respublica

What are the boys doing today

The grandsons are having themselves experiences today. Connor is doing the Bubble Run St. Louis which is taking place in the rain in Madison Illinois beginning at the Gateway Motor Sports park. The Bubble Run is a three mile run more for fun than competition and runners go through waves every 3-5 minutes and 4 foam bogs which cover them in different colors of foam. I'm pretty sure Connor will find this amazing. Or maybe not.

Here is how the run looked

Drew and Jake out in Maryland are at an activity center doing all kinds of things including trampoline. But here they clubbing each other on a beam.

And jumping

Drew

Jake

No fear.

Updated count

As of today on St. Louis highways: Mattresses 59, Ladders 32 all of which have fallen off trucks or cars this year.

An odd cause of a traffic backup

Here is a morning rush hour traffic report from KMOX's Rick Wallace:

"WHOOAA ! ! Just got a report of a horse galloping along 270 around Hiway 157..."

"NOW we have an accident reported in the same area where we had heard about a horse near the hiway--WB270 west of Hiway 157..."

"Good News: the horse running free along 270 around Hiway 157 has been captured and is OK ! !"

A look at Collinsville

A short video promoting Collinsville put together by the Economic Development Committee.

Now not only mattresses and ladders

Y98's traffic guy, Lance Hilldebrand, keeps track of how many mattresses and ladders fall off onto St. Louis highways. Today he has added a new twist.

A Porta-Potty is in one of the westbound lanes of Highway 40 near Boyle. Just one more thing to make that morning traffic even worse if not kind of humorous.

There's also a crash on westbound 64 in East St. Louis near the 3rd Street exit. Pure joy for Illinois drivers getting to and through St. Louis this morning.

Kitchen failures

A quiz on cooking failures. How much do you know?

Weather hits

A crazy storm hit over the seminary about half an hour before the afternoon Call Day Vicarage service. Day turned suddenly into night.

It was tricky walking over to the chapel trying to keep an umbrella from turning inside out and still stay dry. But thankfully the evening service saw no rain.

Let's go Blues!

I've said before that I am not much of a hockey fan and truth be told, I wasn't optimistic about the chance that the Blues would beat the Blackhawks last night. But, I discovered I am a strong partisan of our city and so found myself really pulling for them. I didn't watch the game but followed along periodically on Twitter. There is a man (Mike Poepping of KSDK) who tweets only about the Blues so I knew what was going on. I finally shut down when the score was 2-2 in the third period.

Then as often happens I found myself wide awake at 2 and opened up the ipad to see the result and was able to go back to sleep happily.

The city of St. Louis is as important as a team and if the city's team does well, it makes us all feel pretty darn good.

The day before the calls

Tomorrow is Call Day here at the seminary, a day in which the second year students receive their vicarage assignments for next year's internship year in a congregation which could be anywhere in the US. In the evening, the graduating 4th year students receive their calls to what will be a congregation they will pastor. So the anticipation and, yes, stress, is high around the campus.

It's one of the greatest days of the year, filled with families here for the two services, nervous students, visiting district presidents from around the country coming into town to greet their future pastors and vicars. We're also running a gauntlet of preparation work in the landscape and offices and food service and all the rest. It's all hands on deck to make things go as smoothly and beautifully as possible.

I'd say that although graduation is a much busier two days with many more events connected to it, Call Day is the biggest day of the year, with countdowns having begun back in January by the students. 3 more months, 95 days, and now we're down to one day. Here's what we have to get into the ground in our yard before tomorrow.

I'm not sure it will be possible, we may have to go with just arranging some of the flats in a pretty manner. All flowers from Creekside in Collinsville or Ahner's in New Baden. Two of the best nurseries around.

It's a zoo

A beautiful Saturday ahead of us and this means the St. Louis Zoo will be packed. It's like everyone in the Metro area wakes up on these nice weekend days and thinks, "let's take the kids to the zoo." And that means the traffic trying to get into the zoo at Hampton will be stopped in the right lane which makes it really dangerous for traffic not going to the zoo and driving west they come around a bend after Kingshighway right into stopped cars.

Each year officials try and make people understand that Hampton is not the exit to take to the zoo. They desperately publicize the idea that Kingshighway is the better exit, but most people do not. And so the cars are stopped all along the long exit curve to Hampton and onto highway 40, some on the shoulder, some not. What makes this doubly dangerous is that the right lane after Hampton is exit only at Skinker and many drivers realize this too late. They get out of the zoo jam and then realize they have to get over to the left to avoid Skinker exit and they're getting over into traffic which was in the left and middle lanes to avoid the zoo jam.

This is my exit heading back to the seminary and I see this all the time. Even though I now know what to do, you just can't control the sudden impulses of other drivers.

So if you're coming west on 40 this morning, be aware.