Multiconstruct

Made it back to Columbia a couple of hours ago after a bit of a whirlwind trip to St Louis. I feel a little warm and increasingly tired and am thinking I might be getting sick. It was a fun trip though. Yesterday I was up early and got my weekend stuff done (water plants and such) in a hurry and was packed pretty early. I picked up Jillian and we went to the market. Mark’s birthday is Monday and he was having a fire in his backyard so I got him a Patric Chocolate bar and I gave him a jar of the green tomato chutney I made.

There was also a big box of green tomatoes so I have the opportunity to make relish or what have you. Its sad seeing the end of the vine ripened tomatoes for another year. So after the market we drove out to St Louis. We had a little nap time and i read most of a herman hesse novel I hadn’t read. His fourth one named after an estate. Its pretty good and looking forward to finishing it next time I’m out.

We were wanting to go to a haunted house and went to the Lemp mansion which is reported to be haunted.  The Lemps were per-prohibition brewers and the first Lemp committed suicide after the death of his good brewer buddy Captain Pabst. There were two more suicides and the mansion was pretty cool. There are some working gas street lamps outside and I’ve not seen that before. The haunted house turned out to be at the brewery and not open til 6 so we came back. It was pretty fun. Haunted house technology improved in the last 10 years or so since i’ve been. The Lemp place had a lot of smoke and you walk down this two flight spiral staircase that you can barely see. It was the scariest thing because when it had you walking into strobes or total darkness I was always afraid I would be falling down the next flight of stairs.

Sarah and Jillian were into it and the line was just long enough to bond with some strangers and build some anticipatory tension. All in all it was a fun evening.

Mark had his fire and drank some hot mulled cider and rum and some Black Bear Bakery goods and smores. Being in St Louis had to watch the World Series. Left me as the only one rooting for the Rangers, probably best they got beat.

Slept hard and work up tired, read some more Hesse waiting for everyone to get up. We cooked a big breakfast fried potatoes, eggs & tomato, turnip greens and fruit salad. After that Mark’s dad came over and it was first I’d met him, a cool retired social worker and we helped Mark rip up some bricks and shovel down a high spot in his backyard to improve drainage.

Drove home after, not got time to carve pumpkins so left them all but one as gifts. There was a rubber necker traffic slow down and it felt good to be patient and enjoy the Fall color and sunflowers and just rest. Made it back for some dinner and am gearing up for Walking Dead season 2 episode 2. Hope its better then episode 1, feeling a little soap operaish.