"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." T. S. Eliot
My parents are in town visiting. This puts me in an interesting position because I've already given them the grand tour last time. So... now what the heck are we supposed to do?
Check out the Lucid dealership at University Village I guess?
Next we headed over to check out a Mariners game but first I had to grab a Seattle dog outside the ballpark.
This guy was a professional. He had a friggin caulk gun full of cream cheese.
Winners gonna win.
Fireworks Night was officially part of Ichiro Mariners Hall of Fame Weekend. I don't think I ever got to see him play because he was sort of a big deal. He was ten-time All-Star & Gold Glove winner, three-time Silver Slugger, and 2001 Rookie of the Year & MVP award winner.
Zeke, my friend and Phi Alpha Literary Society pledge dad was in Seattle for a work thing so we brought him along for the fun as well.
Our friends Steph and Neil moved out to the boonies so getting to their house for a bbq was a journey. I seem to only have taken pictures of beers I was drinking, so my priorities were intact.
This one I mostly just liked because it had references to a favorite show of mine: The Expanse.
Fireworks being back at the Arch was a sign that normalcy may be slowly returning.
I’ve infiltrated a couple of parade outfits in St. Louis and so we’ve walked in several at this point. I always tell people that walking in the Mardi Gras parade is the closest I’ve ever felt to being famous, with a ton of drunk people screaming and flashing you for some beads. Well one aspect of the glamorous parade life that I had still yet to do was being one of those people that holds the ropes on the giant balloons. There’s a scene in Batman where there’s a parade with those big balloons but I think they were filled with poison gas and Batman has to cut all of their strings to save Gotham. Needless to say giant balloons are very exciting. I joined all of the.. special interest groups at my new company, U.S. Bank. There was one just for St. Louis events in particular that I didn’t expect to be too exciting, but the excitement was cranked to 11 when they sent out an email asking for balloon handler volunteers for the 4th of July parade. Awesome!
Balloon handling is a lot more work than I had expected. Those balloons are very large and filled with so much helium that it is constantly fighting you for its freedom. They supplied gloves which were necessary to not get rope burn. Once we got walking down the route, onlookers kept yelling at us to spin the balloon around by making all of us sort of jog in a circle. I did not enjoy that. There were a lot of trees and other things to get snagged on and it was kind of stressful.
After the parade we walked it to an alley, open its vents, and all jumped on it to force the gas out. It felt a lot like the murder of a large majestic creature.
We got a bit of news coverage, though I was cruelly out of frame for a tv news spot that happened right next to us.
I'm visible in the bottom right corner of this one.
I'm on the center left of this one. Not bad at all. Give the people of St. Louis what they want: more John Milito!
Afterward we went to a 4th of July party at Zoe and Spencer's house. Spencer has an affinity for explosives so he got weird with it.
Spencer had like homemade sticks of dynamite and was setting them off in his backyard. You could feel the shockwave hit you after each explosion. Anyway our night ended when one of his neighbors went ballistic after probably having their house foundation cracked by one of the explosions.
