2009 in Review: May Travels, part 2

It was one year ago today that my family and
I attended my nephew's wedding in the St. Louis area, and I should have posted about this much, much earlier. Truth to tell, when I got back home I went through a period of writer's block. Looking back, I think the trouble was I was trying too hard to find something clever and out of the ordinary to say.

We went, had a great time, it was a wonderful wedding, and we were all happy for the young couple. That kind of sentiment would easily fit on the back of a post card. There were no problems, and we were very glad to be there. What more is there to say?

So, I'm more relaxed now and less concerned with being clever. And with the occasion of their first anniversary, what better time to let fly with a few photos and captions, and see what happens?

We arrived at my sister's place the afternoon before, for a catered dinner in their yard.


The area was under a tornado watch, but we were able to finish dinner and have a fine time of visiting with a lot of folks before the storm moved in.


Niece #1, Nephew, and Niece #2

The wind began to pick up. Here my niece was posing for a photo for her husband...I'm pretty sure neither were aware that I captured the project in this shot. Well, until now, anyway.


The wind started to blow in earnest, the rain came, and the sirens blew. We all retreated to the garage.

The next day, the day of the wedding. Place: a park in Chesterfield, Missouri.

During the ceremony


After the ceremony while official photos were taken of the wedding party, the rest of us were invited to tour "The Butterfly House". Many colorful butterflies, the shot of this black and white one turned out better than my other photos.


I managed to find a vantage point to get this photo from "behind the scenes", while the photographer had the wedding party lined up.


Left to Right: Brother-in-law, Sis, Me, Daughter #3, Wife, Daughter #2, and Son.


The most interesting place I've ever been to for a wedding reception, the Kemp Auto Museum. If you're thinking old T-Birds and '57 Chevy's, um, no. These were rare, old Mercedes-Benz and others of very fine quality. One was insured for over one million dollars, maybe some of the others were as well.

And I'm sure my nephew and his wife have had a great day celebrating their first anniversary. Congratulations!

The return of The Evening Rambler

Every so often I think of something I want to write here. Short stuff usually, a little of this and a bit of that. Of course I don't always have time right then to blog...and so I don't forget (ahem), I'll word process a list of titles or short descriptions.

An outline without the Roman numerals, capital letters, or indentations.
A grocery list without the food.
Yeah, I can hear you all now, "But Bob, a list is no good if you Can't Find It!"
So I guess I'll have to wing it...

Where are they now?

Last November I had a job assignment through a local temp agency, at a big insurance company with their North American headquarters in the metro. My task was to enter data into a secure database for the Salvage department; mostly account numbers and vehicle identification numbers. The paper file folders included photographs...some of the cars / trucks / etc. looked barely wrinkled, but were a total loss anyway. Others were barely recognizable as cars. Most were somewhere in between.

As I went along I noticed something interesting. Most of the vehicles were made in the 1990's or 2000's. Part of the reason was there were claims for entire car dealers with huge losses due to floods, hurricanes, etc...that, and attrition. There's just more of the "recently" made cars still on the roads...more that could be involved in accidents at any given time. There were quite a few cars from the mid and late 1980's.

Some days into the project and hundreds of listings later, I noticed I hadn't seen anything older than 1978, so I started keeping a mental list. Eventually I noticed some older cars, a handful from 1974 - 1976, and a very few from the early to mid 1960's, say, 1963 - 1965. Just two or three days before the end of the month long assignment I finally found one 1957 Chevy. Got me to thinking back...it doesn't seem all that many years ago that you'd still see lots of cars from the sixties and seventies on the road, and cars from the late fifties weren't all that rare. Not like they are now.

I did see one beauty of a classic, maybe six or eight weeks ago. It was either a 1955 or 1956 Chevy Bel Aire...in motion and just far enough away that I'm not sure which year. (And not that I'm a car expert - but I can recognize a few.) This car looked to have been restored, with a really nice dark blue and white paint job. I'd like to see it again.

So, my question for the evening...what old cars have you seen lately?

Logos! Get your logos!

Cousin Mike has been adding some eye catching logos to his blog (scroll down a bit an start looking in the column on the right). Mostly these are professional sports teams, and it's a neat assortment. I'd like to do something similar here, but right now I seem to be drawn more to scans of nostalgic stuff that has gone away...old pop bottle caps, old gas station signs, a stack of 45 rpm records...stuff like that.

So I need to figure out how I want to go about that. One thing I've thought of, a scan of the week "feature" might be fun. Something that would be in the same location on this page, just the image would change from time to time. I wonder if besides the Blog Archive I could set up a second "Scan Archive" for the older images. I'll have to read up on that.

In the meantime, I've started collecting images. A few days ago I got to thinking of old electron tubes. I have some from my dad's collection still in boxes, but I wanted to go online to see what else I could find. One thing I clicked on was a wall chart of tubes. This was in a photo stream called Diagram Diaries, on a site of charts and graphs...lots of creative ways to show data. I started clicking on the photos to see what else was there. I stopped when I saw something really different...which leads to the following...

Fun stuff...you've got to see this.

Check this out...click here.

I've got to admire artists who can work at that scale and keep that perspective all in their head.

September 18th

Happy birthday, Sis! I'll see you soon.

September 19th

Shiver me timbers, it's that time again!

Ahoy, mateys! Everybody be practicin' yer "Arrghs" and "Landlubbers" fer tomorrow!