where I talk with my inside voice
I took today off work to extend the already long weekend, and I took the kids on a staycation trip downtown. We made a quick stop at the Scott Joplin House and then headed down to the Arch grounds. On our way from the parking garage, we also stopped at the marker where Fort San Carlos is thought to have...
Noah took the written portion of his driver’s test and passed on his first try! That means we now begin many hours of practice driving so he can develop his skills before the driving portion. This is a new chapter and I’m very proud of him.
It’s been over two years since we made a trip to the St. Louis Art Museum, so I thought it was time we rectified that situation. We saw an impressive exhibit called Painting on Stone which documented the practice of 16th century painters creating works on slabs of various kinds of stone that had been burnished to a very smooth...
I just finished putting this together today. I’ve bought a number of the Lego Ideas sets (13 so far) since the original site went live in 2008, and there are some sets that I see and I just know I have to have them (see Christmas 2020), and this was one of those sets. It’s a really cool idea and...
The year certainly had some highlights, but for the most part it was a repeat of 2020. This was supposed to be the year that we restored normality, but the Delta and Omicron variants had other plans. Not to mention all of the idiots who refuse to get vaccinated because of some misguided neo-Luddite protest. I can honestly say that...
For Christmas, Grandma Linda gave us tickets to see the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit here in St. Louis. It was a really cool way to experience his artwork and learn a bit about his troubled life.
Once again, I missed a couple of years, but our “annual” Christmas Card video made its appearance out on the public site too. Since I’m no longer on Facebook, I’m hosting these on my site again, with the biggest benefit being that the copyright nazis can’t shut me down. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Because I had extra vacation this year, I decided to take off the entire week of Thanksgiving. We wrapped up the week by resuming our annual pilgrimage to Meert Tree Farm because we need a little Christmas NOW!
It had been several years since I last set up the haunted garage. Since the kids weren’t trick-or-treating this year, they asked if we could set it up. We didn’t get a lot of visitors this time around, but it was still fun constructing everything and making the house look spooky.
This was Andrea Bocelli’s first visit to St. Louis and it was a great show. He had the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on stage playing his music. The first half was a lot of opera songs that I recognized but probably couldn’t tell you what they were from. The second half started with the St. Louis Symphony Choir performing the...
The journey home was a bit more challenging than we would have liked, but it just made us appreciate our good luck on the trip that much more. With the exception of one day on Nantucket, the weather was darn near perfect. We drove 2,000 miles, visited six states, and saw all kinds of amazing sights and made some great...
This week is the 200th anniversary of Missouri becoming a state and part of the celebration was held in St. Charles – Missouri’s first capitol. I took the kids to see the festivities. There were booths arranged in chronological order representing many different parts of our history and heritage. There was a fife and drum corps. There were games and...
Noah just returned from two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch. I am very proud of him for this accomplishment. He had to spend several months in advance going on practice hikes and conditioning himself for the physical challenges. It was an incredible trip and he had a great time. I was happy he got to go (despite COVID), but we...
I just finished booking our airfare, hotels, and rental car for our epic New England journey. Like our California trip, we’ll be spending two weeks on the road, staying in several places along the way. Starting in Cape May, with stops in Philly, New York, and Boston, and culminating in Bar Harbor with a couple of days in Acadia National...
Minecraft is still a big part of screen time around here, but in the last month we’ve also become addicted to Valheim – a new game that is still in early release on Steam, but has over 6 million players. Something about the description and the screenshots appealed to me, and for only $20, I figured it was worth a...
