We put Chris on the train this morning, sending him back home to Alice. We really enjoyed his visit here, liked showing around town and got see again things that we don’t normally see ourselves, but he wore us out. Today is going to be a rest day and we have no further plans to go outside into the heat or anywhere else for that matter. The Post-Dispatch had a disturbing headline today. Both the city and the county have reinstituted indoor mask mandates, effective Monday. The Republican state attorney general plans on trying to overturn these mandates, but he tried this before, without much success, so bless his little heart. I find this news disturbing in light of our activities of yesterday. The morning was fine, we toured Laumeier Sculpture Park. We were always outdoors and the place was not particularly crowded. After a while though, I found the heat to be a bit enervating. Eventually, we went on for lunch. We first tried Southwest Diner, but they are only doing outside dining and it was already too warm for that. We finally, lit upon the Peacock Diner in U-City, which was nicely air-conditioned and also not very crowded. With the mercury climbing and a hot afternoon ahead of us we drove downtown to the City Museum. Driving downtown, we all noticed how hazy it was and wondered if that was because of the Canadian fires or whether it was just regular Saint Louis summertime weather. Today’s paper indicated that the haze was caused by the fires. The museum’s lot was full and the lot across the street was nearly full too. I ended up parking in a less than desirable spot. I ended up scuffing up the new car. I’ll have to do something about that, but not today. Chris is in the hunt for some proverbial perfect hat this summer, so before we entered the City Museum, we took a brief detour around the corner to the premier milliner in town, but alas it was to no avail. If parking was not enough of a tell, entering the museum we discovered that we were not the only ones in Saint Louis who thought that going to the City Museum on a hot, hot, hot day was a good idea. Millions of screaming children, too young to be vaccinated, were running around and their parents were all chasing them. We all wore masks, but not with the diligence that we should have. We soon climbed up the stairs to the less kid friendly and correspondingly less crowded upper floors. It was on the fourth floor, where we saw the pictured Floor. This artwork is composed of a couple of dozen glass panels, each a meter square that are filled will thousands of miniature figures. Packed closely together, each figure is seen looking up, while holding both hands above their heads, palms pressed against the upper glass pane. I’m usually pretty good about photographing an artwork’s tag but I missed the boat on this one. It took quite a bit of internet sleuthing to find its name and artist. In the mist of this search, I happened upon a Reddit thread that talked about the people who live in apartments on the upper floors the museum building and all of the strange sounds that they hear at night and the title for this post was first cast. We did Salt + Smoke barbeque for dinner. It is a good thing for our diet new life style that we are going back into lockdown.