International Museum of Art and Science

The beautiful sunny days we first had down here are only a memory now.  Since then we have had almost a week of gray skies and moist cool weather.  So we are left to explore the science and art museums in the area of the Valley.  The International Museum is located in McAllen and is rather small compared to the one in St.Louis.  It does have a couple impressive exhibits, however.  In the science section there is a Science on a Sphere, a 6 foot, 20 pound fiberglass animated globe that uses four projectors and state of the art technology to show dynamic and animated images of the atmosphere, oceans, planets, and much more.  It was designed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

In the art museum there are 29 imaginary portraits done by Picasso when he was 87 years old.  He painted   them on corrugated cardboard, and then had them transformed into lithographs by one of France's leading    lithographers.  The suite of 29 portraits were then sent back to Picasso for correction, the whole process      took a year.  Something else which I enjoyed very much in the art museum was a collection of stained glass  windows obtained from churches on the east coast.  They were made in the Tiffany studios.                        

Our time during  these gloomy days is also spent attending the musical jam sessions in the clubhouse of our   park.  Many of  our residents have been in professional musical groups and consequently the musical            offerings have been quite good.  Sometimes in the jam sessions there are as many as about 30 people playing on a variety of musical  instruments as guitars, harmonicas, mandolins, and keyboards.  My sister-in-law       

Mary Jo joined the group yesterday on her dulcimer.   Today we attended a big band jam session in another park.   That session featured many brass instruments and was also very entertaining.    By Monday the          weather should be in the seventies, in the meantime we will just have to look away from the gray skies and     enjoy the bright colors of the blooming plants and shrubs which can be found ever where here in the Valley.