Chinese Treasures

I've started to ramp up my Amazon side hustle with a lot of random purchases.

Lydia has been a pretty good sport about the amount of crap that I bring into the apartment. I have to keep it around until I'm reimbursed so a lot of it sits in the office and waits. Most of it is crap and goes straight into the trash but there's some good stuff as well.

Lydia enjoys opening the packages. It's sort of like Christmas mixed with a yard sale.

There's always some amusing oddities to behold. Items like this African black soap that for some reason resembles a loaf of bread, for example.

So we signed up for this program that pays you to relocate to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I had an interview with them on December 10 and today I got the good word that I was accepted into the program. I had not realized that the amount that they would pay you was graduated depending on your income. The max was $10k and we both had applied, so I figured we were talking either 10 or $20k to make the move. They offered me $7k and didn't make Lydia any offer at all. I found this to be kind of shady, because they knew that Lydia and I would be moving together, so to extend an offer to only one of us felt kind of like a lowball offer. I tried to negotiate with them but they stood firm, so I withdrew from the program. Oh well.

On the bright side, now I don't have to listen to "Sweet Home Alabama" on repeat anymore.

"Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers

And they've been known to pick a song or two (Yes, they do)

Lord, they get me off so much

They pick me up when I'm feeling blue

Now how 'bout you?"

We're losing a lot of irreplaceable businesses due to the pandemic.

I was sad to hear about the demise of Family Video. I used to love going in there all the time, despite the fact that our nearest branch smelled like pee. I did not realize that the company was founded back where things make sense, in Springfield, Illinois.

Sad to see that Civil War sugarbaby is no longer a viable career.

Chess Lessons

The Netflix miniseries the Queen's Gambit is the current hotness and is the 1950s-60s story of a chess prodigy crushing people and crushing lots of drugs along the way.

The show inspired us to play a little prodigy chess of our own. Man I haven't played chess in a very long time.

New Year New Parks

Well it's a new year and you know what that means: new Missouri State Parks!

I was embarrassingly excited to take a hike in the beautiful white ice covered trees I was seeing along the highway.

Of course the fact I was excited about it meant that the universe could not allow it to happen. I was the whitest thing at the park.

Montauk State Park near Salem, MO sports its own fish hatchery, and is noted for its rainbow and brown trout angling. Its natural springs form the headwaters of the Current River.

The trees were getting icier!

Elephant Rocks State Park is home to an outcropping of Precambrian pink granite in the St. Francois Mts that I guess if you squint look like elephants. Quarries here supplied stone for St. Louis City Hall and the Eads Bridge. 

A nearby sign:

"The granite rocks of this area are found in that part of the Ozarks known as the St. Francois Mountains. The rock making up these mountains formed over one billion years ago when molten magma beneath the earth's thin crust cooled. In the millions of years to follow, the land was uplifted, leveled by erosional cycles, and covered with sediments deposited by ancient seas. The granite rocks again were exposed when the land uplifted and sedimentary rocks eroded away."

I thought the remains of the Engine House were cool. They were composed of the same pink granite from the elephants, and they had the original train tracks that would take the quarry's products away to market.

The elephants looked a lot more like baked potatoes to me. Or maybe I'm just hungry.

"Located 14 feet to your left and four to five feet high are letters and numbers carved into granite rock. Many quarry workers carved their names and the date into the rock when they became master stone cutters."

I found these name and date carvings to be haunting. This will probably last longer than their gravestones will. In 1876:

Alexander Graham Bell makes the first successful telephone call

 Battle of the Little Bighorn: an army under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer is defeated by 1,500-2,500 Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho

The first cremation in the United States takes place

 Wild Bill Hickok is killed during a poker game in Deadwood, Dakota

Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state

1875 was the year of the first Kentucky Derby.