St. Louis so far

I've moved from Texas to St. Louis. There are some things in common. The people here are really friendly like they are in the South. You can just walk up to a stranger and break into a conversation. The whole of the state of Missouri is kinda drawn up the way a Texas congressional district might be gerrymandered, encompassing just one half of a major city and then running across over one hundred miles of rural nowhere to encircle another, separate one half of another major city elsewhere. Allergies seem just as bad here as they were in Texas. My nose is snotty all the time. I was expecting some relief from as much when I got here. Supposedly, Austin is the allergy capital of the world, but St. Louis doesn't seem much different. Husband and wife Pierre and Susan Kerbage who ran Network Logistic, Inc. had moved to Texas from Kansas City (the other Missouri-halved metropolis) and Susan complained of the allergies in Austin as if they were somehow different from those in Kansas City. Whatever. I can remember overhearing a conversation Susan Kerbage had with a Jamie Alig (now Jamie Wheatley) in which Susan vented about how she and Pierre were really disappointed with the customer service in Austin. Is Missouri better? Maybe. The "Service Engine Soon" light kept coming on on my dashboard back in Texas. I went to a National Tire & Battery in Pasadena, Texas three times and they couldn't put the problem to bed. They swapped out two sensors and an air filter all for naught. When the light came on again here in St. Louis I went to an NTB and they actually were able to determine that my car's computer needed an update and they suggested that I go to a Nissan dealership which flashed the computer and fixed the issue for real. The Pasadena NTB had two second chances to do research and think outside the box and they were just apathetic. The photo here is from Mardi Gras festivities celebrated yesterday, yes, three days before Fat Tuesday, in the Soulard neighborhood. Just today I made it a point to go up in the iconic Gateway Arch so that I could say that I did so. The arch, in its completed form, is just over fifty years old and that means that it is older than the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and it sure screams of it. It screams of the 1960s. They play a little presentation full of festive colors straight out of that "Down with Love" movie that has Ewan McGregor in it and part of the presentation eludes to the James Bond movie Goldfinger (never seen it in its entirety) current in the era of arch building and that ultimately foreshadows the feel of the very chunky old cable car tech that cannot accommodate anyone overweight or in a wheelchair that takes you to the top of the arch in a claustrophobic little space capsule like chamber (think David Bowie's Space Oddity) that sort of thematically looks like the inside of a froYo which is a local chain of frozen yogurt restaurants that have a sterile white-everywhere theme. The James Bond / Major Tom flavor makes me think of that "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." film too. We are going into some old spy movie on this particular rollercoaster ride. Something that made me feel personally old was as inability to figure out how to adjust the brightness on my phone so that an attendant could successfully scan a PDF of my ticket with a barcode reader. A girl half my age showed me how to do it. Under "Settings" there is a "Display & Brightness" assuming you're running iOS 9.3.5 (13G36) on an iPhone 4S which you are probably not doing. This was something embarrassing for me like not knowing that my device had physical controls for audio volumes. Again, good customer service though. So far so good in St. Louis!