The Last MPS Board Meeting

Last weekend was my last official meeting with the Board of Directors for the National MPS Society. It was held in North Carolina where the office is now located. I was glad that I was able to go, although flight delays made me miss the committee meetings on the first night. The good news was that Austin was able to drive to Raleigh and be there to spend time with me and my wonderful friends. I was awarded with a beautiful blown glass egg and plaque, which fortunately made it back to STL unscathed. I will definitely continue my volunteer efforts and involvement, but the conflict of interest with Mark's position made it time for me to free my position to someone new. I'm thrilled with our replacement crew and know that things will be in good hands in the future. Here's our official Board picture for 2008. Unfortunately, Steve Frye, Luis Guajardo, and Sissi were unable to join us for this meeting, so they aren't included in the photo.




Austin and I just hung around after breakfast on Sunday, enjoying the wonderful sunny weather, and trying to figure out how to use the self timer on my camera. We were finally successful!

Robust

Last night Mark and I went to a wonderful new restaurant called Robust. It's a wine bar, restaurant and wine store all in one. We had wonderful food, sampled some great wines, and thoroughtly enjoyed ourselves (thanks for the suggestion, Shannon and Rob!). Today I'm off to Raleigh, NC for my last official National MPS Society Board of Director's meeting. It will be a busy weekend, but best of all, Austin is driving up to spend the weekend with me since I'm in his neighborhood!

My soldier son

I can't say I'm a big fan of these pictures, his face is so expressionless....I think the Army wants it that way. However, I am very proud of Austin...

I love my license plate!

I ordered the specialty plate back in August, and I was beginning to think it would never arrive!

Restaurants

We've made a pledge that we will try at least one new restaurant a week. I can't say that we've completely stuck to the pledge, sometimes old and familiar is what we are craving, sometimes we don't get out as often as we'd planned, sometimes we just are poor in the planning ahead department. However, hopefully we'll get better, and I'll start telling you about our restaurant adventures. STL has a plethora of great restaurants, and we'll probably never run out! We have been to Oceano, The Drunken Fish, The Blue Sand, Chevy's, Hacienda, Zinnia, The Olympia, The Blue Elephant, Tachebana, Blueberry Hill, and others that I can't remember. Last night we headed out to a new Mexican restaurant named ZuZu's, but it appears to no longer be in business so we ended up walking around the corner to The Blue Elephant . We had gone there for the first time for Mark's birthday and had some wonderful Thai food. Last night was no exception! I love Thai food, and their's is hot, fresh and wonderful!

Katy Trail

The Katy Trail is a rails to trails project along the Missouri River. We drove there today for a long bike ride, it was a beautiful afternoon. We met a friendly black snake on the trail, as well as saw many other pretty sights....

Here's an abandoned piece of equipment alongside the old trail tracks...
We turned around at Klondike Park, which is an old sand quarry. The white sand there was as pretty as any beach, only there's no salt water in sight!


We rode through the town of Defiance, which I thought was such a cool name. We looked it up on Wikipedia when we got home, and found out the town was named in "defiance" of the neighoring town which was also competing to become a train stop. It was also the last homestead of Daniel Boone, who is really big around these parts.

Weekend Activities

Saturday was a busy day! We started out the day at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which was hosting a "Best of Missouri Market." It was crowded, but there were lots of interesting things there. We did tons of food sampling, bought a few Christmas presents, and wandered around looking at all the cool stuff. After that, we headed home with our bounty, picked up the dogs, and headed to the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge held in Grey Summit, MO. Purina's corporate headquarters are there, and the national Incredible Dog Challenge Finals are held there every year. What a cool competition!! While there, Lucy met her bigger, older twin sister...it was too crowded to get a good picture, but this is the first dog we've met that looked like Lucy.





We watched the "weaving" competition, where the dogs weave in and out of poles stuck in the ground. Most of the competitors were border collies, but Casanova, this huge Doberman just barreled through the poles, more or less knocking them out of the way as he went. He won the competition, hands down.


Next was the Freestyle Frisbee competition. It was amazing! These dogs were running in, around, over and under their owners in the pursuit of frisbees. The coolest part about it was you could tell the dogs were having the time of their lives!

On this jump for the frisbee, the dog did a complete overhead flip while catching the disc. Apparently, this is very rare to be executed as perfectly as we saw Saturday. She won the competition. Lucy and Gus paid very close attention, and we hope they aspire to be Frisbee champs one day!

Sunday we headed out to the farm. Mark's goal was to get some areas brush hogged close to the pond. While I'm getting better with the tractor, I'm pretty sure I would have managed to get the tractor in the pond, so he took tractor duty, and I wandered around taking pictures. It was a beautiful day out there, and fall is starting to show up!



This is Elmer, who lives close to the pond at the edge of the field. He's a beautiful old oak tree. Elmer has a friend somewhere on the farm, but we can't find the other tree with a face on it!

There were 34 geese on the pond when we got there. Here's one of the groups on the pond.