respublica

Can you spell Avocado?

A woman in England with much too much time on her hands has begun picking up dropped grocery lists she sees when shopping. She's up to 300 pickups written on everything from old envelopes to old receipts to actual plain paper. One thing in common with many of the lists is the wrong spelling of Avocado. It seems most of us can't spell it correctly.

Can you? I'm not linking this article because there you have to register to read,  But if you're fine with doing that, here is the story.

Do you own a Spider Plant?

We have quite a few plants, some of which are good for freshening the air, adding oxygen, removing carbon dioxide. Others are just for looks. We have a snake plant in our bedroom which is known for removing toxins, adding oxygen and other things I don't understand. But it's doing well.

Another good plant to have around the house is the Spider Plant.

We do not have a Spider Plant but I may head out and try to find one.  There are many more good hard working plants to have inside.

This could well be true

One of my Facebook friends posted this today, originating from a Jeff Grinnell. After googling this guy, it seems he does exist. In any event, the could be history of the width of railroad tracks is very interesting.

A history lesson for people who think that history doesn't matter:

What's the big deal about railroad tracks?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?

Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
So, why did 'they' use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial  Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial  Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the  United States  standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's rear came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in  Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.  The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's rear.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's rears control almost everything.

Would you do this?

Somewhere in Yosemite National Park there is a popular climbing area that brave (or foolhardy) people love to go. A section of one of these areas is a ledge 2000 feet up and supposedly used by climbers to take a rest and enjoy the view. My first thought was "this is nuts" and my second thought was, "how does he get off?"

I read this article but still do not know why anyone would be up on this ledge, known as the Thank God Ledge so named because climbers can take a rest. Not restful looking to me.

Cleaners and other things

Most days it seems as though we are past the days when Covid caused all kinds of shut downs and out of stock items in stores. But, there are still things everyone seems to be buying leads to empty areas in stores. The one item I can rarely find these days is Kellogg Vanilla Protein Drinks. Over the past few years Dale has made it a habit to drink one of these with his lunch and until Covid, I could always find them in area grocery stores. Then suddenly they were out of stock in local stores and haven't come back. Schnucks and Dierbergs still have not gotten the Vanilla but always have chocolate or strawberry, flavors Dale is not interested in.

Then some weeks ago I discovered Walmart carries these and always had Vanilla in stock. Until this past weekend. I guess lots of people really like Kellogg Vanilla protein drinks. But, today they are restocked which is one of those HURRAY days around here. And the best part? The very best part? A four pack at Walmart is 5.98 and before the other two grocery stores ran out of them the cost was 9 something at Dierbergs and 8 something at Schnucks. So many times Walmart is a wonderful place.

Also, since Covid, it has been hard to find a cleaners. The Collinsville cleaners we always went to shut down for good it seems. There really aren't many of these businesses anymore, maybe a drive to St. Louis. But  then we learned about Premium Cleaners in Fairview Heights, a newer business, and they have been fantastic. I'm picking up a load of cleaning today including a comforter. Comforters are impossible to wash in our machine and going to a laundromat is still not for me since Covid. The Premium people are great. It is on the east side of 159 south of the Mall area.

What I never knew about our washing machine

I read an article this morning on the importance of cleaning the washing machine filter. Frankly, I never knew our machine even had a filter. There seems to be no obvious place as to where it even would be found.

We have a Maytag which Dale bought for our Collinsville house during one of the years we lived on the seminary campus and what he did with the manual I've never learned. So I looked through some Google search links and still don't know if any applies to our washer. But nothing seems to go wrong with it so I will avoid anymore searching for now.

Sometimes Technology is a real pain

We've had Charter Spectrum cable since the mid-1980's. When we moved back to Collinsville two years ago we had the cable set up on the main floor where we watch most tv and the cable guy told us we didn't need another box upstairs in the bedroom to get spectrum programming, just go get a Roku stick which has the Spectrum app installed. We did this and had no trouble until recently. Now the Spectrum app seems to have stopped working. Why this is I don't know for sure, but am guessing Spectrum has put the kabosh on it.

I've tried the various, almost incomprehensible pieces of advice I found online, but none brings back the use of this app. We do like watching the end of Cardinal games when we go to bed or whatever else we've been watching. This is now super disappointing. After all these years with Charter Spectrum, you'd think they would not do this.T

We just don't want to be fooling around with a tv we have to be constantly downloading apps with their accompanying user names and passwords. That is why we have liked Charter.

Update: The next morning both computers working as they should for no rhyme or reason. I'd have to guess there was updating done by Roku without notice which had them out of commission yesterday.

This is how I've always felt

Math beyond 6th grade was always Greek to me. And don't get me started on chemistry formulas.

Just one more frustrating text

This afternoon I received a text, supposedly from Amazon which there has been some unusual activity on my account and I should do this or that. This is just not true, I checked with the real Amazon, but I'd guess this happens to others who actually follow the link. That is trouble.

There are crooks and creeps all all the web, it used to be fishing was done with email, now it's texts and messages on Facebook. I hate this stuff.

Auto license sticker update

Yesterday on the post just below this, I wrote about having to renew my license plate sticker. I have to say even though I was not thrilled about paying what turned out to be 160 dollars and change, the process was amazingly fast. I arrived at the place in Swansea and the emissions test and the receiving of the new sticker took no longer than 15 minutes at the most. That was not what I expected, so often there are many others in line.

The only difficult part was actually finding the place, it's set back from the main road (159) and there are so many businesses along there and so much traffic it was easy to miss the signage for the emissions testing. To be honest i gave up driving back and forth along 159 and went into a Huck's gas station and asked the two ladies working there. One told me to turn left out of there and when I saw a sign for Goodman's on the left, turn there. The emissions place was back a bit, surrounded by many new types of not retail business.

The man who I paid for the sticker told me not to put the new one over the old which surprised me. Getting the old sticker off was a bit of a trick involving a hair dryer and finger nail polish remover. But it's done for another year.

Once again with the license plate sticker

I find it irritating that Illinois requires a new license plate sticker every year and with that an emissions test. That test costs 151 dollars and I have to do this today. Thanks JB.

The Sky!

Last night around sunset I looked out over our back deck and saw a gorgeous sunset forming. Recently, for whatever reason, the sky a that time has put on quite the show. This picture is close to what I saw, but doesn't do justice to the beautiful blues, reds, pinks and oranges. It was stunning.

Want to ease joint pain?

Another study which I hope is true. Drinking red wine in moderation can help ease joint pain and stiffness. Red wine is my go to drink around dinner time and by that time my knees and lower back are as stiff as two by fours from bending and lifting in the garden.   Red wine is contains something called resveratrol, which has anti-inflammatory properties.   So I'll be putting the red wine theory to the test.

Cable News ratings

Which cable news stations saw the most viewers this week and most weeks. Fox. What this means is anyone's guess, but my belief is that Fox covers the news with more than one point of view. While they are known as the conservative station which is true, each program normally has at least one liberal or democratic person on. This is not true of CNN or MSNBC. And, for the most part they do not act as though the world is ending each day. There are fun news stories added in. I've said before that we watch all three during the course of the day which gives us a good feeling for what is going on for both sides.

Now, this is daytime. During prime time every channel is hard core partisan and frankly, we never watch prime time cable news for that reason. I will say the most obnoxious person on cable news and one we watch each morning is Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe. He never shuts up, talks over everyone.

Taking care of our streets

The city of Collinsville's public works department does a fantastic job of keeping up with streets, storm drains, water/sewer, just about everything. Today they are doing our street, cleaning, oiling and probably chipping. This gets messy, but in the end fixes small holes and makes our block look nice. The first truck down this morning vacuumed and the second just now washed the road. This will be followed by two more during the course of the day.

We are very fortunate here to be in a city in which everything works well and looks good.

 

 

Our continuing saga

Last week we were sort of out of touch while we were at our cottage in the Huzzah. No cell service down there. In any event here is one more Collinsville house animal story.

If I have the count correct, the wildlife guy trapped 6 raccoons and two possums last week. He doesn't leave traps during the weekend so yesterday he came and put them back. This morning I walked out to see what was in them and was so happy to see no animals at all. Maybe we are past the worse of this.

But, yesterday morning another animal issue came up. We have a small yellow bird bath on our back deck which I love because the local tiny birds use this all day long. We have a small solar fountain in the middle which is cute and adds something fun to look at. I left for the grocery store around 10:30 in the morning and came back half an hour later to see the bowl of the bird bath on the floor of the deck cracked in two. My heart sunk and it was such a shock. No way a raccoon would have been out at that time of day so my only guess is, a neighbor's cat or dog got loose and came for a drink. Jumped up and the bowl flipped.

Dale has been out of town and comes back today. I'm hoping he will be able to put the pieces together. The tiny birds flew over the deck all day yesterday looking for the water so I created a make shift water bowl for the birds by taking a plastic flower pot tray, adding small rocks and water to it and placing it on the birdbath stand. The birds were happy and I was glad they used it but will feel better if we can repair the original bowl.

 

 

These are the times

The past week has been just crazy. There has been so much to do in the garden, our daughter came in from DC for a few days, and we woke up this morning to find that what we believe are raccoons, just destroyed our back deck. So what with having to keep up with basic things, now we deal with raccoons.

Those raccoons (more than one we have to believe) even knocked over a strong, stone bird bath we have on the deck. Both the bowl and stand fell. Also a large glass vase we had out there with pussy willow stems was knock over. Not to mention a drying rack I had hung onions to dry. They were down as well although we deduced coons don't care much for onions.

It's just been one thing after another lately.

Best Regional Donuts

St. Louis Magazine lists what they consider the best donuts in our region. Normally I'm skeptical of these lists because even though they say they are regional, most do not include much from the Metro East. This time they managed two from Illinois. Glazy Squares in Collinsville in the category of "best square donuts in Illinois". This must be a small category because I can't believe there are many square donut places in this area. The second in Metro East is Waterloo Donuts.

I'd say Kruta Bakery has the best donuts on either side of the river, but they are probably considered a bakery rather than a donut specific business. If you want to go donut hunting around St. Louis, here is their "best' list.

Mail warning

I came across some bad news this morning involving mail dropped off in those blue mail boxes. It seems that there has been a rash of mail being stolen out of them, especially on the St. Louis side of the river. One person mentioned on a neighborhood "Nextdoor" page that their store got a check stolen out of the box behind a local bank and that business had to shut down all accounts to make things safe. It seems thieves can "wash" checks they steal and rewrite them for their own purposes.

This information brought out many many responses from people who have had the same experience after using the stand alone blue mailbox. It seems as though the same key opens all of the boxes and someone who gets a hold of one can do a lot of damage to checking accounts. One person told of a check in a birthday card to her nephew had the same thing happen.

The best advice anyone had to protect checks from being cashed by bad people is to use a gel pen which uses ink that can't be washed (erased) to use for something else.

Thieves are always a step ahead of us. Dale has a tendency  to either leave outgoing mail on our home mailbox for the mailman to take back to the mail center, but he does often drop bills in blue boxes when he's out. I'm going to be looking for a gel pen today after doing some research on which pen works best to prevent fraud.

Playing around with our food

New food news today. Doritos has come out with two new flavors in their corn chips. We can now buy ketchup and mustard flavored Doritos. The Ketchup type is a classic tomato flavor while the mustard is a spicy/hot type.

Frankly I don't understand why food companies have to mess around with their standard, almost perfect, product which just adds to the innumerable varieties of snack foods. Walk down any grocery snack food aisle and the number and kind of each product is unreal. Each brand has several types ranging from the normal to sweet to hot to who knows what. This applies not only to corn chips but potato chips and even pretzels.

Also, walk down the soda aisle and there are varieties of every brand. Regular soda, diet soda, cherry soda and who knows what all. The one thing which frustrates me the most when it comes to the Coke section is no Mexican Coke in most grocery stores. This is the type I drink and I have to drive to a St. Louis Schnucks or Dierbergs and maybe Edwardsville to find this. And, stores which do carry it are almost always sold out, an empty section on the shelf. Oddly, when we head down to our cottage in the Huzzah area we always stop at a Country Mart grocery store and they always, always have plenty of Mexican Coke in the 4 pack of 12 ounce bottles. If they can do this in the middle of no where why can't they do it here?

I've accosted Coke delivery persons I've come across filling shelves with scores of other Coke varieties and asked why we can't get the Mexican Coke. Mostly these guys don't know why, and point the finger at store managers or area supervisors.

So much food and drink of all types but none of the best.