is to look for amyloid in the blood, as an early marker of future Alzheimer. Amyloid refers to abnormal fibrous, extracellular, proteinaceous deposits found in the brains of Alzheimer patients. Aren’t you glad you asked?

She was motivated to join this study, because her mother had suffered from dementia. This bit of family history probably makes her more attractive to the researchers running this study. They are only in the first phase of this study. If selected and only a third of the participants will be, she will be invited to join the study’s next phase, which will involve more questions and more bleeding.

Having known a person who had dementia, one has to wonder about oneself. When you are young and you can’t remember something that you should, it is easy to chalk it up to last night at the bar. But as you get older, these senior moments take on a more ominous portent. It is natural to forget more things with age. You have more to remember than when you were young. I feel that in the end it comes down to a matter of degree. The cutoff being determined by one’s own self-sufficiency. If asked, say everything’s fine, even if it’s not. Last night, we watched the new Netflix Sarah Cooper special, Everything’s Fine. Talk about some cognitive dissonance.

Red-legged Serlema

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I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor

Posted on October 29, 2020 by RegenAxe

Oh no, it’s nibbling my toe,

Sometimes life sends you a victory, but sometimes it sends you a defeat and sometimes it sends you 2020, but only once, I hope. At times like these it is best not to dwell upon the negative. Instead, it is better to accentuate the positive and proclaim all of life’s victories, no matter how small they may be.

Oh gee, it’s up to my knee,

Anne and I were walking yesterday, passing cars in the De Mun neighborhood. De Mun with its proximity to Washington University is quite cosmopolitan. This makes it ripe pickings for one of Anne’s favorite games, the license plate game. She has an app for that. In a normal year, with our multiple cross-country car trips, she can secure several victories a year, seeing plates from all fifty states.

This is anything, but a normal year and she has yet to win even one game. At the start of this month, she was sitting at forty-seven states. She still needed Vermont, New Hampshire and Delaware. She got Vermont when Dave and Maren texted her a photo of a plate. She has routinely taken my similarly texted pics, but then I play the game with her. She justified accepting Vermont from them, because she thinks that she saw a plate in the park. She just wasn’t sure.

Anyway, we saw Delaware yesterday. With the election, I take this as a good sign. She is now sitting at forty-nine states, with only New Hampshire left to go.

Oh fiddle, it’s around my middle,

Dan called us last night. Both he and Britt passed the test and earned their FAA certification as professional drone pilots. They next plan on making a promo trailer from the footage that they shot at the cabin and then begin shopping it around. His first stop will be with a producer who he once worked for. That project was a History Channel series. Mostly he worked at building the company’s studio, but he did get out in the field for the maple syrup episode. In the meantime, he’ll take union set dresser work to keep himself afloat.

Oh heck, it’s at my neck,

Dave had a birthday this month. At his request, I bought him a pair of crampons, so that he and Maren can hike more safely in the mountains of New England. Today, I texted him, just to be sure that they had arrived. He replied that they had, but then said that he had not used them yet. I told him that winter is coming and then I warned him about the wildlings up north. He asked, Canadians?