After 8 straight days of bike riding in the park I missed two days of exercise on Friday and Saturday. Friday was simply house cleaning. The place was so bad I thought it might be discovered and declared a health hazard and condemned!!! Saturday was our Dogtown Historical Society meeting, followed by some related errands, and the The St. James annual Homecoming. Plus a heavy afternoon rain. Thus two days and no biking.
Finally on Sunday and today, Monday, I’ve been back to the park to ride.
I’ve found over 200 golf balls in the past couple of years in the park. Only three time did I ever go to the park to actually look for golf balls, the bulk of the balls I’ve found from my bicycle while riding around the edges of the course, especially Triple A.
For some time a thought had crossed my mind, but I’d never said a word about it to a single person: Why hadn’t I found any of these YELLOW golf balls or any other colored balls? I am sure that the traditional white balls are infinitely more popular than the colored balls, but ZERO colored ones and more than 200 white ones? That made no sense to me.
In any case, I wanted to clear out the golf balls I had since I’m starting to find more this summer, and I gave a large bag of balls to Sally Sharamitaro to share with some of her women golf partners in her league – I don’t even play golf EVER. But, I mentioned to her my puzzlement about the yellow balls and wondered if they were just lost less often than white balls since they are more visible? We talked a bit about it, but came to no conclusion.
Sally left and I got on my bike to ride. The incredible irony is that riding in the grass across the street from Triple A on the north side, where the baseball fields are, there was a YELLOW ball. I just burst out laughing at the coincidence of this. No one was around or they would have wondered at the old guy standing in the grass leaning on his bike and laughing out loud. A nut case for sure. At any rate, yesterday was a bonanza day, 6 balls in about 10 minutes. (5 white ones and my first yellow.)
Now, pockets bulging with golf balls, I headed down to my two favorite bridges, the long curved wooded bridges just west of Steinberg Rink in the wet lands. I had met a woman there a few days before who was walking two very large (and wet) Doberman Pinchers. (Scary looking dogs). I ask if they’d been swimming and she said yes, but that it frustrated her since they always jumped into the horribly scummy small pond just a few yards up, in between the two bridges. This is a really small pond, only a circle of about 10 foot diameter. It is covered with slimy green moss. She said the dogs love it because there are so many frogs and they like to chase them. She was trying to get them now to swim in the river system to clean up a bit.
I mentioned recently that I’ve never seen a frog. I hear them every single day croaking and all, but had never seen them. So, I parked my bike and slipped up to the rocks around the pond very quietly to see some of these frogs. Wow, I saw at least ½ dozen or more, albeit, streaking into the water when they knew I was there, but I got good sightings of a lot of them yesterday and again today.
These were very small frogs, not much bigger than a half dollar or silver dollar size.
What I was not prepared for, however, were the giant turtles. Scared the daylights out of me. I was on a rock, about 4 foot above the scummy water, staring in the water trying to see frogs, and two HUGE turtles, much lager than the one I saw caught some weeks ago, broke the water like dolphins jumping in the sea. I jumped much higher than they.
The two were locked together and making wild noises. Now I have no idea if they were fighting to the death or mating!!! In any case, they were gripped in passion of some sort, came high out of the water and splashed back down under and while bubbles galore were breaking the surface for some time, they never came back up. It was really strange.
Obviously, I know absolutely NOTHING about turtles. Anyone know: Do they fight? Do they mate like THAT? If they weren’t either fighting or mating, what in the world were they doing?
Today the pond was so quiet. When I first got off my bike and climbed up, quietly, on the rocks, I did scare up a dozen tiny frogs, and did see a smaller turtle feeding at the surface, but didn’t see the monsters.
It was most curious.
The Jewel Box is in astonishing glory of flowers right now, really worth a visit. Take a picnic, a nice bottle of wine, and relax there. They have nice picnic tables (3 of them) in the shade. But, take something as a table cloth, the tables are very old and rotted to some extent and kind of ugly. Nicer to cover them. But it is so beautiful there.
They still haven’t put out any picnic tables at the Muny. A week from today is the first performance, and they will be having the entertainment there at east end of the Muny. I expect the tables will be put out this week for sure. They always have them there and many people bring picnics and listen to the free music before the shows begin. Many people are like me; they come for the picnic and the music and don’t even attend the Muny show itself. But I’ll keep an eye out this week for the appearance of the tables.
The back parking lot area of the Muny is really beautiful. They fixed that up last year and just about this time of the year I was reporting to you the final steps in landscaping they were doing getting ready for the Muny opening. This year the flowers and trees they planted last year are settled in, in full bloom and really lovely.
Almost each day I ride around that upper Muny parking lot. There are tons of cars parked there and shuttle buses. I wondered where they are shuttled to. Today one of the shuttle buses was there, the driver sitting out taking a smoking break. I asked if he shuttled people to the Metrolink or buses. He said, no. These were all workers at the huge number of construction jobs at Barnes/Jewish Hospital. That makes sense. It’s been more than 2 years now that so much construction is going on there. Barnes now has the whole are from Clayton Ave to Forest Park Blvd, from Kingshighway all the way to Taylor Ave., 100%. And, now they are building even to the east of Taylor. That’s one gigantic complex and building, building, building.
It has struck me as odd that more than 50% of the vehicles which parked in the Muny lot and were shuttled somewhere, we pick-up trucks. Now I have the explanation, and so do you!
Often when I ride and don’t plan to stop at a coffee house (as today), I don’t carry much. I put a few dollars into my biking shorts, my bike lock key and one of my old expired driver’s licenses just for identification in case anything happened to me. As I was riding the last part of my ride I remembered I was completely out of wine. This borders on tragedy at my house. But, I was fairly sure I had a $10 bill in my pocket. Lately I’ve been drinking a wine which Schnucks has had on sale for $8.89, a nice Chilean Cabernet. However, they often change their wine sale items on Monday mornings. I took the chance and rode down to Schnucks. The wine was on sale and I turned out not to have $10, but $13.00. I noticed they also had laundry detergent on sale for $2.99, thus I got both and arrived home with one sole nickel in my pocket.
However, with laundry soap and wine and a refrigerator full of other food, I don’t have to open my door for two days now if I don’t want. Oh me, I could so easily become a hermit. As long as it was a hermit with a computer and a bike.
Now, at 11 AM it is still very sunny and bright, yet the weather people on NPR still say we may have scattered thunderstorms today. I may still get in a front porch lunch picnic before any rains come.
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