When It Rains, It Pours

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In River City it was everywhere today.

Autumn Colors Slowly Arrive

I found a tree that has changed to its autumn colors. This photo is from Friday, yesterday, and was taken at St Paul's Battle Creek Park while I was on a quest for colorful trees. This guy didn't seem stressed, so I guess the foliage change is in progress.


A photo from my refrigerator. These young fries have not yet learned to write all the characters correctly (note the backwards "n" and "¢" on the sign), but are actively engaged in capitalist behavior. And they are pretty cute. It's 1986 and it's taken in the front of the homestead on a hot day.


Tennis was played by the geezers this morning at 9 pm. We managed to hold the session to two and a half hours. The weather was a bit brisk, but the predicted precipitation didn't materialize. I am not the oldest of the players, just second oldest. Bill C. is 68. I should actually get photos of these old guys to prove that we are actually playing all this tennis. Maybe next week.

The rest of the day was more restful. I did a little cooking this evening. It's autumn food time, so we had spaghetti squash and new red potatoes, along with fried chicken thighs. Nothing too special, but a good sign that fall has fallen is the urge to devour squash. I think that we'll have an extended fall this year. The weather is predicted to remain in the 70's through much of this week.

Squirrels Are Vermin

On my last trip to Park o'Minnehaha, I came upon a dead tree trunk standing in the park. It has a tiny door built into the trunk at about eye level, and hinged, decorated and supplied with a tiny handle. See photo. I'm suspicious that it was put there by Carl P., but who knows. As curious as I was, I opened the door slowly and the fake squirrel tail slowly sailed out. You can see it in the photo. A practical joke trap! If I had opened it rapidly as many would, I would have been startled by the "squirrel" on a spring jumping out at me. What is this doing in a public park in Minneapolis?


A beautiful day again, nearly 70 and sunny most of the day. No tennis.

The Lily Pad Said It's Time To Change

The leaves are slow to change, although they are leaning in that direction. I found these exotic lily pads at the Como Conservatory in a pool outside in the elements. They are not native plants, but as you can see they are beginning to change colors.


A closer view of a few of the same variety. They are the largest lily pads that I've seen. There is a sign next to the pool pleading with the public not to throw coins into them. What is it about water pools that makes people tale out their spare change and toss it into the water?


It was a nice day most of the day until about five pm when the skies opened for some more rain to grace our plants. I visited Minnehaha Falls, too, looking for color changing trees, without much success.

I played mixed doubles at Wooddale tonight. It was a lot of fun, two 7-6 sets and a lot of competitive back and forth points. I played well enough, but my shots were not as lucky as last night, so a trip to the lottery ticket seller was not in order tonight. Incidentally, my three powerball chances from last night came up extremely dry. Only one of the 6 money numbers showed up anywhere on any of my three chances, and then only once. It's a good example of how good I am at picking numbers, and I'm probably just as good as everyone else.

Lightning and Thunder on the Tundra

It was a nice day, most of the day, to play outside a little bit. The geezer tennis session was scheduled for 5 pm and the weather was mostly sunny. The courts at Marie Park have accumulated some leaves so we swept and raked them off before starting. We played two sets and a 10 point tiebreaker before the darkness began to impinge. There was a large dark area in the sky as we played and it began to light up with lightning and thunder as we quit. I was able to get home without getting wet, but the heavy rains came soon after. I had a good tennis day and had enough "lucky shots" that I stopped and treated myself to three powerball tickets. I'll let you know if I won anything sometime later this week.

The photo below is from 1985. Herb and I chatted on the internet with Kagami Sensei this morning from her apartment in Japan. She's was doing pretty well, but having some moments when she wished to be home. She wanted some photos for her Japanese language blog (one that I'm not able to read). She especially asked for this and another photo that have been on my refrigerator for some time. It's of her and her goony bro playing in the backyard with a hose and having a whale of a good time. Happy days. I sent the photo via email, but it is also "grab"able, I told her. She has another entry today in her xanga English language blog, part of which she wrote for therapy. Have a look, it's a good read.


This is a cartoon with some editorial content that I did a couple of days ago. Unky Herb liked it well enough that he said I should put it on the blog. Since I'm not much of an artist, I should apologize for the art content. Shoulda woulda.

Racketry Science

The temperature managed to rise to 57 degrees today on a dark, dank day in September. I stayed off the bike because of the wind and chill, and played no tennis either. I trekked around Como Park for about an hour this afternoon. The tree damage from the early August wind storm has not yet been removed. Large piles of limbs and trunks are scattered throughout. There were chain saws in use, workers trimming back jagged branches to add to the piles. There is also a campaign to rid the park of the buckthorn menace, which also adds to the piles.

I took a picture of my current racketry. On the left is "Wilson", the newest of the two, a Prostaff k Six-One 95 that I thought would be a first stringer, but he had weight problems. On the right is a six year veteran, a lighter Wilson Hyper ProStaff 6.1, my current weaponry.


The weather promises better for tomorrow.

The Growing Season Continues

Just so you know, the tomato plants are still growing outside my back door. There are a couple of reddish orbs that I'll be picking soon, and the weather creatures haven't yet predicted an end to the growing season. The tomatoes are invading the lawn in their quest for sunshine and have a reasonable crop of greenies for frying. Dad used to say that he only would eat tomatoes when they were green and fried. I've eaten some since and am not that impressed. Yes, he didn't like ripe, red, luscious tomatoes. He claimed that he had eaten his fill as a youngster on too many occasions to still appeciate their sweet redness. I, on the other hand, still like ripe tomatoes.


The zukes are giving up. They have no potential fruit and the leaves are beginning to brown.

The tennis goes on. We (the geezers and me) tried to play at Marie Park at about 5:15 and managed to get in two games before the deluge. We retreated to Woodbury Tennis Club via US 494 through a driving rain, and bumper to bumper traffic, to finish the evening's fray. We managed another two sets and a fraction before calling it a night. The courts at Marie are getting marginal for evening tennis. They are accumulating a lot of leaves dropped on them from the fading foliage, and that's distracting. In addition, the sun retreats completely out of the sky by about 7 pm and that's just not enough court time.

First Day of Fall

Today was the first day of autumn. It seemed much like summer, except that the length of the day has shortened. Lacking a tennis matchup, I took another bike ride around the city. It was windy, not as windy as Friday, but windy enough. I rode up to Hamline and through residential streets making a loop back through the Macalester campus and along St Clair to home. It was a meandering 11 mile journey and mostly out of the wind. I have a picture of one of the street art figurines that St Paul has been putting up over the last several years. This one stands in front of the vets office where we used to take Taggy for his rabies shots. They always treated Taggy with TLC. The art is Woodstock acting like a doggy doctor for Snoopy. It's the right place for this particular piece of art.


There are no alpaca farms in St Paul, so there will be no photos of those particular exotics on this blog. There may be something comparable at the Hoofed Animals building at the Como Zoo. I know that they have giraffes, bison and ostriches, but I don't think they have llamas or alpacas.

Herb spent another weekend in Chicago. There's a pretty good zoo in Chicago, too.

Equinox

This is my photo of the autumnal equinox. It should be understood that Grand Avenue runs east and west in St Paul. I took this photo on Grand at sunset on September 22, the closest sunset to the equinox in Minnesota. The sun shines directly east on the equinox. Grand is a busy street and I should have found one with fewer vehicles so I could concentrate on the photo, rather than saving my neck.


I played some tennis this morning again. It was a couple of sets at 9 am, before the sun was very high in the sky. It was a little chilly, but the day warmed and it was a beauty of a day.

Winded Again

I'm posting a photo that I actually took today. It was warm this morning, but the weather prognosticators were predicting strong winds with gusts to 35-40 mph. Undeterred, because I had no tennis to play today, I took a ride to the windiest place I know of, down by the river. It went along very nicely until after this photo was taken at the turn around point, some distance downstream from the Lafayette Bridge. The photo captures the Mississippi and the Capital City all right, but doesn't capture the essence of the wind. The journey after the turn was upwind, reaching, at times, six miles an hour. Another lesson relearned.


It was another 12 miles for the summer and gets me to about the mileage that Santini and Mr Moohoo had near the end of April.

There will be tennis in the morning, rain or shine, and opportunities to catch the turning of the leaves. Then, on Sunday at 4:52 CDT the autumnal equinox arrives. [I looked it up this time.]