Dragon Breath (Dumpster Diving)

I have absolutely no fresh material. Lots of family stuff last weekend and overwhelming amounts of of work. (Did someone say I was going to retire soon?) So we have to dive into the archives.

This was taken in June at the eastern gate of Tower Grove Park. I don't think I have published before. A pair of griffins on pedestals face each other. The one on the north blows fire and smoke.

Probably have something for theme day tomorrow.     

Boo! The Horror!

Ellie is a kindergartner at Gateway Science Academy, a charter school in the city, even though we live a bit outside of the municipal limits. On Saturday evening they had a function for the kids I'd never heard of, Trunk Or Treat. Any family that cared to decorated their car trunk for Halloween and passed out treats to the moppets. Ellie had a blast.

I am not in touch with popular culture but I am told that her costume is one of the characters in The Incredibles animated movies. Above, she poses with a classmate who is dressed as, well, I don't actually know. There were games, like tossing a ping pong ball painted like an eye into popcorn bags. And they had a DJ! I didn't know Ellie could dance but she boogied out, even with music only the parents would know.            

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.        

Cammo

Back home at last. I was sitting on our front steps yesterday afternoon while Ellie was doing something we will see tomorrow. A monarch butterfly flitted by and settled in the fallen leaves. We don't get many of these in our area. If I hadn't noticed it in the air I probably would not have seen it among the browns and oranges.          

CORRECTION: Mrs. C, the house lepidopterist, botanist and grammarian, looked this up and informs me that this is not a monarch butterfly. It's called a comma, oddly enough. I'd be a mess without her.

The Rock

Almost everyone has heard of Alcatraz, in its day the baddest federal prison of all. It is located in the cold waters of San Fransisco Bay. "The Rock" closed as a prison in 1963. Now there are daily tourist excursions. The island is 1.25 mile from San Francisco and the currents are strong. The government claims that no one successfully escaped.

Since I have an iffy sense of balance, paddle boarding escapes me. My son did it on the lake shore of Chicago when he lived there, and still gets out on the lakes of central Michigan where he lives now. I have a friend in New Orleans who paddle boards through the bayous, dodging alligators as she goes. I wouldn't stay upright when the first ripple came by.   

Dining At Bubba Gump

Work is getting in the way of editing photos. Better get my priorities straight.

Mrs. C has a cousin who lives in Los Gatos, California, sort of out the back end of Silicon Valley towards the ocean. She has a middle-aged son who lives nearby. We've met him a few times. They picked us up from the Sausalito ferry last weekend, took us on a bit of a walk and then suggested dinner. We were on Pier 39 (see previous post) and our hosts took us to the last restaurant of the strip, Bubba Gump. There are many of them around the US.

The restaurant theme is based on the movie Forest Gump. The character had some developmental disabilities but his charm and determination took him far. At one time he was captain of a shrimp boat. The restaurant is all about shrimp. If that is not to your liking the options are limited.

I was taken aback by the balancing skill of the young man in the first picture until I noticed that the bottoms of the glasses had slots and were designed to stack this way. Margaritas were long on color and ice and short on tequila. The entrance to the place is in the lower right of the last photo.       

We Interupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programing

I still have some California material I want to post but this is worth a diversion. There was a full moon rise last evening. This was taken from my office window. The territory in the foreground is East St. Louis, Illinois. The Mississippi is just off the bottom of the frame. Although it was cloudless the air wasn't exactly clear. Wish the moon were sharper.