respublica

Pots, we have pots

A couple of our students helped lift up heavy flower pots onto light poles today. To do this they needed a bobcat and a ladder and at least one of the guys had to be very strong. That was Zach. The new hanging pots are self-watering which should save a lot of time this summer because hand watering while standing in a Gator or other vehicle was time consuming. The self-watering aspect is kind of interesting. Wrapped inside each pot is a piece of permeable carpeting which is watered down. Then the soil and plants are put in. The wet carpet keeps the soil moist much longer than if it weren't there. Maybe once a week or so, the spout of the pot gets water in it and re-wets the carpet. If there is rain, maybe 2 weeks will go by before having to do this.

Geordie is manipulating the Bobcat while Zach tries to hook it onto the lamp post. Zach is one of our field workers at Holy Cross.

This reminded me of how our weekend in Collinsville went. Dale planted a large number of big pots with flowers for our back deck. There got to be so many I finally asked him how we were going to keep them watered since we aren't there all the time. He had no real answer except to look at me like I'd be driving over a lot to water. Hmmm. So I decided to try something different and ordered some plant watering spikes from Amazon. Which came Tuesday already. The idea of these is to screw each one onto an empty soda or water bottle filled with water, a one liter bottle is best. Then completely wet the soil in the pots followed by sticking the spike as far down toward the roots as possible. When the soil dries, the bottle disgorges the necessary water.

Those in the picture aren't the half of them.

Re-boot your router and beware of other programs

All of a sudden we're getting a spate of warnings about privacy concerns and malware. The problem is the solutions to these issues on our computers and devices is often confusing and sometimes even a false flag. A personal tech column in last week's New York Times gave a warning about not ignoring emails regarding privacy concerns. These emails are coming from companies which explain their new privacy rules, written after Europe passed the new General Data Protection Regulation law which went into effect last Friday. Since many companies are international, they must send out warnings about what to do to protect yourself to us in this country too.

You may have received an email from, say, Google or Apple or any other site which explains how to go about protecting yourself and most often the emails are asking your permission or consent for something. For example you may be asked to ok Pop-up ads. Or something else. The problem I have with these emails is it is hard to tell if it's the actual company or a hacker who seems to look like the real thing. I got one supposedly from Apple today and I'm pretty sure it isn't really Apple. By consenting to something from a possible hacker could be bad news. In any event, going through all the social media platforms and finding where their privacy policies are and how to handle them is exhausting.

All of which brings me to another issue. Tech news stories yesterday related a message from the FBI which advised, Re-boot your router. It seems Russian hackers have been able to slip malware into our routers and re-booting (unplugging and then re-plugging) should stem the malware.

Should you? According to the tech site, CNET, it won't hurt and we've often had to do this when we've had an outage or connectivity issues. CNET does however say that only a small number of routers have been seen to be infected and mostly some models of older routers. The router companies that found malware are Linksys, Netgear, Mikrotik, QNAP, and Tp-link. But again only a dozen or so models from those companies have been known to be affected.

It's kind of a crap shoot these days. I have no problem re-booting my router although it's not on the list, its the new Google Wifi mesh which is fairly well received and respected. But it's all the other things coming from company emails that concern me as to whether they are real emails or hackers. And, do I want to sit around all day and plow through all the steps for privacy protections.

Getting rid of stuff

Like many people, we've come to a point where we want to get out from under so much of the things we've accumulated over the years. Things that sit on shelves, pile up in closets, overwhelm a basement. So this tweet by Chris Kelly, a former member of the Missouri House spoke to me.

"We are trying to get rid of house junk. Why do the kids get to leave their stuff in our basement for literally decades?"

Truer words will never see print. We go through the periodic sifting through our kids things and when asked if they still want this or that, most often the answer is, "I don't know, but don't throw it away, I'd like to see it first." That 'see it first' day rarely comes. They are at the point in their lives when their own kids are piling up stuff they will someday have to deal with. No one really wants their childhood memories eliminated. They just don't want them in their own basements.

Time for an update

Last week I predicted there may be an uptick in mattresses falling now that moving time of year is upon us. Here is the latest:

Mattresses 60

Ladders 48

What indoor temperature is best?

KSDK in St. Louis had a feature this morning on what temperature your thermostat should be set for the most efficient use of the air conditioner. Experts recommend 78 degrees. 78 degrees! It's been in the mid to upper 90's the past few days and I doubt many of us would have felt all that comfortable inside at 78. In fact, none of the channel 5 news people talking about this story said they would set it at that number. Their choices ranged from 72 to 65.

65 might be a bit too chilly, the opposite of the 78.

I can understand the efficiency argument, the lower the thermostat is set, the longer the unit runs, the more it costs and may overwork the machine. We won't be one of those 78 people unless we're on vacation.

The experts also recommend settings for when you're away: 85

When you're sleeping: 82

82 for sleeping would be quite hot. We sleep better when it's cooler according to sleep experts. So it's a battle of the experts.

Remembering my dad today

He's in the Holy Cross cemetery in Collinsville. 

Here is a one of my favorite HC cemetery pictures, Christian and Connor on Memorial Day 2011

Carrots and dogs

There is a really cute Twitter page named the Golden Ratio 4 which posts things about their 4 Golden Retrievers, actually 5 retrievers. Every day the dogs are handed a big carrot one by one which has made me wonder if carrots are ok for dogs and would Ferdie enjoy one. These other 4 dogs all seem to like them. 

Turns out carrots are great for dogs, they are high in fiber, antioxidants, and slow dental disease. I don't particularly like carrots so I rarely have any at home, but maybe I'll get a few for Ferdie to see if he likes them. 

Car break-ins, it's that time of year

I don't know whether it's the nice weather or schools being out for the summer or what, but all of a sudden cars are being broken into all over the area. I recently downloaded the Nextdoor app, a relatively new app which centers around your own neighborhood and lets locals share things or ask questions. Often the daily posts are about a lost dog or recommendations for plumbers, or things for sale. This is not unlike Facebook pages specific to a local community, except that it is confined to neighborhood borders.

As I was reading this site last night I learned many people woke up on Thursday morning and found their cars broken into Wednesday night. Several cars on the blocks behind us and several more on the blocks just ahead of us were hit. Most cars had been locked, but that didn't stop the bad guys who screw drivered one car, broke windows on others and generally ransacked the inside of cars.

Some cars were parked on the street, others under a carport or on a driveway. The most frequent advice given by others was to leave nothing in the car and leave it unlocked so that no damage could be done. Others took issue with the unlocked advice because some bad guys know how to hot wire a car.

I don't know what the answer is, this seems to be the time of year when this sort of thing happens in a big way. But reading the updates from neighbors just before I went to bed last night, made me go outside and check to see that we had nothing in our cars which would interest a thief. I had nothing in mine, but Dale did so I brought that stuff inside and left his books in the car. I doubted anyone looking for valuables would have been interested in theological text books. Not that they aren't costly and important, but still.

Coffee with a cop

This morning the Clayton police department had around officers come to Kaldi's Coffee on Demun for a neighborhood meet and greet. Free coffee donated by Kaldi's and it was held outside which was nice. Also nice were all the policemen. Gayle and I went to represent the seminary and they were very complimentary about the sem and we thanked them for all they do for us.

Also officer Smith, who is pictured with Gayle and I, was full of praise for the Collinsville police department after he asked where Dale and I were before we came to the seminary. He said he'd been to the Collinsville headquarters and thought highly of the work done by the that department.

Clayton has a force of 50 serving in various ways: on the streets, detective work, drug task force etc.

 

Sports stats

There is no other sport like baseball when it comes to keeping statistics. I mean, there are stats for just about everything in baseball. Today comes an update to one more:

"According to Elias Sports, Gleybor Torres is the youngest player in Yankee history to hit a homeroom in 3 straight games."

It's sort of mind boggling to consider the fact that someone is not only keeping these stats, but looking through record books for it.