respublica

Racetrack Christmas

Our daughter was in town this weekend and we got reserved time slot tickets to the World Wide Technology Raceway's Wonderlights Christmas drive through show. This was amazing. You stay in your car and drive around the entire race track area which is filled with all kinds of lighted figures accompanied by perfect music. The music comes from the car radio tuned to 89.5 or some such which is perfectly timed to whatever scene you are driving past.

The music and lighted figures are also a nice combination of secular and religious Christmas. We will go again it was so wonderful. If you've never been to this, you must go.

 

 

 

A great weather photo

There are photographers who make their living chasing weather events in order to get descriptive images and Zach Walters is one of them. He caught this in central Illinois farmland near Farmer City, Illinois yesterday. He doesn't have a website I have found but does have a weather chasing Facebook page.

 

Talk about the "eye of the storm", this is surely it.

2020 It's a Puzzle!

I received a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas from my sister. I like doing jigsaw puzzles and have done quite a few, but this year I haven't done any. It was just too crazy a year and lots of work involved with the move from the seminary to Collinsville. But I am going to start this one today.

Click to enlarge to see all the 2020 things. I will probably get some puzzle glue when I'm finished and frame this thing.

The gift that keeps on staying put

I've mentioned too many times to count about how frustrated and disappointed we were with the gift I'd ordered for our grandson Connor. It never came even when ordered the first week in December. The present was a DribbleUP basketball which works with technology. There is something in this ball which connects wirelessly to an iPhone/pad or a smart TV which turns its use into a virtual basketball trainer. It sounds very cool and those who have actually gotten one, rave about it. Connor is playing 7th grade basketball so this sounded like something he would really like. Check the link to see for yourself.

It comes with a stand to hold the phone or ipad so you can watch and copy the drills. Even better is connecting to the smart tv with the bigger picture.

In any event our order is still someplace in New York. Last night my obsession with this issue had me looking at the dribble up facebook page and there were posts telling people about the latest things possible with this basketball and many raves from those who have one. So I commented that "we still have not received ours."  I did not expect much from my comment but it wasn't 5 minutes before someone from DribbleUp answered my comment.

He apologized, explained the issue is with the US postal service without being critical of them, and asked me to message or email him for the email address I used to order. I did that and 15 minutes later he'd found where our package was (same place in New York I'd found). He was still hopeful the USPS would eventually deliver but...Then came the best part- "Just to be sure that you'll receive one, I just submitted a replacement order - free of charge. You'll receive a new tracking number once your order ships the next business day. In case you receive both orders, feel free to let us know so that we can send out a prepaid return label for the extra."

I have to say this is customer service at its best. How many businesses have someone working during the night to get back to people immediately? I am very impressed and now have hope a cool basketball will finally get here.

Kids are fun

There is a house sort of behind us with several kids. 3 boys as far as I have been able to tell and two girls. They made my day today.

We had put out two of our Christmas village animals yesterday for Halloween. I stuck candy in them and let the trick or treaters take what they wanted. These particular kids weren't around last night so when I saw them circling in front of our house today I asked if they wanted to take the rest of the candy on the animals. They sure did! They had a lot of fun with this and then headed home. After a while they came back and gave me a thank you note they'd just created. Nice kids, very polite and the kind who laugh easily.

Nicely done and I got a kick out of the: "have a good November"

As this was going on all of a sudden honking broke out on Vandalia (159) one of the main north south roads through Collinsville. It turned out to be a Trump Parade and we stood and watched kind of transfixed. All kinds of decorated trucks and cars and honking and honking drove through for quite a while.

Two unexpected things in one half hour.

Collinsville ranks high

This was a nice surprise. The Post-Dispatch related the results of a survey from AdvisorSmith, a business insurance site. This company did a study on "the best cities for working at home" in which they looked at 2500 cities. Collinsville ranked 21st in the smaller city category!

The five factors used to determine the rankings were availability of high-speed internet, weather conditions, crime rates, housing prices and parkland for nearby outdoor recreation.

The study showed that among small cities — 10,000 to 100,000 residents — about 76% of all Collinsville residents had access to two or more broadband providers offering 100 Mbps internet connections. (The small-city average was 52%.)

Also, the average cost for a three-bedroom in Collinsville was slightly less than $134,000, about 53% lower than the average home price for small cities.

No other STL municipalities made the honor roll of being one of the top 100 cities in either the small-city or medium-city category, and St. Louis city did not qualify as one of the top 50 large cities."

I copied the information from the story because clicking a Post-Dispatch link often means having to complete some sort of survey in order to read. We subscribe to the paper, but not everyone does.

The Gingers are back

Every now and then I've linked to a blog site written by two sisters who described their travels. After a hiatus, they're back online. Haley was moved by the whole family last week to Baltimore where she will be in graduate school. Now she's on her own in a new city and wandering around checking things out, especially the food. Her mom is the seminary's director of landscape and grounds.

Check it out.

Picnics in 2020

I don't know if the person who built this picnic table had social distancing in mind, but it sure looks that way. Quite an imagination and the construction skills to go with it.

Vegetable garden has been planted

During this stay at home time, several of out students formed a committee to plant and manage the big vegetable garden. One of our students who works on grounds roto-tilled the plot. Then the committee of maybe 3 or 4 guys and wives if they have them, worked online to decide what to plant. They got seeds ordered and last weekend planted. The plot is so big, no one anywhere near each other. This I know because I watched from my car for awhile.

What tickles me is the row markers are white plastic spoons which someone spent a lot of time on writing the names of each row's vegetable. They rigged up a simple, but very workable irrigation system as well. When these plants mature into vegetables, they will be available to the students.

See the spoons? The edging needs to be trimmed but it will be done.

Here is what the individual spoons look like.

This is so cool.

Taking a moon photo

Last night we saw an amazing moon, super moon. It showed up in the east out of no where and it was stunning. And, like many others, i grabbed my camera to attempt to get a picture of it. It was so big and so orange-y pink that I hoped it would be easy to capture. But, as always with moon shots, I was wrong. It is very hard to get a picture of even a huge moon, the moon looks blurred or tiny. Mine were both.

But, Pastor William Weedon of Hamel got a darn good one. Taken right at home in Hamel.

Really nice.

Here is one from the extraordinary Chicago photographer, Barry Butler.

Here is my awful attempt. What I am seeing is these good moon pictures were taken before dark. In the dark you just get blur, interfering residual light from street lights, and no size.