A Very Small Pool Party

Lydia really likes hanging out by pools in the summertime. While the pool we have access to through our apartment building was technically open, we didn't want to risk interacting with other residents or really even want to use the other building's elevator to get there. So I did what anyone would do: I bought a kiddie pool, crawled out my apartment window to the roof of the building next door, and started blowing.

We had some setbacks pretty much immediately. It would have probably taken me hours to blow this thing up with my mouth. I was getting pretty lightheaded which was probably a bad life choice while upon a roof.

Luckily I'm like friggin' MacGyver. I cut a water bottle in half and taped it to a hairdryer. The hairdryer's coldest setting was still pretty hot and so I had to take frequent breaks because the water bottle plastic would begin to melt when it got too hot. Other than that it was a success.

The next hurdle was how to get the pool filled with water. I had bought a hose for this purpose but there wasn't a way to connect it to our kitchen faucet as I had intended. We resorted to taking care of this the most ghetto way possible by filling various containers with water and then dumping them out the window into the pool.

I bought a few of these water cooler jugs full of water early in the apocalypse when I wasn't quite sure just how bad things were going to get. I was still a bit nervous about emptying them but I figured I could just fill them back up with faucet water immediately.

It's amazing how much water weighs and how much this pool could hold. After a ton of manual labor we had like a couple of inches worth of water in the pool. We were tired of lugging it and splashing it all over our apartment, and we also weren't sure how much weight we could put on the roof before the thing collapsed. So whatever. I think Lydia was happy enough with our accomplishment.

On the plus side I think we were pretty safe from any possible drowning incidents.

Later on we strolled around a bit in Lafayette Park and noticed this Thomas Hart Benton statue.

Keen JMAA readers may recognize that name from our recent visit to Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site in Kansas City. Well the artist Benton was named after his great-uncle Senator Benton seen here.

Senator Benton was one of the two first senators from the newly minted state of Missouri. I'm patiently waiting for the day that the hippies realize that St. Louis' Benton Park neighborhood is named after a slave owning senator who Wikipedia says was "an architect and champion of westward expansion by the United States, a cause that became known as Manifest Destiny." 

You can see he's unfurling a map of North America. Fun fact about Manifest Destiny:

"According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum was the "Manifest Destiny" for Germany's romanticization and imperial conquest of Eastern Europe. Hitler compared Nazi expansion to American expansion westward, saying, “there's only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins."

So yeah this statue is for sure going to get torn down. Enjoy, St. Louis!

Watching businesses, especially bars, try to "reopen" during a pandemic was pretty vile. I felt like I was looking into the dark heart of capitalism.

Cemetery Sanctuary

We wanted to spend time at the park as we considered public indoor spaces off limits due to the danger of contracting the coronavirus. Well unsurprisingly everyone else had the exact same idea, and all of the parks were packed. Even being near other people while outside made us uncomfortable, though, so we did some brainstorming on where would be a good green space for us to inhabit. We came up with a genius place.

Cemeteries! We headed over to Bellefontaine Cemetery as we had done a little volunteer work here previously and we knew it had beautiful natural elements and some cool graves to see as well.

Later on we spent some time on the roof.

There were tiny red clover mites all over the roof. I was impressed as it was quite a climb for such a tiny creature.

Watching the Sun Set

As I regard the insides of buildings as hot lava, I am now always on the lookout for interesting outdoor activities. I heard that there was a park that was good to watch the sunset in. With a name like Sunset Park I figured the rumors must be worth investigating.

Lydia came up with a high tech solution to the glare of our roof office: putting her laptop in a box.

Sunset Park in Florissant, MO was very sunsetty indeed. There were a good number of other people in the park so we didn't venture too far from the cars. It was nice though.

Still Surviving

Cleaning products are still quite hard to come by, so local distillers have keenly figured since no one is coming to their onsite locations to buy anything anyway, they might as well produce overpriced moonshine, mix it with some thinners, and then sell it as a cleaner. Sold!

It's been an ongoing battle to retrieve all of the refunds from the various tours, hotels, and flights for our ill-fated trip to Mongolia. This was a hard won refund from a tour.

Funnily enough, I've never been to Still 630 and I don't recall ever trying any of their products before now.

A half gallon of white lightning set us back $30.

The roof also provides a lovely view of downtown at night.