City Daily Photo Novenber Theme Day - Friend

I have one very best friend, someone who has stood (or in this case, sat) beside me for 44 years, my wife Carolyn. Always kind, always tolerant of my weird edges, and, as recently illustrated, supporting me in sickness and in health. We met in a St. Louis bar on St. Patrick's Day. We come from about as different backgrounds as two Americans could have: a farm in Kansas and an apartment in New York, but the relationship worked.

We share similar values (à gauche). Neither of us is interested in consumerism but we sure love seeing the world together. This picture was taken a few years ago above the Mediterranean in Eze, France. We've walked together from Tierra del Fuego to Everest base camp, gone to some of the world's great opera houses and raised two children. Now we dote on two, and soon to be three, grandchildren, including the redoubtable Ellie. 

I couldn't have a better friend.         

Dragon Breath (Dumpster Diving)

I have absolutely no fresh material. Lots of family stuff last weekend and overwhelming amounts of of work. (Did someone say I was going to retire soon?) So we have to dive into the archives.

This was taken en June at the eastern gate of Tower Grove Park. I don't think I have published before. A pair of griffins on pedestals face each other. The one on the north blows fire and smoke.

Probably have something for theme day tomorrow.     

Exercising the right to vote

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I was happy to vote today!
Israel had municipal elections and it was a yom shabbaton, a day off from work and school.
Two of our town's schools had polling places for the roughly 6,500 residents old enough to vote. 
It was a festive atmosphere in Meitar, with folks walking in, stopping to chat, and smiling at one another. 
And music and booths just outside the schools' gates. 
It happens every five years.
Democracy in action. 
May the best man win! 
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Boo! The Horror!

Ellie is a kindergartner at Gateway Science Academy, a charter school in the city, even though we live a bit outside of the municipal limits. On Saturday evening they had a function for the kids I'd never heard of, Trunk Or Treat. Any family that cared to decorated their car trunk for Halloween and passed out treats to the moppets. Ellie had a blast.

I am not in touch with popular culture but I am told that her costume is one of the characters in The Incredibles animated movies. Above, she poses with a classmate who is dressed as, well, I don't actually know. There were games, like tossing a ping pong ball painted like an eye into popcorn bags. And they had a DJ! I didn't know Ellie could dance but she boogied out, even with music only the parents would know.            

Madeleine Monday

I slept soundly Friday night, woke early but, since it was still dark, lay in bed for a while thinking. An idea occurred to me: I'm going to get Ellie roller skates today. She comes bounding upstairs to say good morning when she is with us. I ran the idea by her. "Yay!" was her answer.

It was a lot harder than I thought to buy children's skates. A big national sporting good store, which had lots of them on its web site, had nothing in the shop but a small selection of adults' roller blades. So we went to Walmart. They don't even have them on the shelves, only on their web site. We wanted to see and touch the merchandise. So Target was a couple of buildings down the strip center. We gave it a try.

Bingo. Very small selection. The girls' stuff was all commercialized Disney themes, but she's into that. We got mismatched aqua and purple Frozen skates with pink and white Minnie Mouse joint pads and gloves. Fine with her.

She took to it instantly. Not zooming around but on her own two feet and eight wheels.
 

Mostly.        

Cammo

Back home at last. I was sitting on our front steps yesterday afternoon while Ellie was doing something we will see tomorrow. A monarch butterfly flitted by and settled in the fallen leaves. We don't get many of these in our area. If I hadden't noticed it in the air I probably would not have seen it among the browns and oranges.         

The Rock

Almost everyone has heard of Alcatraz, in its day the baddest federal prison of all. It is located in the cold waters of San Fransisco Bay. "The Rock" closed as a prison in 1963. Now there are daily tourist excursions. The island is 1.25 mile from San Francisco and the currents are strong. The government claims that no one successfully escaped.

Since I have an iffy sense of balance, paddle boarding escapes me. My son did it on the lake shore of Chicago when he lived there, and still gets out on the lakes of central Michigan where he lives now. I have a friend in New Orleans who paddle boards through the bayous, dodging alligators as she goes. I wouldn't stay upright when the first ripple came by.   

Dining At Bubba Gump

Work is getting in the way of editing photos. Better get my priorities straight.

Mrs. C has a cousin who lives in Los Gatos, California, sort of out the back end of Silicon Valley towards the ocean. She has a middle-aged son who lives nearby. We've met him a few times. They picked us up from the Sausalito ferry last weekend, took us on a bit of a walk and then suggested dinner. We were on Pier 39 (see previous post) and our hosts took us to the last restaurant of the strip, Bubba Gump. There are many of them around the US.

The restaurant theme is based on the movie Forest Gump. The character had some developmental disabilities but his charm and determination took him far. At one time he was captain of a shrimp boat. The restaurant is all about shrimp. If that is not to your liking the options are limited.

I was taken aback by the balancing skill of the young man in the first picture until I noticed that the bottoms of the glasses had slots and were designed to stack this way. Margaritas were long on color and ice and short on tequila. The entrance to the place is in the lower right of the last photo.       

We Interupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programing

I still have some California material I want to post but this is worth a diversion. There was a full moon rise last evening. This was taken from my office window. The territory in the foreground is East St. Louis, Illinois. The Mississippi is just off the bottom of the frame. Although it was cloudless the air wasn't exactly clear. Wish the moon were sharper.   

Pier 39

The northern tip of San Francisco has an area known as Fisherman's Wharf. Obviously, fishing boats used to dock here but that's long gone. A number of tour boats and ferries now make there base and hundreds of sea lions have decided it's the place to hang out.The center of it, Pier 39, has become a circus. It's full of tourist junk, tasteless jewelry shops and mass market restaurants. (We ended up at Bubba Gump's for dinner but that's a long story.)

There was en entertainer out at the end who was pretty good. He tried to whip up the crowd, telling us candidly that noise attracts more people, a bigger audience and, hopefully bigger tips.   

Oct 24 on the Granby River

Muir Woods

We took an excursion Saturday to Muir Woods National Monument. the area north of San Francisco that is home to the giant redwoods. The experience is staggering - the silence, the feeling of awe, the sense of the depth of time. Wish the light wasn't so contrasty and that I had a tripod, but we make due with what is at hand.              

Tarnished Gold

We took an excursion yesterday to Muir Woods and got dropped off in Sausalito, a touristy town across the bay from the city. There was a mandatory stop for pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was  a bit hazy and the light was terrible so B&W was the way to go. More dramatic this way.   

Green Apples, Bowler Hats

Mrs. C and I took some time off to visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern art. It's a don't miss. We were last there several years ago. Since then there has been a huge expansion, tripling the exhibition space

The featured show was about the later work of René Magritte.  Some people consider his work simple and repetitive. The audio guide explained how complex the paintings are, challenging the viewer to think about odd juxtapositions and the subtle layers of the seen and unseen.  

It's obvious I link to take pictures of people in museums looking at the art, such as this old favorite.  You have to wonder what what gets through.           

 

Chinatown

We did a walking tour around SF's large Chinatown yesterday for as long as my back was cooperating. A lot of the area is visually explosive and full of color. There are more of these I may get around to editing but I'm supposed to be going to school here. At least some of the time.    

Welcome To SFO

Flew into San Francisco late yesterday afternoon. We really lucked out at the conference hotel and got a room on the 42nd floor with a sweeping view to the northeast. The tall building on the right is called Millennium Tower. It has sunk 17 inches/43 cm into the ground since construction. You can't see it in this picture but it is tilting a bit. Many people who bought zillion dollar apartments find that they are now nearly worthless. Lots of lawyers and engineers have all the work they can handle.

Just south of our hotel is a neighborhood called The Tenderloin, perhaps the worst in the city. As the taxi drove through, we saw many homeless people, rundown buildings and cheap hotels.  A man was was lying prostrate on the sidewalk being tended to by emergency medical technicians. There seemed to be a liquor store on every corner. There is no place for low income people to live here. A our driver told us that the median price of a house in the city proper is $1.3 million.