Weekend Adventure

P and I went to the MN History Center on Saturday to see the Vatican Splendors exhibit. The city was under a snow emergency so I suggested we take the bus. We could have someone else drive, not have to pay for parking and the exhibit would be pretty sparse on a Saturday because of the weather conditions. The bus stops right in front of our house so that was pretty easy. We had to walk a bit to the History Center, but not bad.


The exhibit itself was pretty good. An expensive ticket at $20, but there were a number of items that I would have never seen even in Vatican City. The Pope's clothing was especially interesting. The embroidery at the exhibit is worth the price of admission. Simply astonishing! There is an alb that must weigh 50 pounds for the amount of gold couched onto it. WOW. I would impress you with photos of the exhibit, but they were not allowed. Something that grinded at P as he would have loved getting some detail shots of the 8th c. mosaics from the original basilica.

I did find the exhibit a bit on the preachy side. It's an exhibition of artwork, and granted it's sacred artwork so placing it in context is perfectly reasonable but I felt they went far beyond that. I felt like I was in confirmation class and that was annoying and unnecessary if you ask me. I have no problem learning about the differnet popes who used the different items, but please respect my intelligence by refraining from going on and on about "how great" this one was and "how selfless" this one was. Whatever.

The snow fell steadily during our visit.


We walked down to the Liffy to have lunch with C&C.



P and I were witness to a rear ender right after this shot was taken. He flagged down a cop who was completely oblivious to anything happening around him (and still seemed confused after we tried to explain why we flagged him down). It wasn't anything serious, just someone slid into another person's back end. No injuries obviously. I was glad we didn't drive.

We had the Liffy to ourselves and enjoyed happy hour taps and fish and chips. We walked into down town and caught the 67 back home. I put some corned beef and cabbage on the stove when we got home and we ate it with some boiled potatoesfor dinner.

Sunday P spent a couple hours digging out the house. I think we got 6 inches easily. The blowing caused drifts that reached mid calf on the sidewalk.



You can't really see my lights on the trees out front. They've turned into white blobs.

The birds were having a field day and I finally caught a chickadee getting a snack at the thistle feeder out front. The goldfinch were swarming the thistle feeder out back.



I elected to stay inside and made a big breakfast of corned beef hash and eggs for P when he came inside. He had so many icicles around his face that it made his mustache look white. Nehemiah elected to stay warm and curled up to P.