St. Louis Gallavanting

Ernie doesn't get up into the big boy bed very often so this was an event.

Viry and Lolo brought Emelia over to the apartment to meet Ernie.

Later on I met up with Seago and Hank at the Golden Hoosier to tell tales and curse our enemies.

One of my favorite parts of coming to St. Louis is how cheap everything is. I couldn't resist the mini beer cooler full of Busch for $15. What a deal.

Hank got scared and went home so we headed to Up Down to play some classics. We had apparently wandered in on Barbie night so there were some interesting costumes and other strange pink occurences.

A Very European Stay at the Chase

In an amusing turn of events, we booked booked a fancy hotel in St. Louis with the points we had leftover from the Maldives operation. That reservation just so happened to fall a couple of days before we were about to leave St. Louis. It was actually kind of nice because we had been working so hard packing up all of our stuff that a little staycation was much appreciated.

There were some issues with mounting our tv above the fireplace there, so one of our missions was to delicately patch up the gaping hole in the wall well enough that we wouldn't be charged anything for damages.

With a name like The Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta St. Louis you know you're getting into some fancy pants hotel activities.

We booked a nice suite actually. The magic that those Expedia points were able to conjure will be missed. 

We've been jealously eyeing the Chase's pool for some time now. Now it was ours! All ours!

I was able to tie up another loose end just before skipping town. This is really turning out to be an exciting final episode of this season of John's Super Exciting Life. Lydia was kind enough to assist me at a local copy shop with a ton of copying. I've been working on gathering the paperwork for my Italian citizenship application since the opening battle at the Sangamon County Clerk's office in November of 2016. I've been wrestling with city, county, state, federal, and Italian government offices ever since, gathering up birth, marriage, divorce, death, immigration, and naturalization documents of every ancestor on my dad's side of the family all the way back to great grandfather Ernesto's birth in 1897. There was even an ill-planned lawsuit against Dickinson County, Michigan. It has been quite the undertaking, but the day to submit it all has finally arrived. Normally this would involve a trip to the Consolato d'Italia negli Stati Uniti, Chicago, but due to covid everything is temporarily being done by mail. 

Not only did I need to collect all of this business but I then had to send those documents to their respective secretary of state's office for an apostille. If you don't know what those are, then you clearly need to reread the Hague's Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents.

After all that paperwork I had a hunger that only a large slice of an animal could solve. I ordered one last magnificent rack of ribs at Sugarfire Smoke House.

Back at the Chase we did some pool lounging.

The Chase has a movie theatre inside of it which is pretty solid. I used to come here a lot more in my early St. Louis days when I lived in the Central West End. If you came at the right time there would be a little man who would play the organ for you before the movie started. I assume that this was a throwback all the way back to silent movies where live musicians were the only source of sound that you got at the movies. Afterwards the same man would be waiting at the door to the theatre to thank you for coming and offer you a Tootsie Roll from a silver platter. It was very fun and I'm sure I'll never see anything like it again.

Our last order of business for the night was to pop down to the Chase Club to spend a couple of free drink tickets the hotel handed us.

Fringe Vaccine Benefits

Spending a lot of time doing the usual constant reading about death rates and vaccine minutiae. I wonder what these new magical mRNA vaccines may help us with in the future. If they could cure cancer that would be cool so that I can die the way I deserve: milkshake overdose.

Our apartment managers are doing their part by... putting up a poster a year into the pandemic about washing your hands. Great work.

Lydia breaking the internet.

I'm amused by the deals available to people with a vaccine card and I fully intend to abuse all of them to the greatest extent possible.

For today's trick we showed up at one of my favorite arcade bars and picked up a cup of free game tokens. I didn't want to actually use them as I still don't really trust indoor spaces, so we took the money and ran.

I'm rich!