Eight Hours of Romney!

We danced advanced this morning 10:00 a.m. to noon. After lunch we started again 1:30-3:30 advanced and 3:30 to 4:30 C-1. After dinner we picked up again with C-1 from 7:O0 to 8:00 p.m. and advanced from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. By the end of the dance, even I had had enough square dancing for one day!

It was great to have the chance to dance to Romney again--still as challenging and sarcastic as ever. We even went out to dinner with him. Hal and Dorothy and Hardy and Judy filled him in on all the Missouri doings, and we all gave him the scoop on the Valley dancing.

Tonight we came home and opened a bottle of the St. James Vinoles and shared it with Hardy and Judy as we mellowed out after our challenging day.

After lunch, Judy and I went to a post office so I could send out some mail. We stopped at the nearby mall, partly so we could walk a bit and partly so Judy could get some fresh brewed iced tea (her beverage of choice). We chanced on an unusual store: The St. Louis Teachers' Recycle Center. It was full of unusual items, mainly craft materials. The store is open to the public, too. We had fun checking out all the "trash to treasures."

The St. Louis Teachers' Recycle Center, Inc. gathers creative materials from local business and industry that are landfill-bound and makes them available to teachers, parents and youth groups. Susan Blandford, the Center's Director opened the first of four centers in St. Louis in 1992. Since then, the excitement of teachers has spread throughout the region and the demand for a traveling recycle center became apparent. This year the St. Louis-Jefferson Solid Waste Management District funded SLTRC to purchase a van to help deal with the delivery of materials directly to schools, youth programs and area educational events.

The St. Louis area has proven that "we are all in this together" by supporting this win-win-win program for the past fifteen years. Industry wins by lessening their contribution to the landfill, teachers win by having access to high-quality materials for their classrooms, but most of all, our children win by having good materials to put their hands and minds around. THANK YOU ST. LOUIS!