Ice Carnival at the Loop, St Louis

The Loop is a lovely, lively area of St Louis,(well, technically, University City)..an area of shops and restaurants, within walking distance of Washington University (and more importantly, of DnA’s home.)

They had a lovely Ice Carnival and it was that day that there was also a frost, and that added beauty to the Carnival.

There were a lot of ice sculptures on display, and it was a nice play on words to see a “snow” man made of…ice! Here we are, mother and daughter, with Mr Icy Cold (and that certainly described the weather, too!)

There was a young girl selling hot chocolate on the sidewalk but we made the mistake of waiting for our spouses to turn up (KM went to get the camera, and he took this picture)…and she had vanished when we went back looking for her. So we went to a lovely restarant on the Loop called Blueberry Hill, and had lovely hot French onion soup instead…

Another bald eagle story..

kalyan sent me this link…I really don’t know whether to laugh at the greed, or cry at the death….

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/012907/loc_20070129013.shtml

Fall in Winter

That is not a cryptic caption. I had gone for my usual walk, when I lost my footing, perhaps on this patch of ice and grime, and fell. After two weeks, the golf ball over my right eyebrow is a marble, and the black eye looks more like insomnia and less like one of those comic book illustrations that we all laugh at. But, having picked myself up, I realized that the road and the edge of the pavement (er, sidewalk), made a picture that appealed to me….here it is, a study in brown and white:

Safety is a Dangerous Job…

What happens to a “safe cover”?

Ironic..

and ironic that “ironic” is the word to use for this …er..ironic cover…

And lastly…I first approached this, thinking that it was, possibly, another avant-garde sculpture in Forest Park!

Formulae

High Intelligence+Youth+Sometimes Good Looks=Very Often, Arrogance+Ageism.

Intelligence + Humility= Wisdom

Information =/ (no “not-equal-to” symbol on this keyboard ) Knowledge

Ignorance =/ Innocence

Still cannot sleep…

…so, if you haven’t yet, do watch “An Inconvenient Truth” , a documentary on global warming, presented by Al Gore. It’s a scary documentary, no matter what he says about there being a message of hope.

Gore lacks the charisma of Clinton, but he comes across as a man of substance. If I had a vote, I would vote for him rather than the known Hilary or the unknown Obama…

And if you want to be right royally depressed, read The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, the Man Booker Prize winner.

Expecting reactions to this…

A bald visitor to the Sambandhi’s home…..

I posted about how I missed the first Bald Eagle event (Jan 14th) at Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, St Louis, when it got cancelled due to the ice storm. I then waited eagerly for a week, and we went to Alton, Illinois, on Jan 22nd to see the eagles in their riverine habitat. We had to stand about mile away to see them, standing in the freezing cold, turning an enraptured blue….

And then, today, I get an email from my son-in-law’s mom in Portland, Maine, which goes as follows:

“I was just getting out of the shower when the phone rang and it was
Laurie Jensen next door asking what kind of bird that was in one of
our birches, devouring a duck. Take a look!”

A bald eagle had caught a duck, and was sitting in the birches on the edge of her front lawn, eating it!

She is not a wildlife photographer…but she rushed for a camera, and though it was low light, she took a few hurried shots…here they are. These birch trees are on her lawn, which faces the Atlantic…they are about 50 ft from her window….here the photos are:

The eagle stops to look directly into the lens…with the kind of vision it has, the bird probably took in every detail of LS’ home, camera, even the number of her eyelashes (eagles would be able to read fine newsprint across the length of a football field)….

Having decided that the photographer is not a threat, the bird then stoops back to its meal (it’s a duck that the eagle has caught)

And the meal then proceeds….

I sat at those same windows in that house for 4 days…of course the bald eagle did not visit until de Ponti Murphy left and had taken a lot of trouble to see its brothers and sisters elsewhere!

From one of my favourite humourists

This one is for premkudva, who has brought a smile to my lips oftentimes with his anecdotes about his two daughters, and his wry comments upon the world. He is a stamp-collector, and this is what Dave Barry has to say:

“I never could get into the traditional hobbies, like religion or stamp collecting. I mean, the way you collect stamps is: Every week or so the Postal Service dreams up a new stamp to mark National Peat Bog Awareness Month, or whatever, and you rush down and clog the Post Office lines to buy a bunch of these stamps, but instead of putting them to a useful purpose such as mailing toxic spiders to the Publishers’ Clearing House, you take them home and just sort of *have* them. Am I right? Have I left any moments of drama out of this action sequence? And then the *biggest* thrill, as I understand it, the real *payoff*, comes when you get lucky and collect a stamp on which the Postal Service has made a *mistake*, such as instead of “Peat Bog” it prints “Beat Pog”, which causes stamp collectors to just about wet their polyester pants, right?”

I will never again be able to look at a stamp collection without thinking of Peat Bog Awareness!

The Bald Eagles

Gosh, this jet lag means no sleep at the “right” times…so I decided to post the bald eagle photos before going off for my walk…Photos by KM. The camera had a lot of trouble midway through and we were lucky to get any pics at all.

We went to Alton and before we were taken to the eagle habitat by bus, we went to see a captive bald eagle on the hand of his trainer, at the Visitors’ Center.

Here he is, McGuire the bald eagle, in all his majesty…he is named after the famous baseball player. He lives in Milwaukee.

Protected: A dream…

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