Cardinal flowers

After a busy weekend, celebrating the arrival of NCW in a new decade, I came back to St Paul. The Prairie Princess was here and this afternoon we decided to take a walk over by Como Park, a place that she hasn't visited in the summer in two years. It has changed a bit, but the important spots are still there. As it turns out there are quite a few cardinal flowers growing in various spots around the lake, and so I was able to join the other bloggers who have graced their blogs with photos of this flower.  Now five of us have seen them lately.

There are monarch butterflies in the area. On our walk in Como, around the lake and through the butterfly garden, past innumerable milk weeds, we encountered a grand total of three monarchs. It's a slow year for them apparently after last year's drought in much of the USA. I caught this guy on a flower near the north end of Como Lake.

It was a quiet day at Como today. School is in session, so there were no field trips yet, and the only other activity in this pleasant September evening were other walkers and a school of karate students breaking boards near the Schilling statue - not pictured here.

The 120 party

It was the weekend for the 120 birthday party where a lot of the family and friends of the Pengilly woman and her eldest son gathered to celebrate their birthdays. Both ages were round numbers and the total of their two ages is 120 years. You can do the math. There was much laughter and consuming of food and drink. I didn't get a head count, but it was a crowd. I brought along the Prairie Princess for her first visit to NCW's lake and her first chance to meet some of the family. There was a cake and a video presentation of a lot of photos from the lives of the principals. The celebrants are pictured below with the cake.

A hit activity at the birthday party was the photo booth. The idea was to don a costume or disguise and have your picture taken. These fun loving folk are the North Country Woman and her children in self selected disguises.

The weather turned to rain in the late afternoon, but the party went on under the rented tent and around the tables of food set up in the garage. There were several photographers, but I managed to get some shots of the attendees. This one depicts the NCW with grandchildren in her living room as the end of the birthday party was approaching.

Mark and Peggy arrived yesterday about noon after the party had dispersed. We had a chance for to talk and to eat together. They missed the big crowd, but had a chance to visit the lake and enjoy the north country atmosphere. Mark and Peggy posed just before they left for home this morning on their shiny new motorcycle.

Today was Farmer's Day in Bovey. I hadn't been there for the celebration in 53 years, so I thought it might be fun to stop to see what was going on. It was meant to substitute for a visit to the State Fair, a visit that I was unable to complete this year, mostly due to scheduling conflicts, extremely hot weather in St Paul, and a couple of days of fatigue from playing tennis in the extremely hot weather. Farmer's Day seemed to be a good substitute for the fair, a remedy better than more cow bell, so we set out this afternoon to see Bovey. I was going to get a photo to post to the blog, because if there's no photo, then there was no event. Well, there's no photo, because there was precious little in the way of event. I did run into an old classmate and her hubby, and I guess that made the day a little bit better.