Bright Saturday

It's a bright enough Saturday and the temperature is hovering around 50 degrees. After playing some tennis at Wooddale this morning and eating some lunch, Herb and I had a stroll around the neighborhood. The tennis, I'd just as soon forget, an off day, and get on with the blog.

The school board election is next Tuesday, so I won't have many more chances to use campaign signs as a relevant subject. This sign is an ad for the only current minority member of the St Paul school board. Kazoua Kong-Thao came to the USA as a refugee child from Laos and is a member of the St Paul Hmong community. She was elected in 2003 and is running for reelection this year. She is the Vice-chair of the school board and a strong representative of the minority community in St Paul which makes up 70% of the student bodies. I am likely to vote Tuesday and likely will vote for her, too. We are electing four members this year.


It's November and soon there will be no more flowers growing in the outdoors. These black-eyed susans are still going strong and may be the last flowers to survive. I'll be watching them, because they are near my garage, and they are native plants from the variety that KS planted in the back yard before hoofing to Japan.


I have put the tennis scores out of my memory banks.

Time to Watch the TdF

The cool weather the last two days lured me back onto the Trek chained up in the garage. The goal was to go down by the river and get a couple of photos and get in some miles for July. I had just watched stage four of The Tour d' France (TdF) and the idea of a quiet ride appealed to me. It was a little windy, but as SS says, "if you don't ride in the wind, you don't ride" in the wind.

This is taken from the Wabasha Bridge in downtown St Paul. The boats are tied up at a fairly large marina at Harriet Island. A lot of the owners of these boats live in them. Many live there all year around. It seems like a miserable place to be in Minnesota winters, but they insulate the boats and make it through the winter just fine.


I liked this spot at the Science Museum of Minnesota because there is a garden of black-eyed susans. There are a few of them in KS's native grass garden in the yard, but not so many as this. The Science Museum is 100 years old this year, but it hasn't been in this building that long. The Museum spawned a big brood of ceramic dinosaurs (see yesterday's blog), but there weren't any on the Shepherd Road level, at least that I was able to find. They do have a lot of native grass and flower plantings, and they are quite attractive. They also have quite an attractive miniature golf course there that may be associated with the museum, and maybe not. In any case, it also has native plants as part of the landscaping.


It was another night for tennis. We were scheduled for 5:15 pm and at 5:10 the skies opened and it rained mightily for about ten minutes and made the tennis courts at Marie Park into a lake. It may be a case of bad karma. I had my trusty broom - the one that used to belong to Abraham Lincoln, only 10 new handles and 4 new heads - and we swept the courts. This shows Curt of the geezer gang using my broom. We were able to get the courts dry by six o'clock and managed to get in two evenly played sets. Maybe 6-4, 6-4.


Gas was $3.399 at the SuperAmerica on 35E and Highway 13. A possible new high.

I understand that there is a standard for rest room door colors in Michigan parks. Blue and orange are allowed.