Tag Archives: Chris’ Camera

Bike to the Boathouse

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First off, the Leaf Guard Gutter people showed up Friday morning, before we left for work. They installed our new gutters, so that all we need now is some rain to test them out some. There is rain in the forecast again, Friday night. 😉

I took Anne out to the Boathouse for her birthday. The Boathouse is in the Park, on Post-Dispatch Lake. The lake got its name, during some financial crisis, when the Pulitzer family funded a public works project to dig out the lake bed. Sitting outside, with the ducks, geese and egrets would have been preferable, but the wait was too long, so we ate inside. We got 11 miles. Thanks, from Anne, for all of the kind birthday wishes. The great picture below is from Chris’s Camera.

News from Saint Louis

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Tuesday evening, Anne got home first. Our general contractor’s sub-contractor for masonry work was busily working. Their scaffolding blocked the use of the front door, so Anne had to use the backdoor. She took the above picture. She asked the masons to let her know when they were done. An hour later, I get home, notice the repaired brickwork and the completed, cleaned up and empty work site. Admiring the work, I enter through the front door, which succeeded in startling Anne, who was still waiting for the mason’s knock. Two months in the waiting and less than a day in the making and the first step of our multi-step home repair process was completed. Wednesday brought rain again, so the roofer was put off for another day, hopefully on Thursday. After the roofer comes the painter, for the trim and then Nick, the awning guy. So with a little dry weather, we might be complete with our February storm damage repairs.

Before the heavens re-opened and another deluge fell on Wednesday, I was able to get a bike ride in, before work. Without having the benefit of Anne’s skirt to hide behind, I got ravaged by the big dogs in the Park’s predawn bicycling activities. I did manage to get 15 miles in though. I returned home, showered and dressed for work. On the way there, I stopped at Starbucks for my usual Grande (medium) Latté. The Latté Ladies were also in a mood to have some sport with me. The register lady first called out, “Latté for Mark”. This soon morphed into, “Mark for Latté”. All of which was lost on me, because I had my nose buried in my Weapon of Mark’s Distraction, my iPhone. Only later, after I noticed that “Latté” was written on my cup, instead of the usual “Mark”, did I finally put the pieces together. Today, I should plan on paying more attention to my surroundings, but watching and waiting, as the other Starbuck patrons get served is too boring. I’d rather skim the NY Times or just play with my iPhone.

Chris returns to one of his favorite subjects, the Clemont Hotel. In this shot, the morning sun is reflected onto the Clemont, from the windows across the street. These reflections become golden decorations on the face of the hotel.

Me & Royal Society

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“I told you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week … but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting…by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs … but by a two-thirds majority in the case of…” Michael Palin, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Great Britain, The Commonwealth and alas America are all a buzz this week about Kate and Will’s impending wedding. London bookies are taking bets on everything royal wedding related, from what color hat will the Queen wear (at 2:1, yellow), to who will cry at the wedding (at 1:1, Kate’s mother). Both of these are fairly sure bets. But for every devotee there is likely a detractor too.

File this under unexpected consequences, but when the British government made Kate and Will’s wedding a national holiday, it created a mass exodus from the British Isles. Last weekend, Easter, was also a British holiday weekend. In the US, holiday weekends are normally 3 days, but in the United Kingdom, they are 4 day affairs, Friday to Monday. Back-to-back holiday weekends mean that for a mere 3 days of vacation, your average Londoner can string together 11 days off. A full 2 million subjects are fleeing the realm during this period, or about 3% of the population. Extra flights were put-on to handle the load. I’m not saying that those people who are leaving the country are disloyal to the crown. Maybe, they just prefer to watch the wedding on the telly, from the south of France?

That entire hubbub is over there, but over here, in the colonies, are things really all that much different? In the United States, we don’t have hereditary nobility, except for possibly, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, or the Bushes, etc. We do have American royalty, or more particularly Hollywood royalty, and there is a hereditary component there. One need only look at Drew Barrymore’s family history for an example. But our Hollywood nobility earned their titles, primarily through their abilities and not simply by the accident of their birth. Our, Hollywood nobility is not confined to US citizenship. The King’s Speech, a British production about British royalty, was coronated at this year’s Oscars.

This royal Anglophillia of Americans is not confined to the big screen either. Over the past six-months, two BBC imports, Downton Abby and Upstairs Downstairs have been battling each other, each reaping their ratings rewards and both ingratiatingly indoctrinating the American public into life under an upper class. In both these series, the aristocracy appear so good to their servants. Sometimes they even treat them like they would their own children.

It seems to me that this country once had a revolution to shed these aristocratic tendencies. Our country is only just emerging (hopefully) from one of its great trials, The Great Recession. Preceding this event, economic stratification in the United States had reached levels not seen in generations. The recession only accelerated this division. We don’t need to codify this disparity, with royal trappings, otherwise, the joke of an anarcho-syndicalist commune would lose its humor on both sides of the divide, both upstairs and downstairs.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night …

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… and stormy morning, stormy weekend and stormy all next week. The old saying, April showers bring May flowers, comes to mind. So what do May flowers bring? (see asterisked answer below) Chris’s camera contribution, Storm over Monterey, epitomizes this theme, look for it below. One could even make the case that it is the origin of this theme, since the storm photographed there Wednesday, is the one here Friday. All of the rain that we have had and the rain yet to come, will serve as excuse to my contractor, for why no work has yet been done to repair the house, from another, earlier, dark and stormy night.

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest uses the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night”, as a signifier of purple prose. This contest was formed to “celebrate” the worst extremes in this style. The contest is sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University and recognizes the worst examples of “dark and stormy night” writing. Its website claims that the WWW in its URL stands for Wretched Writers Welcome. Is this a writing contest that I could win?

All this rain has to go somewhere, so into the creeks and rivers it flows. The creeks do rise and then also the rivers and we have flooding. A month ago, I took the above picture of the Mississippi, flowing under the Eads Bridge. The Missouri River is already in flood all across the state. The Mississippi is so far, not so bad off. One can only imagine what the coming week of rain will do to all the river levels. So if the creeks don’t rise (too much) and the Good Lord willing, maybe Anne and I will get some bike riding in this weekend. 

* Pilgrims 😆

My Next Quinquennium

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quin·quen·ni·um /kwinˈkwenēəm/ Noun: A specified period of five years.

I love new words, especially the 50¢ variety, and so it is with quinquennium. I encountered it while reading a business article about China, where the author was speculating about the future of the Chinese economy, over the next five years. He was less than optimistic. The juxtaposition of quinquennium and the Communist phrase, five-year plan, gave the article an interesting dichotomy.  

The machinations of the Chinese economy are beyond me, but the article did cause me to think about where I saw myself in the next five years. Remember that interview question? Optimistically, I see myself as being retired in the next five years, but another business article seemed to cast doubt about that too.

According to this article, the concept of retirement is both very modern and also rather transitory. As late as the 1880s, ¾ of American males were still working at age 65 or older. Records for American women were not kept then. The nadir was reached in 1988 when only 20% of men 65 or older were still in the workforce. As of last year that number had ticked up to 22%. The reasons for this are many and varied. Men and women are living longer. The paradigm of a person working their entire career at just one company is almost archaic. More and more employers no longer offer pension plans. This trifecta has reversed the century old trend of earlier retirement, and it is not coming back.

As Anne has just pointed out to me, while previewing this post, I won’t be 65 in five years, only 62 years old. So, my aforementioned optimism, might have been better labeled, delusion, but such are the things that dreams are made of. On the company website, they have this neat little widget that estimates your retirement income. It comes up set to age 65 and for me reads “comfortable”. I could slide it all the way to the right, age 75, and it would read “almost rich”. If I slide it all the way to the left, like next year and on a Monday morning, I do wish it could go further, it would read like rural Mississippi. Is it coincidence that after such a lovely weekend, I chose this theme to write about on a Monday evening?

This post’s three pictures are from Chris’s Camera, taken in Santa Cruz. They include close-ups of Nik and Erendira Wallenda and another telephoto shot of the couple on the high wire. They have three children, Yanni, Amadaos, and Evita, who, have DNA passed down from 25 generations of circus performers. Nik’s ambition is to honor the memory of his great-grandfather Karl, by walking across the Grand Canyon. He has already secured the permits. Another contingent of the Wallenda family performs in Saint Louis, as part of Circus Flora. Anne, Joanie and I regularly go to see them perform.

Spring Chicken Ride

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Sunday, Anne and I rode the Bicycle Fun Club’s Spring Chicken ride. It started and ended in St.  Libory, IL. Saint Libory or in Latin, Saint Liborius, was a 5th century Catholic bishop. He is still venerated as the patron saint of Paderborn, Germany. Needless to say, St. Libory, IL was founded by Germans. We did the middle route and got 36 miles, on what was a picture perfect spring day. After the ride, we ate at St. Libory’s Chicken Restaurant and had chicken, except that Anne had fish. Joining us in this post-ride repast were fellow Team Kaldi’s members, Mark [the good one], Merri, Susan, Don and John. Where was Tom?

I got up early on Sunday morning, early enough to catch the tail end of the BBC night service that runs in the wee hours of the night, on our local radio station, before the NPR news comes on. Instead of their usual and also unintelligible cricket scores, they were interviewing some Cornell professor on control theory for bicycles. Apparently, while riding a bicycle is easier than thought, understanding how it is done is even harder than ever imagined. The professor had all sorts of techno-babble for his control theories that I will spare you. He did have one thought that I would like to share. He compared the bicycle to the airplane. In 1903, if you walked into the Wright Brother’s bicycle shop, you would see bicycles that were both recognizable and not too dissimilar to what we rode on Sunday. Moving on to Kitty Hawk though, the Wright Flyer bears only passing resemblance to today’s airplanes. The professor hypothesized that while the 1903 design for an airplane was hardly optimal, the 1903 bicycle’s design was. Such is perfection on two wheels. 

Brothers Chris and Frank cruised around Monterey bay, up to Santa Cruz and toured the beach boardwalk there. In addition to the usual boardwalk activities, like the Sea Flyer, pictured below [I love this shot], Nik Wallenda performed his high wire act. Nik is seventh generation Wallenda. He holds the Guinness record for the longest distance and greatest height ever traveled by bicycle on a high wire. He and his wife are pictured performing together, on the left.