Current Jazz Selections

Instead of hunting out new jazz releases, I have been digging through some of those CDs stacked on my bookshelves. Currently, I have been listening to Dave Holland's quintet--that is, the work featured on Not for Nothin' and Critical Mass. I have been waking up to one and listening to the other one when driving across town to where I teach a face-to-face class. I have a bad habit of buying clothes or shoes and letting them sit in my closet for a few months or sometimes up to a year. The same problem exists with music, too, because I have purchased a few CDs that I have never listened to. Life is often hectic, particularly at the end of the semester, and sometimes my interests change or I return to what I know when I get a couple of weeks off at the end of the semester. These Dave Holland recordings are new discoveries for me, despite having had them for more than a year. A couple of other Dave Holland discoveries await my attention.

A Few Flowers

Before the heat in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Southwest began heading north, there were a few flowers visible in my yard. Pictures of them appear below; as in previous posts, clicking on any one of these pictures will make it larger.

Missouri River Flooding Redux

Like many other locations along the Missouri River, the place where I live is experiencing flooding. Only a few parts of the city are prone to flooding, mostly those areas close to the river, such as Riverfront Park, the sewage treatment plant, and Landing Park. Leavenworth, unlike some of the other cities along the Missouri, increases in elevation as one travels west. The bluffs on this side of the river are what led Colonel Leavenworth to violate his orders regarding the fort he was instructed to create. Finding the eastern side of the river to be a floodplain and potentially unhealthy because of the mosquitoes, he chose to enter into Indian territory and to build his fort on the bluffs overlooking the river and, coincidentally, at the same location where the French had created a fort previously.

The photos below of Landing Park record the rising water, beginning in late May, with the earliest ones appearing at the bottom of the post. Clicking on any one picture will increase its size.

Even though there have been health warnings regarding the presence of E.coli because of the sewage treatment plants upriver not treating their waste, there are still people fishing in these flood waters--either for recreation or out of desperation.

Magnolia Blossoms_2011

My annual collection of magnolia blossoms appear below. Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

I am a little slow in posting these pictures. All of the magnolia blossoms where I live are gone now. There was only one good day to get pictures because of the high winds and the cold front that moved in that evening and destroyed many of the blossoms. Even getting pictures on this particular day was difficult because of the wind. I was only able to salvage about forty pictures from the two hundred or so that I took that day. Enjoy!