It’s been a minute since I blogged (I hate that expression but I’ve started using it to fit in, haha), so let me pop in and say hello. I’ve been busy, more than you’d think for summer.

I’ve taken two different online teacher courses (I’ve been learning tons, and really just trying to take advantage of this opportunity to learn online: if it goes away, taking one week of training in person, when you factor in travel, taking off work, and the tuition, would cost about as much as the nearly 5 different courses I’ve taken over the past year!) so that kept me busy, plus teaching. I’ve been working hard these past few weeks on getting my studio and my studio schedule organized for the fall. One thing I am telling myself is that if somebody can’t fit into the schedule, that’s okay. It happens, and I don’t need to lie awake stressing over how to make it work for everyone. (Yes, I do that sometimes. Yes, it is a little insane.)

It’s also been a bit of a stressful time. I got exposed to COVID from a student (vaccinated) and then had to do the whole teaching online/testing/waiting for test results thing. I know I wouldn’t technically have had to quarantine, CDC guidelines don’t say you should, but I imagined how I would feel having to tell my students if I tested positive, and that was enough for me to ask them to be online for a few days of lessons. I’m glad I’m mostly seeing folks in person though, because I didn’t love being online all day again. I still teach some students online, but I see more than half in person. I assume something like this will happen again this fall, with the delta variant running rampant through our area, but I hope that more vaccinations (come on, vaccinations for under 12’s) and going back to intense mask wearing will help. Oh, and I found out I had tested negative just in time, as my parents were visiting for the day.

Louie and I camped for two nights at Hawn State Park. We’d camped there before, but this time we took a walk-in site. It was a nice location, though the walking in was a little annoying. The first night we had the area to ourselves and it was beautiful…then a group of young people had two or three of the sites, so we lost our solitude. They were perfectly nice and respectful though, and we had a weird incident involving a man walking through the sites poking around at about 5 to 6 am in the morning, but nobody was hurt. I noticed him first, and quietly awoke Louie, and we weren’t really sure what to do, but my impulse ended up being to start yelling and wake up the other 12 people sleeping nearby, while Louie had evidently been planning to go out and approach the guy calmly, and either way, we got the guy to leave (he had a lot of excuses for why he was there) and blah blah blah. I don’t really feel like talking about it more.

The day we spent at Hawn was nice, except I was dealing with a migraine and the heat was pretty bad. We did a hike of about 4 miles, and then ended up eating dinner at a nearby restaurant. This was when we still trusted our vaccines, which we may not anymore: we ate at a patio last night, and I think it’ll be awhile before we eat indoors again unless it’s a place we really trust to be either vaccinated or mostly vaccinated and well spaced.

Anyway, after we left Hawn we headed to St. Genevieve just to visit the National Historic Site–it had recently been turned into a National Historic Site, and I wanted to see it. We visited the Visitor’s Center and watched a short movie and saw a few displays, including a wonderful model of the town.

Then we took a house tour (the Felix Valle House) and learned quite a bit, and then we just walked around a bit and had lunch at the Anvil Restaurant. There are other houses we could have toured, but we were ready to go home at that point.

Anyway, then another week and more went by and then my parents visiting, just for the day and overnight on their way somewhere else. We did a little sightseeing, and went to see the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site, which none of us had been to even though it is less than 20 minutes from my house. It had a really nice museum and we took a ranger guided tour of the grounds. It is a small site, but very educational and well done. We were probably there about 1 1/2 hours total.

We had more time after that, so we headed down to visit the Arch Grounds, which my Mom hadn’t been to since they were redone. We didn’t go inside there due to worries of too many people, but just walked around a bit. The weather was really quite nice, not too hot and sunny, so it was a lovely day for it.

We had pizza from Pizzeria da Gloria that night, which is quickly becoming Louie and I’s favorite pizza place. Try the mushroom pizza!

My sister and her family are visiting for a few days, starting today, so I’ve been cleaning as well, getting the house ready for more visitors (okay, full disclosure, I haven’t been doing much cleaning, but we did move some things around and then we had to set up a futon) and planning some fun activities. We are planning to visit Grant’s Farm, the Aquarium, and the new Playspace at Forest Park. We have reservations for one outdoor patio meal at Katie’s Pizza and Pasta, and otherwise are cooking or doing takeout: if we need to wear masks again, we shouldn’t be unmasking inside in front of strangers whose vaccination status is unknown. It’s too bad, because I was enjoying going to some restaurants and sitting inside, but…

Have you been to the NPS sites I mentioned above? What is your take on eating inside? Any other thoughts?