My tax money at work

I guess autumn has begun to invade this land. The temperature dropped to 43 this morning and rose briefly to 61 in the "heat" of the day. I turned my home heating system back on.

I visited Como Park for a rest day walk and a chance to explore a bit. I like to see what kind of changes the powers that be are making to my favorite park. I walked part way around the lake and then thought I'd go to the Conservatory and see what sort of flower show was in session. The signs suggested a summer flower show and I was curious to see what they had.

There were a couple of changes on the way over Lexington and past the labyrinth. They have finished restoring the pool area just past the Lexington pedestrian bridge. For many years the pool was dry and the concrete was cracked. This summer enough money was available to get the pool into the condition in the photo below. It seems to be a big improvement.

And then before reaching the Conservatory I came across a sign announcing the restoration of the Friedrich Schilling statue that greets people as they enter the park. It's been there since 1905, and it has apparently fallen deeply into disrepair. They have a restoration specialist working on making it good again. The specialists have taken it off its pedestal. Here is photo of the statue last year.  Schiller was an important German philosopher, poet and playwright who died in 1805.

There was also work going on on expanding the Japanese garden near the Conservatory using Ordway money, but that won't be done until the spring of 2013.

The Conservatory flower show was pretty good but anticlimactic.  The flowers - roses, hibiscus, sunflowers, etc - are still in bloom outside.  I have included one photo anyhow.

September is more than half gone and we're just a few days from the equinox again (September 22).  Soon enough I'll be pining for sweet September.

Some old photos again

Saturday is often predominately a tennis day for me, but today was more so than usual. As usual, I played with the older gentlemen this morning at Marie Park. It was the second tennis day in a row, but it was pretty social and I played well enough to split sets. The US Open men's semifinals and the women's finals were played today and were televised on CBS. Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer won their matches in straight sets and will meet for the championship tomorrow after the Vikings play their opening season game. Justine Henin won her seventh major championship pretty easily over Kuznetsova. She's a very good player and has a better serve than most men.

And I bought some tennis balls and a tennis shirt at a local sporting goods store to load up for next week's matches.

Adam is still in Chicago, but I used his scanner again to move these photos to digital format. They are both from 1990 - 17 years ago when times were much different. This is Kelsey with a fish she caught in Wisconsin at Fred Prouse's cabin that summer. It's the only fish that I know she caught - ever - and she was pretty excited, and cute. I used to have the picture on my desk at work.


This is also from 1990. Adam and his buddy, Andy (Mr. Excitement, we called him), were making movies with the video camera. I think they did some sound dubbing and maybe some story boarding for their mini-classic, "The Package." The footage is still in existence and can be made available for a modest fee. This film making was fitted in between the video gaming sessions that went on quite a bit in those years.


I tried to do some digging today to find out why that Friedrich Schiller guy has a statue in Como Park. There was some googling to do and a pass through Wikipedia. It seems that Schiller made Carver's Cave in St Paul popular in some of his writings and thus may have encouraged some of his compatriots to emigrate to Minnesota. Carver's Cave used to exist in Dayton's Bluff in St Paul, but was destroyed many years ago in an orgy of railroad building. It had been a sacred site for the Indians when they owned the land and was reputed to be quite lovely. Another example of unplanned urban development.