Lots of Frozen

It has been COLD and WINTERY and FROZEN.  My last post was on Tuesday of the week that school was cancelled every day all week! 

 

 Monday was icy, Tuesday and Wednesday was snowy, Thursday and Friday was bitterly cold on top of snow that still hadn’t been cleared from most residential and rural roads.  I LOVED it!  I am now caught up on Downton Abby, I have been working on lots of neglected sewing projects, and I practiced enough that I felt ready for last night’s CCO concert. 

While the outlying roads were snow packed, the main roads were cleared pretty quickly and we went to St. Louis last Saturday, the 8^th, to attend the temple and to take Noah to look for bald eagles along the Mississippi River. 

 

   There is a particular place on the river called Chain of Rocks that is literally a line of rocks (called a shoal) across the whole river 

 

 The shoal made navigating this portion of the river very tricky until the Corps of Engineers built a bypass canal about 30 years ago. And, it churns up the water so the fish-eating birds (bald eagles, gulls, etc.) love to feed there.  There is an old bridge that is now part of a pedestrian/bike trail that we walked out on to get a better look.  

 

 We saw lots of gulls and chunks of ice floating in the river and we got kind of FROZEN and we only saw three bald eagles flying in the air.  None perched and none up close.  Noah saw the first.

 

  Another interesting site in the middle of the river are these water intakes that were built in the late 19^th century to help boost the St. Louis water supply. They were used in conjunction with the tall towers - called standpipes - that still exist in St. Louis.  Below is the link to a brief explanation about them.

 http://www.builtstlouis.net/watertowers/watertowers1.html

 They are not used any longer but there they still sit in the middle of the river.  Access to them was only by water and then by climbing up some very tiny metal rings imbedded in the wall.  Scary.

Steve and I celebrated our 39^th wedding anniversary on the 31^st of January.  These are the flowers he gave me.  

 

I was all set to blog last Sunday afternoon and I came home to a darkened computer screen!  What the heck?  At first, I thought it might be the monitor or the cable but it was ultimately diagnosed as the computer couldn’t boot up.  Oh my goodness, were our computer issues never going to end???  Sigh.  But, when I took it to Personalized Computers on Monday, the computer was fine!  What happened is that Steve installed a new external hard drive a couple weeks back and when I pushed “restart” on the computer last Sunday morning, the computer tried to go to the external hard drive and got lost, or FROZEN, so to speak.  The folks at the computer shop clicked a button so it will not be confused again when we turn off/on the computer from now on.  Whew!  Crisis averted.  

Yesterday was a day for concerts.  As already mentioned, Civic Orchestra had their all-French composer concert last night.  And, in the afternoon, RTO performed at Parkside Manor Nursing Home.  Both went really well.  Poor Steve was the brass section as the trumpet had to work, the trombone was serving in the St. Louis temple, and the tuba was at a funeral.  He held his own very nicely.  It is so great to see him playing the euphonium again. 

 

Steve and I watched “Eight Men Out” Friday night – it is a 1988 film about  the White Sox where eight players threw the World Series (remember Shoeless Joe Jackson?).  Oh, and I finally saw FROZEN with Sarah a week and a half ago.  LOVED IT!  Can’t wait to get it on DVD.  

No school tomorrow - thank you Lincoln and Washington for having birthdays in February!  Freezing rain is possible over night.  Sigh - more FROZEN days, I'm afraid but February is half over and then it will be March and spring is here.