Queen Hairstyles 4 Long 3-10-2020

Along the trail.

Hornbein's Goat Project.

Near the Red Barn.
 
Happy Anniversary.
 
Art Show with Jan's Work.
 

First Flower for the Day Amaryllis 3-9-2020

A new year but my old friend bursts out as usual. I have some reds but my orange ones

always arrive at the head of the line.

         

The stigma is the amaryllis "MeToo" moment, ready for action.

The anthers are hoping to oblige ready or not.

           

Without the drama of words its pretty mundane.

                     Amaryllis

By Connie Wanek

A flower needs to be this size

to conceal the winter window,

and this color, the red

of a Fiat with the top down,

to impress us, dull as we've grown.

Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb

half above the soil

stuck out its green tongue

and slowly, day by day,

the flower itself entered our world,

closed, like hands that captured a moth,

then open, as eyes open,

and the amaryllis, seeing us,

was somehow undiscouraged.

It stands before us now

as we eat our soup;

you pour a little of your drinking water

into its saucer, and a few crumbs

of fragrant earth fall

onto the tabletop.

Queen Hairstyles 3 3-9-2020

 For years the Queen had it cut short.

Queen Hairstyles 2 Alaska 3-6-2020

 In Alaska the Queen had beautiful long hair. She did her art work at 3845Baxter Road.(1968)

 Here she is on Halloween in Anchorage  getting ready to take Lee and Gordon 'Trick or Treating' in the snow in the  dark of the afternoon.(1969)
 
 Taking after her father she went fishing out of Whittier just for the 'Halibut'.(1969)
 
And in the late Spring she went to the Inuit Village of Point Hope.
(1970)



The hair defintely kept her warmer.

Hairstyles of the Queen 1 3-6-2020

We will show the various hair styles of the Queen.
Here she is eating an omelette in Door County, Wisconsin.


 And enjoying some Prickly Pear in Rocky  in 2014.






 Here she was when she was still a Princess.

Don's Blog A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood 2-15-2020

We had a heat wave yesterday so we went hiking. This was our first time to the Phantom Forest in Des Peres.

There was a circle trail through the forest. 

After our hike we went to the John Allan Love County Park. On the way out we saw a "herd" of Elks.

Don's Blog Beware 2-2-2020

Beware. The world is a dangerous place. Be careful who you trust.

This worries even the Gnomemeister.

Don's Blog Forgetfulness 1-29-2020

 Having just 'finessed' another appointment yesterday I thought this was appropriate. My brother sent this to me many years ago when Billy Collins was Poet Laureate.                   

 Forgetfulness

By Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted   

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness" from Questions About Angels. Copyright © 1999 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)                                             

Don's Blog Home Medical Dictionary 1-28-2020

             Home Medical Dictionary

This is not so much a dictionary

as it is an atlas for the old,

in which they pore over

the pink and gray maps of the body,

hoping to find that wayside junction

where a pain-rutted road

intersects with the highway

of answers, and where the slow river

of fear that achingly meanders

from organ to organ

is finally channeled and dammed.

Ted Kooser

'Delights and Shadows'

2004

Don's Blog '20 Dover" 8 Final Blog 1-18-2020

Enough is enough. Its time to move on - both me and you. Here are a few final thoughts.

The screened in porch was a haven especially at night. We had wooden roll-up blinds for

           

the afternoon sun and when it rained. In the summer we had a single bed on the porch and routinely 'slept out'.

As a peak experience there is nothing better than sleeping on this porch in the driving rain.

A counterpoint was the afternoon I was pushing hard on a glass pane near the handle of the door to the porch. 

The glass broke and I drove the base of my left third finger deep into the sharp edge. It was a red mess and also a trip to the ER at the San. If I look hard I can still see the small scar.

            

 My final few stories concern the back door area and back yard. Most of the deliveries to the house came to the back door - usually from the Dover Street side but sometimes from the Arlington Street side. In addition to the mail we had regular milk delivery. The milk came in returnable bottles and the regular milk had a 2-3" layer of cream on the top. I didn't like its consistency but my brothers would drink it right from the bottle. Another popular delivery came from Mr Ward who came with cans of fresh home baked cookies. He was a quiet and unassuming baker whose cookies did not stay in the returnable cans very long. 

Beyond the ice box in the kitchen was a steep winding stairs leading to a tiny room with a small sink. I don't think anyone 'lived' in the room which was on the way to a storage area and then up some stairs to the attic itself  which stretched the length of the house. We each had our own storage unit but there were many shelves filled with presents (some unused) from my parents wedding in1928. We still have a few presents in our Kirkwood basement storage from our wedding in 1961 in our basement storage. It must be in our DNA.

We did spend some time on the back stairway. We were usually eating such family favorites as a potato chip

sandwich with catsup on white bread or a homemade milkshake with vanilla ice cream and some pure maple syrup. Another oddity on the stairs: one of us would have to kneed the white packet of margarine  so that it would turn yellow and more resemble real butter. This type of 'protection' devised by the Dairy Industry was destined to fail from the start and soon we could get already yellow margarine.

The back yard was small and fenced. In the north-east corner where 3 garages came together it was easy to climb the yard fence as boys are want to do and then get up on the shed at the back of the Levering's garage. From there it was simple to get on the roofs of the two garages to the north. What was not so easy was the jump from the middle garage to the garage on the right. Only a few daredevils (of which I was Not one) could do that. I think that these neighborhood gambols were much more valuable in forming who we are than computer games currently popular with young kids now. Just saying'.

Finally a story about the results of winning a drawing. My mother always entered the American Legion drawing to win prizes. She won at regular intervals and her prizes included a mink stole, a 22 gauge rifle, and even a Sedan Deville Cadillac. She always laughed about the time she picked up the phone and a man said, "Well, you won the damn Cadillac". Anyway one day at the carnival, which was always held off of south La Grange Road, we won two live chickens. That's a little different than bringing home goldfish which we had done. We brought the home the prize chickens in a box. Much to our surprise my dad said that we would have fresh chicken for dinner that night. He had been brought up with chickens in Marietta Georgia. We all gathered in our small back yard and with no warning my dad wrung the necks off of the chickens which started to run around the ' like a chicken with his head cut off". It was a total surprise and a shock. There was blood everywhere. We had to catch the chickens, put them in a pot with boiling water and pull all their feathers off. This was a real mess. There were feathers everywhere. Finally our huge live chickens had turned into scrawny little dead birds. My mom cooked them up and they tasted pretty good but it did transform our view of the current FDR saying that for everyone there would be "a chicken in every pot."

I want to thank Stacy for including us in the next chapter of "29 Dover". I am sure the new owners will write another chapter in this home's fabled history.

           Hooorah for 29 Dover!