Christmas Holiday

Christmas day in Minnesota. We had a nice breakfast and played some games on the Wii. Tennis and bowling were fun, and no one got hurt. Then we opened some presents. The photo records the gang who was here and the fun they were having. I used the tripod and the timer on the camera, so it's the best of about three shots that we were willing to stand still for.



Merry Christmas to all.

Snow Event

The concept of "white Christmas" is overrated. We are getting a snow event the day before Christmas Eve and it's snarling the roads and causing airline delays. There is much gnashing of teeth. I have been out for a walk to Grand Avenue in the blizzard and found it populated with last minute shoppers. I was one myself. Since that adventure I have been inside waiting for the snow fall to stop and the shoveling to begin. Those are my feet waiting on the couch. The shovel is in the garage.



Merry Christmas.

Bad Air Day II

Merry Christmas. It's only slightly premature and I have a photo of one of the decorations on my Christmas tree to decorate the blog. This comes under the heading of "fun with photography."



It was another air alert day for the Saintly City, but the level has abated and the forecast says snow and better air. The principal pollutant is particulate matter. There is only one day of the year with less daylight than today. And that is tomorrow, which is 4 seconds shorter.

My main exercise of the day was a walk to Grand Avenue and a turn around the aisles of one of the fine emporiums of capitalism on the street. The stores are pretty busy with last minute shoppers. I spent a little time in line at Regina's Chocolates on St. Claire. It's a locally owned and operated (since 1926) candy store that seems to be having a very good sales season. It doesn't have a web site. On days that are distant from major candy holidays it is an easy place to get service, but when I left the store today the line stretched to the exit and the prospective customers blocked my way out. They were shopping locally.

There is a lot of Christmas activity in the air, and with the impending snow, the whitish Christmas that we all dream about is very likely to come to pass.

There will be another day of tennis tomorrow.

Remember Flowers?

It's a gray Sunday and a short day at that. I'm reposting a lively orange flower with a bee attached to brighten up the post. It was taken this summer when the days were much longer and the sun brighter.


I had a walk around the neighborhood and along Grand Avenue. The shoppers were out and so were the Christmas decorations. The temperature was in the teens, too cold for much melting of the snow, but it was starting to look dirty already. Maybe it's the city air, or maybe the salt that lowers the melting point of snow so that it slushes up at a lower temp. There are a lot of Christmas decorations on houses, mostly lights, but an occasional reindeer or Santa ho-ho-ho-ing on the snowy lawn. We are actually very likely to have a white Christmas this year. I haven't seen many Christmas trees up close, but it is rumored that many more environmentally sensitive LED lights will illuminate Christmas trees this season. They are purported to use about 10% the energy of the older incandescent lights from last year.

I watched the Vikings on TV for a while and they looked to be winners again. Four in a row!

Not much else happened today. There will be some tennis tomorrow and a busy schedule for the week. The USTA 8.0 mixed doubles team league will begin on Friday, so there will be real competition to report. There are only 13 days until the winter solstice and 16 days until Christmas.

October in September

It was primary election day in St Paul. I felt my civic duty and went to the polls. There was a single race on the ballot - the race for City Council for Ward 2. While I was signing in, the election judge noticed the street that I live on. He wasn't busy. I was the only prospective voter in the room. He said that he thought that Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) had lived near me in St Paulwhen she was a teen-ager. That sounded interesting, so when I got home, I used my favorite search engine and found a biography of the famous aviatrix(?), "East of the Dawn." According to the book, she lived just down my street about a block, but only lived here in 1913, the year she was 16, and the year my mother was born. They lived in a house that they couldn't afford to heat. I'll get a picture of the house soon, and launch it into cyberspace. She moved to Chicago the next year and graduated from high school there. She became world famous as a dare devil flyer. In 1937 she and her airplane were lost in the Pacific and her body was never found.

It was cold enough today that it reminded me of Christmas. I have an old photo of Kagami Sensei and her baby cousin, Wireless, from, Christmas, 1989. It's cute enough to be reproduced here. KS looks like she's about to break into a dance.


As unbelievable as it seems, a hard freeze is expected tonight in the northern half of the state. Less than a week ago it was over 90 and I had to stop playing tennis because I only had one bottle of water and its contents had been swallowed. My tomatoes are safe tonight here, the weather creatures predict 38 degrees.