Rekelekt: March 2019

March was an eventful month, and: Emily turned 11! The weekend before her birthday she had her friends over for pizza, ice cream, and games.

On the actual day of her birthday she wanted to go to McDonald's and have a Shamrock shake. It's the little things...

She wanted a hoodie from The Office (which she watches on Netflix a lot) and I think she likes it:

If you were ever a fan of the "Where's Waldo?" puzzles, scroll through this blog post and count how many times you can find Emily's Dunder Mifflin hoodie. The answer is at the end of the post. (Hint: it may be only partially visible in some pictures and in one instance she's not wearing it, but it's in the picture.)

Blow out your candles! Cut that cake! IIIIIIIIIIt's your birthday toooodaaaayyy:

Then she got to celebrate her birthday again the following weekend at the Conrad's. The fun never ends:

Finally winter began to thaw. What is this?? Is this sunlight? Can we actually go outside without dying? We get to enjoy the porch again at long last:

Right before St. Patrick's Day we had one more snowfall, but the snow didn't last.

More Shamrock Shakes! Delicious and nutritious:

Speaking of ice cream, we observe DQ's annual free cone day every year:

Then, over spring break we took a trip to St. Louis for a few days. We visited the Gateway Arch, the Science Center, the Planetarium, the St. Louis Zoo, the City Museum (which is not really a museum), the Art Museum, Civil War Museum, and some great restaurants. Our hotel was right next to the arch, so all we had to do was walk outside:

We had a cool view from the rooftop of the hotel, too:

There's a horse-drawn carriage down there if you look closely. The carriages also circled around our hotel.

This is the old capitol building that was closed and maybe being repurposed for something else? Not sure, but I like the architecture:

Our first stop was the Science Center, which had a lot of hands-on exhibits. The Planetarium across the road had free parking and since the two buildings are connected we entered that one first. The skywalk from the Planetarium to the Science Center crossed I-64 and we could see the cars rushing past beneath our feet through the glass panels in the floor:

There were also radar guns along the skywalk that you could point at lanes of traffic and see how fast people were driving. Most of the drivers were not speeding, which was kind of disappointing.

At the Science Center we learned about voussoir-shape arch designs and how each piece evenly distributes the weight of the whole structure. Emily built this one from padded blocks:

Then we balanced out that bit of education by playing 80s arcade games in the history of games exhibit. Reminds me of the Quarter Barrel:

The Grow exhibit demonstrated the use of UV lights to grow plants indoors. Also, Rose is creepy:

There was an elaborate two-story contraption that would drop a ball from the top which would then travel through all the twists and turns and trigger other mechanisms on its way down to the bottom. Once reaching the bottom, there was an auger that raised the balls back up to the top again. The whole thing was kid-powered using a large blue hamster wheel seen in the lower right. Kids would run in it causing the whole machine to come to life:

We watched a planetarium show that explained how to identify many of the most common constellations and how to find them during each of the four seasons. Photos during the show are not allowed (plus it's pitch dark when the show starts), but here we are waiting on the foam mats:

The dinosaur exhibit was pretty cool, too, with a tyrannosaurus rex skull on display and plenty of fossils and agates and nifty prehistoric stuff. A large number of dinosaur bones have been discovered in the St. Louis area during various construction projects.

There was a Blue Angels jet parked outside the Planetarium and we can't ignore that. Makes me want to go back to Pensacola:

This forlorn character was standing in the roundabout near the entrance, staring up at the sky:

Back at our hotel... it was an old building that looked a lot like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining on the inside:

The next morning we went to the zoo. Emily likes penguins:

A funny thing happened... the penguin area was mostly open with very little separating people from penguins and one of the penguins splashed Emily in the face! Unfortunately, I didn't capture that magical moment quickly enough.

When I was a kid, I had lots of Bill Peet books and Cynthia and I both remember reading "Capyboppy." As a kid, I thought it was a fictitious animal (because many of Bill Peet's creatures were), but at the advanced age of 41 I discovered that the capybara is a real thing. Huh.

Lots of fish in the rhino pool. Unfortunately, the rhinos weren't cooperative, so we couldn't get any decent pictures of them.

Elephants throw dirt on themselves as a sort of sunscreen to protect their bare skin from the sun. I didn't realize this, but they can actually get sunburnt.

After the zoo, we had lunch downtown at Baileys' Range, which I think is now Rose's favorite place to eat. Too bad it's so far from CR:

We came across this awkward sculpture on our way back to the hotel:

Then in the afternoon we went up in the Gateway Arch! Ignore the constipated-looking guy in the background:

The legs of the arch are visible from the top when you look straight down out of the 7" tall windows:

The Mississippi River was high due to all the rain and recent snow melt.

Busch Stadium where the St. Louis Cardinals play:

As breathtaking as the view was from the top, I think I liked the view from the ground better. It's easier to get a sense of the massive scale of the building when you can walk around it and it looks different from almost every angle.

Ladies and gentlemen, no Photoshop has been used in this next feat. Thanks to the versatility of phone cameras we bring you this:

See what I mean? It looks different from every angle:

This picture gives a sense of how large the legs of the arch are at the base:

And those are the 7" tall windows at the top:

This shot is now the lock screen on my phone:

Album cover pose!

Comparing awesome phone pics:

The next morning we visited the Missouri Civil War Museum:

After the civil war museum we visited... IKEA. Rose being a chair model:

I dunno...

Then we checked out the City Museum, which is not really a museum at all (although it does have a handful of random exhibits if you look hard enough for them), but rather an enormous off-beat playground for kids and adults. Everything looks incredibly dangerous and fun. Seriously, you can climb around in all that stuff. Nothing is off-limits, even things that seem like they should be:

While Cynthia and Rose climbed around in all that mayhem, Emily and I stuck to the catwalks and easier stuff. We're not chicken, we just have a strong survival instinct.

This is sort of a museum exhibit, I guess:

On the way out, we ran into Captain Jack Sparrow:

On our last day there, we went to the St. Louis Art Museum, which had an impressive collection of paintings, including art by Monet, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Picasso. It easily rivaled the Chicago Art Institute.