Mondays Missives

From the gift shop at Meramec Caverns- I think it was 400 bucks.

When I see beer cans some cretin left on the bank of a lake or river I pick them up and crush them  for the old can guy to find.

We got covered in ticks visiting a park in Lee's Summit.

I cannot wait to view tigers and orangutans with a feeling of, "bamboo thickets , exotic birds and ruins".  Also, isn't it great the orangs and tigers will finally get to experience, "invading forest with canopy trees"?

A pack of wild wheelbarrows rest between kills in the KCMO Zoo.

There is a commemorative highway, marker, memorial, museum etc for everything you can imagine every other mile in Kansas.

• I have always loved the Wise County Messenger paper. When I was in Germany my mom sent me a subscription. I fairly often received the copy addressed to a soldier also from Decatur in a different unit who I was in the same scout troop with as a boy. The interpretation is someone at the main USAEUR post office recognized the paper as belonging to a guy in 3/11 Armored Cavalry Regiment and sent it to our region where someone remembered a guy in Bad Hersfeld getting the same paper where it went to my squadron where someone knew to send it down to my troop- correct? It seems impossible, but sometimes I'd get it with my name and address and others I'd get it with his name and unit address. I want to bump into him someday and see if he had the same experience and recall.
• I have recounted the convoluted trail those papers would take to get to me and remember my interpretaion being doubted but do not recall peoples rationale. What else could it be? I would receive papers with the other kids name and Army Post Office address at a Kaserne 200 miles from my own and it happened multiple times.
• One of my best friends in that unit was a black guy named James Brown (not making that up). He ran the mail room and would read my paper and comment on there not being any black people pictured and tease me about him being the first black person I ever saw without making trips to the deep south on vacation to lynch folks. I told him about knowing lots of black kids growing up and playing football and basketball with them, but yes- we did have to cross the tracks to see each other. When he would find pictures of a black person in my paper I would later get it with the pictures of those people circled in red.
• Citizen Cope- Let The Drummer Kick
• Children if left to their own devices are solar and water powered. It's not even summer yet and I can't keep Zac out of the pool.
• Zac and are going to build a rocket this year. I bought several kits on clearance a couple of years ago. Chloe and I spent hours building one of them up just right with her choice of colors. I taught her about space travel and aeronautics etc. On its first flight on cue at it's apogee the orange chute popped open and we watched it drift away- never to be seen again.
• I have known of multiple cases where a manic depressive person's moods have been balanced out with meds and the person would fuss at their doc because while yes, they no longer have those lows they also don't have the highs.