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Missouri Botanical Garden

If you live in St. Louis, you can't help but get caught up in everything that is Cardinals fever. After all, this is a baseball town, and when your team is going for the World Series championship for the 12th time, it is a big deal. They paint the town...well, red.

Jim and Andy

Our son flew in from Washington, D.C. to see his first ever World Series game with Jim. They were lucky enough to be at Saturday night's game, where the Cardinals won 5-4 with the now notorious obstruction call. They definitely saw a game that will be in the history books. The game that Jim and I saw last night? Not so much.

Jim and me at game 5

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was fun to celebrate it at a World Series game. Call me greedy, but I was hoping for a Cardinals victory as the icing on my birthday cake, so to speak. Instead the game was fairly ho-hum. Our defense was excellent, but our offense was just not there. The Red Sox deserved to win, that is for sure. But it was rather unpleasant to have four Sox fans right in front of us, and one loud-mouthed Red Sox fan a few rows back.

Willie Robertson

You know that it is a mediocre game when the fans are more interested in seeing what Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson is up to rather than watching the critical game. In case you are wondering, Duck Dynasty is a reality show on television showcasing the Robertson family and their company that makes products for duck hunters. Yes, really. I have to admit that at times Willie was more entertaining the our boys in red.

While it is always a sight to see the Clydesdales parade around the warning track at Busch Stadium, the highlight of the night for me came when Tech Sergeant Angie Johnson sang "God Bless America" in the 7th inning. I have been following Angie since she was a contestant on Cee Lo's team on The Voice in 2012. I think she has amazing talent, and is just overall a really good person. In fact I believe so strongly in her that I backed a Kickstarter campaign she set up in order to record an album. She was so successful in that endeavor that she was ultimately picked up by Sony Music Nashville and her first CD is out. The fact that she is a Missouri gal and serves in the Missouri National Guard makes her all the more endearing to Show Me State fans.

So I am now a year older but the Cardinals are not a game closer to the World Series title. It will be interesting to see what the rest of 2013 holds in store for us.

Game 5 rally towel

While on Facebook a couple of weeks ago I came across a posting by a college professor who is conducting a study on the impact of the high school question on non-St. Louisans. She is looking for St. Louis residents who were not born and raised here to answer some questions. I immediately posted a response on her Facebook status as I have many things I would love to tell her about my experiences. When we moved to St. Louis Jim and I were starting a whole new life - newly married, new jobs, new home, new city...all the major stress points in life except a death in the family. At a party we were asked where we went to school, and we replied, "Iowa State". After getting a blank stare, the guy said, "No, where did you go to high school?" When I answered, "Hoover High", the guy literally turned around and walked away. That was just our first experience with the St. Louis obsession about where you went to high school. Unfortunately it was not our last.

A few days after I posted I received a phone call from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, wanting to know if I would talk to her about my experiences. We had quite a chat, and I was candid about how it made us feel being new professionals to the St. Louis area. I never really thought that we would stay here more than a few years. But here we are 33 years later. The article by the reporter made the front page of the Post-Dispatch on February 7th. I made the first line of the article. It was a pretty interesting piece, and it has generated a LOT of conversation both on the stltoday.com website and on Facebook. People have very strong feelings about the question, both positive and negative. As I said, I don't object to anyone asking me the question - I object to the way I am treated after I answer it. If you decide after talking to me for a bit that I am not interesting and not worth your time, fine. But to dismiss me simply because I did not graduate from high school here? To me that is pretty shallow and narrow-minded. But perhaps that tells me that I don't want to waste my time getting to know you either. At any rate, the study should be interesting. I have already answered the first set of questions and have volunteered to be interviewed further. If you live here but are not from here and want to participate, let me know. I'll forward the survey to you.

I'll leave my best quotable quote with you - the one that did not end up in the newspaper. When the reporter asked me when things changed for my husband and me here, I told her after we started our family. Then people were more interested in where my kids were going to preschool than where I went to high school.