respublica

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.

Heading South

In the past week we, along with our next door neighbors, have noticed a huge uptick in Hummingbird activity on our feeders. Ours feeder is on our back deck, our neighbors put theirs on the front porch. Between the two of us there is enough for many birds. Lately the hummers have been crazy busy drinking the nectar, often fighting each other for it. Other hummers hover nearby waiting their turn, making that unique buzzing sound.

All of which had me wondering if it is time for them to begin their flight back to Central America and Mexico. It seemed early so I did some checking and sure enough, August to September is their travel time. I'll miss them, they've been very entertaining and often hover very close to me and look me right in the eye for some seconds.

I will say, these are not early birds, most other birds have been up and chirping for some time this morning, but not the hummingbirds. They show up maybe between 8:30 and 9.

The Poorest Towns in Illinois

This is the type of article I find interesting, mainly because I live in Illinois and want to know these things. The article features an informative video well worth watching. But if not, here are the ten poorest Illinois towns.

• 10. Sorento
• 9. Robbins
• 8. Cario
• 7. Venice
• 6. Ullin
• 5. Madison
• 4. East St.Louis
• 3. Carbondale
• 2. Centreville
• 1. Elizabethtown

Anyone else find it interesting that Carbondale is on this list? It seems most jobs are in food service or retail.

In praise of plumbers

We decided it was long past time to replace our kitchen sink faucet. Not only was it put in in 2002, but it was causing a leak somewhere. Once decided it had to go, we looked up some styles online and then went to Home Depot this morning to pick out a new one.

That was the easy part. Getting the old one off, disconnecting the plumbing lines by laying under the sink was hugely hard. Dale did this and with his size, trying to contort himself enough to reach and see all the little screws and parts which had to be taken out was painful. That was yesterday and today back to laying inside of the cabinet underneath the sink and trying to connect a new set up.

It took a couple of hours to finally getting it in place and working well, but it will take a few hours for his body to recover from this. He did a great job.

We give all kinds of kudos to anyone who goes in plumbing as life's work. This is hard, painful, physical work. God bless anyone who does this.

Here he was this morning studying the directions on what to do next.

Storm Drain

Last week this area had a ton of rain, inches and inches of rain. All over the St. Louis area roads were flooded and homes and businesses took on water. It was a huge mess. The local news was all about the water issues in many parts of the area, but one place we didn't hear much about roads flooding was here in Collinsville. I got to wondering just why this was, very little flooding. And then as I looked out the front door I remembered the city spending a lot of time putting in new and larger storm drains beginning in around 2014. Before that big storms would cover streets in certain areas and the city decided to get to work on drain plans.

I remember over the years that our neighbors who lived in the first couple of houses on the street would get basement water with almost every rain. I spent a lot of time helping shop vac up much of it. The small storm drains back then could not hold the water which spilled out and ponded a large area. As I watched the huge rain last week I noticed the street was not ponding, the water was going down the drains perfectly and I'd guess this was the same over most of the city.

I gave kudos to the city for deciding to do this back in those years. Here are two photos I took back in 2014 when this work began. Dale and I took our dog for an after dinner walk and looked over all the new concrete drain work waiting to be put in on Vandalia.

Our street got a new, larger drain and the street department guys are very diligent about keeping it clear of leaves and debris.

Here is a look back at 2014, the beginning.