🎭 Theatre Writeups, 🛣️ Highway Updates, 📰 Musings on the News, and other 🗯️ Rants and Roadkill Along the Information Superhighway
My family is going to be in the San Francisco Bay area and the Sacramento area around Thanksgiving. I’ve posted the details in a friends-only post. If you might be interested in getting together, and have not yet friended me (so I know you want me to consider friending you back), please comment on this message, and we’ll see about coordinating things.
(Looking for updates on my dad: See his blog, grandpa_a)
We’ve arrived back home, and all are happy. The flight from STL to DEN was running late, but thanks to having a cart ready in DEN, we made it to our DEN-LAX flight in time. ellipticcurve picked us up, we had dinner, and then we got our car and came home. Now I’m catching up on everything.
Our bags are packed. We’re ready to go. We’ll see Linda just once more. Then it’s drop the car, off to Lambert, and then good bye.
Today, we fly home. This has been a good vacation: seeing family and friends I haven’t seen in 15+ years; rebuilding associations. Visiting a good city. Having fun together as a family. But I’m ready to go home (as for going to work, well…).
Many people have asked: Why St. Louis? In August? Are you crazy. The answer is simple. My mom’s family is here (only one left), and she grew up here. I wanted my daughter to meet this side and learn about where she comes from, as she’s the last of the line (my mom’s mom’s sister had one child, who had no children; my mom was an only child, as was I (effectively—my step-brother died when I was 10). We did this. But now, much as I love St. Louis, Los Angeles is home, and its time to come home.
In a little over 12 hours (as I write this), we’ll be seeing ellipticcurve, and will be home.
[For those that don’t get the title reference: It refers to a song by the children’s group Parachute Express (real-media-clip)]
Today, we went to go see the Butterfly House in Faust Park. This is a special butterfly enclosure with tropical butterflies, some of them quite exquisite. Lots and lots of butterflies. Flapping pretties. This makes two butterfly houses this trip. We also got to see part of a wedding; they regularly do weddings there.
Lunch was with the H’s, who showed us the new “big box” strip in Chesterfield. Sad. We also saw the construction of lots and lots of row homes in the county, lot line to lot line. Sad to say, these are the advance signs of the demon, ummm, the “Los Angeles”-ification of St. Louis. The Borg are here already: not only is there a Microsoft office in St. Louis, but every mall we have seen has been borg-ified by Westfield.
The afternoon we spent walking the “loop” in University City, along Delmar, doing some shopping. As we were sick of restaurant food, we stopped by Wild Oats in Clayton, picked up heathy food, went to Linda’s house, and cooked dinner. Yay! Healthy food! Yum, yum. Peach chicken (using the last of the peaches from Soulard Market last week), fresh broccoli and carrots, and brown/wild rice, with blueberries and raspberries for dessert.
I’m not sure there will be a post tomorrow: We’re flying back to Los Angeles! We are so looking forward to coming home. St. Louis is a nice place to visit, but… we miss our friends.
I hope everyone has enjoyed this travelogue. I know it will prove useful when we go to assemble the photo albums.
