ROTATING STOCK

Didn't get any holiday weekend pictures yesterday. The weather was gray and hot with intermittent showers. Should be better today and I'll head downtown later.

However, I have tons of photos from last Sunday's Pride Parade. I had a bad back day and eventually parked myself on a cement wall. It turned out to be a good place to shoot the passing parade, the one on the sidewalk, not the street.                     

A NOT SO GREAT FIREWORKS SHOT

The rain held off last night so the family went to see the Webster Groves fireworks. It was bloody packed. Things didn't work so well. People lay out tarps hours ahead of time to claim a dry spot for viewing. The view from our area was partly blocked by trees and street lamps. And the remote shutter release cable I have didn't fit my current camera body so, using bulb exposure, I had to press the shutter button with my finger.  And there was obviously a problem with the show itself - short and lacking the usual big finale. 

If the rain stays away I'll try the big display downtown but the forecast is still wet.                

FOURTH OF JULY IN WEBSTER GROVES

My home is in Webster Groves, Missouri, an older, inner suburb of St. Louis proper. It's a nice town with a close community, an economic mix, solid (and mostly older) housing and lots of services. No big box stores unless you count a supermarket. The nickname of the high school teams is the Statesmen, after Daniel Webster, not something violent like the University of Missouri Tigers or the clownish St. Louis University Billikens. 

July 4th is a big deal with an hour long parade wandering through the streets. It's very hot and humid today (welcome to The Lou in July) but the whole family went down, found a reasonably shady spot and watched the spectacle. Big fireworks tonight if the thunderstorms hold off.               

PRIDE

         

Pride is a tricky word and concept. It is one of the Seven Deadly SIns. According to the Book of Proverbs, pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Hamlet warns us against the proud man's contumely. (Had to look that one up. It is an out-of-use word for scorn, accent on the first syllable.)  

And yet we are proud of our and our children's accomplishments, our country (sometimes) and our worth for just being human. That was the part on display at the huge Pride Parade downtown on Sunday. It was at least as big as our other annual street buster on St. Patrick's Day. I have a ton more pictures from the event but the big Fourth of July celebrations will start to get in the way. We're watching the practice for the air show over the Mississippi from our office as I write this.

               

Clearance Sale

Lots of good people shots from dinner at  Lohr and Carrie's house last week. I picked a few of the best to clear out the topic. There are four figures worth of shots from last weekend's Grand Center Theatre Crawl I have not finished sorting by show, let alone edited. Haven't even looked at Sunday's pix from the Pride Parade. Then there are big local and downtown July 4th celebrations later this week if the rain holds off (the forecast is not good) and the river don't rise. (But it probably will.)

Our wonderful host and hostess are in the last picture.