So, yesterday afternoon at the end of the day, I was half-dreading seeing the woman in the gray van again, but instead I had an uneventful walk to my rental car in the parking lot.

When I got there, however, I found a couple of folded sheets of paper placed under the windshield wiper. They had several Bible verses printed on them, and the first sheet had a handwritten scrawled note on top :

“I’m sorry for being so rude yesterday.”

Whaaa….??
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Okay, so after almost ten years of living in these United States and I have just encountered my first serious case of prejudice.

In St Louis.

In this allegedly Christian heartland of America. Go figure…
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There’s really nothing much going on in St Louis this week - so Alexis came to class with me and sat in as a student for the first half of the day She got to learn introductory MATLAB! She’s dangerous now, folks, watch out…
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So I arrived in Hartford late on Saturday afternoon - courtesy of a delay at O’Hare when I seized an opportunity to get a FREE roundtrip ticket by volunteering to take a later flight. Yay! Alexis can now come on a trip with me for FREE! We plan on using it in September when we are scheduled to fly to Austin, Texas.

While home, though, the plan was for me to join Alexis at a wedding - one of her close friends, Kimmie, was marrying her man Damian and Alexis was one of the bridesmaids - but that plan started to unravel with the flight delay from Iowa the previous night.

So, here’s what my 22 hours at home were like :
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“Is that really your name?”

I looked up at the waiter, Joe, who was looking at the signed credit card receipt for our dinner. Alexis and I were in Hannegan’s Restaurant, in the riverfront area of St Louis. We are in St Louis for the next week on another training trip and we had just walked down to the riverfront from the downtown Renaissance Grand Hotel where we are staying. We had enjoyed a simple but filling meal and Alexis was in the restroom while I was paying up. Our waiter, Joe, had just taken my receipt away and then turned with that question.

“Uhhm, yeah…”, I replied.

“Man, you know that’s cool, right?”, said Joe.
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