Birthday Birthday Meow!

Birthday Birthday Meow!

So, yeah, my life has been busy the past several weeks.

Highlights include:

1) Back on Oct. 29th, my wife Kelly arranged for a trip to the Museum of Transportation where I was surprised to see friends and family there for my (early) birthday party. That was the last weekend when rides were available on their miniature train (similar to the Zooline railroad) and on their very cool historic trolley car (once owned and operated by the St. Louis City Water Division).

To make it a truly multimodal experience, I rode MetroBus all the way out there (although not back home). I took the #30 Soulard to Sutton and Manchester, then walked one block down Manchester to Big Bend, catching the #56 Kirkwood Webster all the way to my destination, which is served on weekends only.

This was probably my first trip in 15 years to the Museum of Transportation, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

2) I got a Build-A-Bear for my birthday, on Sunday November 5th. I picked a cute little brown puppy, and adorned him with a WashU t-shirt and a cute little orange kitten. My wife Kelly arranged the excursion, and my brother Andrew was in town and came along. (He works for Kroger in Troy MO.)
3) On my birthday (Election Day November 7th), I worked at Monroe School as a technical specialist for the Election Board. But really, I did a lot of election specialist work as well, including finding voters' correct polling places in the book, looking up inactive voters, etc. We were short staffed with only one Republican judge most of the day, and that particular judge was unenthusiastic at best.

The highlight of my day was when alderman Craig Schmid played the trumpet and Democratic committeewoman Lorraine Ura along with some others sang Happy Birthday to me! Now THAT was fun! They kept their distance from the voters; although it happens that was their polling place anyway so both of them got in line at various times.

It was hilarious, because my wife Kelly saw Craig over at our regular polling place (Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer) and mentioned it was my birthday ... then only a half-hour later he showed up with trumpet in hand!

Many other important events have happened in the past few weeks, some fun and others not so fun. But this year at least, my birthday was indeed memorable -- even if I did spend the actual day waking up at 3:15 AM, arriving at the polling place at 5 AM, and not leaving until 7:45 PM, with much work to do in the intervening hours.