The Count Down is On

I can't believe the school year is winding down and the end is in sight. That means I only have a little over 1 month to see all of St. Louis I intend to. So I better get busy.

This past week I did a few long rides out in West County. I decided to ride my mountain bike. This was a good thing because there was a lot of curb hopping to be done due to the traffic and road construction. The sights are truly beautiful if you are willing to ride about 10 mile of horrendous city traffic before you get to the rolling hills.

I must qualify this last statement. To really see the beauty of the landscape one must have a well developed sense of imagination. One must also suspend one's belief in the wisdom of humanity. For me it is a coping mechanism. I can and I must imagine how breathtaking it was before the advent of The Subdivision. Truly, this category of development is the bane of the contemporary American landscape.
The street names are so trite and ubiquitous. Does any suburban area not have countless streets with such whimsical names as Ridge Crest Ave, Stony Pointe Drive, Aspen Bluff Blvd, Springwood Court, Lost Pines Lane? Do the masses understand the irony of those former bluffs, springs, ridges and crest having been bulldozed to make way for these idyllic little Pleasantvilles? No, I thought not.

But I did enjoy my many miles immensely, in spite of. And I found hidden pockets of treasure in the form of strongholds of un-pretentiousness. In one case, I was winding my way along a county road with a 6,000 sf house every acre or so and I noticed a sharp left that dropped precipitously down along a roaring stream. It was definitely the road less traveled and it felt like I was in an entirely different zip code. The homes were all the river-side cottage types and the inhabitants looked like your average blue collar, hard working folk who maintained their own lawns and kept their own gardens. It was so quaint I could not believe it had not been co-opted by developers. The reason surely being that this area is obviously in jeopardy of major flooding ever 50 years or so. The best part is that the road ended in a trail that took me back to the road from whence I came. Just like in New England.

And then the weather gods were smiling upon me. I left for 3 days to attend a Foreign Language Conference a the University of Kentucky in Lexington. It rained here in St. Louis the entire time while the sun shined on me in Kentucky. It stopped raining upon my return to St Louis.

At the conference I was lucky enough to attend talks on such topics as: The Argument/ Adjunct Distinction in Syntax and the Semantics of the Spanish Subjunctive, Transitivity and Subcategory Gustar in Spanish, Syllabic minimality in Spanish Truncation. Exciting stuff. Well, if not exciting at least interesting. I also attended a few workshops on language technology. It is amazing what some people are doing in the classroom with technology. Mostly at the university level since it requires an investment in technical infrastructure. Most public school do not possess funds for this kind of techie-bling . Unfortunate.