WHAT’S THIS?

 

I was driving around yesterday, again looking for something, anything, to photograph. When I pulled into Forest Park something caught my eye that made me stop and pick up the camera. A middle-aged man was cruising down the sidewalk on contraptions I’ve never seen. A little hard to see at this scale, but this variation on roller skates/blades has one wheel in the front and three in the back. He was pushing along with poles and a smile on his face.                     

TOWER GROVE PRIDE

 

Back home and a big change of scene. There is more to edit from Scotland but I’ll put those on Flickr.

There are two major Pride festivals in STL, a big parade downtown in June and a stationary event in Tower Grove Park in September. There were lots of folks who were out there. As happens often, it got so crowded it was hard to pick out individual people with my camera. This makes for a nice start, though.                

QUEEN OF THE ROLLER DERBY

Possibly a last pic from Circus Flora, pending what happens at today's No Kings demonstration in downtown St. Louis. It’s hard to see at this resolution, but there is a sturdy strap around the man’s neck that wraps low on the back of the woman’s head. I was able to use a fast shutter speed to freeze this but just looking at it was a blur. 

This afternoon should be interesting.                   

Madeleine Monday

I slept soundly Friday night, woke early but, since it was still dark, lay in bed for a while thinking. An idea occurred to me: I'm going to get Ellie roller skates today. She comes bounding upstairs to say good morning when she is with us. I ran the idea by her. "Yay!" was her answer.

It was a lot harder than I thought to buy children's skates. A big national sporting goods store, which had lots of them on its web site, had nothing in the shop but a small selection of adults' roller blades. So we went to Walmart. They don't even have them on the shelves, only on their web site. We wanted to see and touch the merchandise. So Target was a couple of buildings down the strip center. We gave it a try.

Bingo. Very small selection. The girls' stuff was all commercialized Disney themes, but she's into that. We got mismatched aqua and purple Frozen skates with pink and white Minnie Mouse joint pads and gloves. Fine with her.

She took to it instantly. Not zooming around but on her own two feet and eight wheels.
 

Mostly.