Smashing Pumpkins

Can you believe this? This morning at about 8 p.m. the doorbell rang here at 3866 Russell Blvd. It was the neighbor, Sharon, saying “Did you know that your car window was smashed in last night?” An expletive spilled out of my mouth as I rushed outside to see what had happened. Sharon went along with me, and we saw the broken window and a broken pumpkin inside the front seat of the car.

Simple, unmitigated vandalism. There was a digital camera in the glove compartment, and Luis's sunglasses in a door side pocket that were still there - so obviously someone just wanted to test lobbing a pumpkin into a car window. Sigh. All's well that ends well, however, as the rental car company has now given us a Kia Optima, a slightly bigger car, and one with automatic locks and windows. This car will be better for our trip up to Michigan this coming week to spend Thanksgiving with my brother John and his family.

Yes!! Luismi is here!! We're having such a great time. While I was working Thursday he went with Marina, a friend of Diana's from Madrid who is visiting St. Louis, to the St. Louis Science Center, where there is an exhibit called Body Worlds 3, by Gunther von Hagens, on. Not for the squeamish, like me, so it was good Luismi had someone to go with. It's an anatomical exhibition of real human bodies...I'd rather go to the art museum! Today we went to City Museum with Diana and Marina - now that's a real treat. It's not REALLY a museum - more of a great big playground ("where the imagination runs wild"), made with bits of pieces of found stuff from all over St. Louis, such as old chimneys, salvaged bridges, construction cranes, two abandoned planes, and a yellow school bus perched on a corner of the roof. There are stairs everywhere, and chutes and slides to clamber up or woosh down (that's Marina to the left, clambering up to one of the old planes). I did a bit of wooshing and climbing...and found myself smiling the whole time. Luismi was not feeling too well (Diana gave me a cold which I've passed on to Luismi) so he walked around and watched us be silly, and then sat and watched an acrobatic show, which we caught the end of.

And here's Marina & Diana deep inside the museum...

Luis & I have also been doing some shopping, sampling of restaurants: Italian (near the university on Wednesday night after my linguistics class, as 5 students from the course last spring in Madrid came to the class to talk about their final research projects), and Ethiopian, a placed called Meskerem (which I now know refers to the first month of the Ethiopian calendar) on Thursday night, with Cody and Travis (both of whom had been students on our campus, and had gone to Ethiopia on separate occasions with the English language teaching group that Hamish organizes), Travis' Dutch girlfriend Stina (who Luis recognized - it turns out she works at the Majestic, a bar here in St. Louis where Diana had taken Luismi the night before while I was teaching), Colin (former SLU student, who now works at Kingdom House, where Diana and I volunteer on Mondays in their after school program), Diana and Marina. The food was quite good - nice spicy sauces, the ingera different from any bread I've had before, and it was fun eating the food with it. The atmosphere was delightful, as was the Ethiopian beer. We've also been a couple of times for breakfast at the City Diner...in the same area as Meskerem, the South Grand area, which I've mentioned before.

The other morning, when we pulled in to the street next to the diner to park the car, we noticed a police car stopped, and a policeman talking to a guy who was walking his dog. We drove a bit further on, parked the car, and started walking up the street. We noticed the policeman behind the door of the police car, holding up some kind of largish weapon. He shouted to us "get back to your car!". That caused us both some alarm, and then he pointed to a spot a few car lengths away from us and shouted "there are 2 pit bulls loose!". I turned around and ran, and hid behind our car door, with Luis behind me, until he realized that this other guy who we had just passed in the street was saying "here doggie". The dogs went up to him wagging their tails - though they weren't his - they were quite docile, really. Then the health officers swooped in and captured them and whisked them off in a van. We went on to our breakfast at the diner. Really, it's never a dull moment in this city!

Luismi, Polly and I get to Tower Grove Park in the mornings. Fall continues to be amazing here. Just thought I'd let you enjoy these bushes turning red out in front of the porch to our house, and these trees across the street. It IS fall, and I'm trying to ignore all of the Christmas trees and decorations out already (what IS with that?). We'll enjoy Thanksgiving first...