respublica

Tiny Town Time

All of a sudden it's time to get our Christmas Tiny Town out into the yard. But first it is a matter of getting all the parts to the town out of the storage place and checking to see if any repairs are needed. But we did get all the lighted animals home and they are on the front porch waiting to go.

An inexplicable crash

Our daughter lives in Montgomery County, Maryland and over the weekend they lost power to their home as did 85,000 other county residents. The power was out for most of the night, but I believe it's finally been restored this morning. This happened when a small plane crashed into a local power line tower on Saturday. Two people were in the plane and suffered serious, but not life threatening injuries.

Not having power is rather miserable and cold at this time of year. I still haven't heard how the plane managed to hit a major power area but i did read power finally came back this morning.

A Thanksgiving Truism

Thanksgiving is one holiday when having two ovens is a necessity and most of us do not have two.

Illinois eatilng laws

This kind of made me laugh. Headline: "Is it legal to eat while driving in Illinois?"

Before reading the answer, I basically thought, if it's Illinois laws, who knows. But the answer is....

Illinois banned using handheld devices in 2019, which was also the year the state made its distracted driving laws a moving violation.

A ticket for distracted driving is reported to your car insurance company and can increase your rates.

However, there is no law that says you can’t eat a cheeseburger while driving.

 

News I didn't want to see

After some years of being told that Ibuprofen is a much better anti-inflammatory medicine than aspirin, now we're told that this product can make things worse. According to those who tested this on people found joint inflammation and cartilage quality got worse over the next four years compared to a group of 793 controls who did not take the drugs.

I gave up aspirin for aches and pains in my knees for Ibuprofen because experts and my husband believed it was much safer and worked better. As soon as I saw this story last week I stopped with the Ibuprofen and went back to aspirin especially at night.

Seriously, how much can we really believe when it comes to things like this. Doctors have been prescribing the Advil type pain killers for some time as they believed it was better than plain old aspirin. Now what will these doctors be recommending. It's hard to know what to believe anymore.

The Cost of Everything

With Thanksgiving this week I've been watching the price of food very closely and most everything is way higher than last year. I'd bet the main reason for this has been a year of crazy high gas prices. Most anything we need is affected by fuel costs, everything from the planting of crops to the delivery of crops to stores. Also the manufacture and shipping of canned goods and frozen foods have been affected by the price of gas.

When we were down in the Huzzah last week gas prices were in the 3 dollar range some in the upper 3's others in the low 3's. This is nothing to cheer about although we did since they were better than we'd been living with for over a year.

In the end, the grocery stores probably won't be lowering prices too much until shipping and growing things level out. We are used to big grocery bills but not at all able to justify many of the things we would like to have. I'd hope if gas does come down, prices on other things will too. But, I'd guess many places would like to keep the higher prices for better profits.

All those old forgotten photos

A couple of years ago Vince Herr noticed that I was interested in photography and Collinsville and Holy Cross. He was something of a hobby photographer in his years and dealt mainly with slides. He photographed many Holy Cross and other Collinsville scenes in color. One year when we were at the funeral home, he came down from upstairs and handed me several slide boxes of his and wanted me to have them.

Over the years I looked at them by holding them up to a window or a light. I really wanted to see them bigger and in print or digital, but time passed and life entered in and I kind of forgot them. Recently I've been on a Holy Cross committee working on how to celebrate the anniversary of the church and these slides popped into my head. Maybe they will be of some interest.

A couple of years ago I bought a little machine which turns slides into digital. I did a few of the churches ladies from years ago making apple butter outside the school. Yesterday when I was ready to look at some of the slides, I could not find the bracket that goes into the machine with the slides in it. I have the bracket for negatives, but the slide one has disappeared. So what does a person do? That person goes to Amazon and has them send me a new slide bracket. Comes today.

Here is one of Vince's slides from an older year of making apple butter. The Catsup bottle shows in the background.

Bird feeding time

All of a sudden it has gotten really cold, kind of unusual for this area. It's not normally in the 20's or low 30's with a bracing wind in November. Too many high winds this fall around here as well. So I've been back to feeding the birds and they seem really appreciative. We began using only hot pepper bird seed last winter and continuing right now. This type of seed is not liked by squirrels but the birds are fine with it. I doubt I'll ever use any other kind.

I've already filled one feeder 3 times in the last ten days so we know it's pretty cold.

Driving in St. Louis

I came across this Facebook post today about how weird St. Louis is in relation to driving directions and other unique mapping. The list is just below, but I would add one more. St. Louis and MODOT are not nearly as good at clearing winter highways than IDOT does just across the river. IDOT is so much better and efficient. To read each page you'll have to click each one to enlarge the print.

Big trucks

Dale and I left for the Huzzah cabin on Friday around noon after the snow stopped falling and the sun came out. The first issue we saw was on 55/70 right on the north edge of Collinsville. A number of semi's had skidded into the guard rails and stopped all traffic heading west. One of the trucks was hanging half over the rails. We saw this before we got to the interstate at 157 and saw traffic at a stand still and so headed for the highway entrance at Black Lane. Nothing was coming from the east because of the truck accidents so we got right on at that point.

The same day a semi crashed into a school bus in Chicago carrying players and coaches from a high school hockey team. 16 were injured, 3 critically. After being hit, the bus flipped onto its side, ejecting at least one student, while the driver kept driving until he careened into a ditch off the freeway an eighth of a mile from the crash site, police said.

The semi driver was arrested later that day for driving drunk. He ran a red light and crashed into a school bus carrying an out-of-state high school hockey team, knocking it onto its side and leaving more than a dozen people on board with injuries.

This is one of the awful issues with semi's and as we headed down 44 there was one semi after another in all lanes speeding along, often passing other semi's and cars. They dominate the highways. It's a very dangerous time to share the road with these trucks which have become way too tall, way too wide and way too long. Anyone who passes or gets passed by a tractor trailer these day knows how small and vulnerable we are in a car.

Sharing the road going and coming, even on Sunday afternoon, was nerve wracking. I know full well they are driving these trucks above the speed limits. My opinion is there just has to be some plan in place to cut the size of these trucks down and do more to slow them down.. Anyone in a car is not going to do well if one skids into you. But they now own our interstates and this is not a good thing at all. And, when they get into cities the space they take up on normal streets in just beyond belief.

The truck driver in Chicago was drunk and driving what could well be termed a vehicle weapon.