Exciting things to open!

 I love my calendars.  I use Outlook at work and ical at home and both feed to my iphone.  I also subscribe to my husbands work travel schedule.  I have color codes for everything.  Red for work, pink for school, purple for Girl Scouts, orange for sports, etc.  I have just one paper calendar I hang in the kitchen to keep the kids reminded of relevant dates.  Without my calendar, I am lost. 

I have a category called "neighborhood need to know".  Things like festivals, openings, closings, etc.  A small but important category.

Four dates have me excited.

July 14- reopening of the Grand Bridge.  Finally.  The span from highway 40 to Chouteau will re-open.  Holy Smokes it's been a while waiting on this one and the roads handling Grand's load have been a mess (Vandeventer, Compton).  During the school year the Grand bridge affects me greatly because I use it to get to my kids school from downtown.  And then during the summer my kids go to camp at SLU and how great it will be to pick up the big kids at SLU and get to Mimi's preschool in Shaw without dealing with the congested mess of Vandeventer/Chouteau/Manchester/etc?.  (This week the kids are all at different camps at Hampton/Gravois- Gus at karate, Audrey at Willmore Park, Kay at Cor Jesu).

July 27- Opening ceremony for the Olympics.  I confess. I am an Olympics junkie.  I will watch the Olympics for 3 weeks straight. I think I've even planned the births of my children around the Olympics.  I have good memories of watching the Olympics in the middle of the night while breastfeeding (Mimi Beijing 2008, Gus Turin 2006).  I was pregnant with Kay (Sydney 2000) and Audrey (Salt Lake 2002).    I planned this year's summer vacation around the Olympics so I wouldn't miss any coverage.  I will be glued to my TV.  See this post from my 63104 mom tumblr for an Olympic encounter with 1996 Magnificent 7 member Shannon Miller:  LINK.

December 2012- reopening of St. Louis Public Library's downtown branch.  I am so excited to see the remodel.  Love sunny Barr Branch, but Central is so much bigger.

Sometime in the future- a Great River Greenways trail expansion from downtown all the way down to the River des Peres trail.  If I have my information correct, I'd be able to get from my house in Soulard to a trail along the Mississippi that would then take me to the River des Peres trail or northward to downtown and beyond.  Does anyone know how exciting that would be?   If there was a Sidney Street trail head, I'd be only about 1/4 mile from the trail.  As opposed to now where we have to load up the bikes and drive to a trail.  With 4 kids, that doesn't happen very often.  I'd need an industrial bike trailer to get those bikes around.  See here:  LINK.

Save the Del Taco flying saucer!

Some short-sighted jerk wants to tear down this awesome building and make another ugly strip mall. If you're not in St. Louis, here's some background: the flying saucer was built in the 1960's a Phillips 66 and later a bank. In the 1980's it became a Naugles and is now a Del Taco. It's on the Saint Louis University campus. Drunk people have been getting late night food here for as long as I can remember.

Badmansard was a Naugles purist and went to the Maple-hood Naugles while in high school (photo below- now a Quiznos and a bad mansard). However, I went to law school at SLU and visited this site frequently. Let's not tear it down. It's a cool conversation piece.

Badmansard knows not every mid century modern can be saved, but we're smart enough to figure a way to keep this one. You can check out the facebook page here: LINK.