I took a walk yesterday around Mac-Groveland and Merriam Park, about 4 miles, and it prompted updates to several topics I have touched on before.

Peanuts statues. O’Gara’s at Snelling and Selby looks to be a prosperous bar. In addition to this busy location, they maintain a building on the State Fair grounds, which I’m assuming is open only during events and during the two weeks leading up to Labor Day. O’Gara’s sponsored a Peanuts on Parade statue in at least three of the years the program has run, and the statues stand at the corner of the bar’s ample parking lot. Except it may no longer be so ample once Whole Foods opens next year across Selby Avenue (along with 210 new housing units) — you can see that building rising behind the bar. And once St. Paul’s pro soccer team takes up residence in 2018 at the new stadium five blocks away, this and other bars will be turning ’em away.

Elf houses. Mr. Little Guy may have been the first, but now that one can buy elf accouterments at Michael’s, imitators have sprung up. Here is one on Hague Avenue west of Selby. I stopped and talked with a woman out walking her dog, as it happened right beside this elf abode, which I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. The dog-walker said she had in­stal­led one at the base of her streetside tree as well. I inquired whether the doors covered hollows in the trees, as the Lake Harriet elf’s does; she said I would have to talk with the elves about that. Unlike Mr. Little Guy, these elves don’t respond to written enquiries.

Sidewalk poetry. Here is another poem I found in Merriam Park, half a block from the elf house above. Slide the left-hand panel to the right by its little red triangle for a more legible version.