respublica

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.

Painting the flowers yellow

Tomorrow is graduation here at Concordia Seminary and everyone has been working tirelessly to get the outdoors and indoors looking its best. Seriously, the way the staff works is just amazing. And they do it cheerfully. The grounds/landscape people which includes Gayle as the director of operations, and any number of seminary students to help her, have been going great guns.

We had the flower beds up by the chapel entrance filled with purple Alliums. But as we were standing around up there yesterday it was pretty obvious their day was over. So the question was, should we pull them out before graduation. They still had their big round ball heads on top of 4 foot tall stems, but no color. It was pull them and leave the area with nothing or....or what.

One of the students who works with Gayle is Zack Saurralt who also happens to be assigned to Holy Cross in Collinsville as a field worker. He mentioned that when he was in undergrad at Concordia Ann Arbor, a professor went out the night before graduation and spray painted spent flowers in red which is one of the school colors. We tossed that idea around and thought, why not try it. I went to our tool shed and found a can of yellow spray paint and we tried it.

It was perfect! I mean who knew? The color held up and the big flower head looked like new, just a different color from it's original. I jumped in the car and went to buy more yellow spray paint and a second student, Alarik Morris, who is also a field worker at Holy Cross did the painting. He stayed at it until he finished all four big beds. Today people who have gone by there were talking about how cool it was the Alliums changed color.

Holy Cross field workers for the win.

Who knew this would work? So fun

 

Another rare weather phenonmenum

This morning I came across another thing new to me which occurs during very cold weather.  Light Pillars! Most of the time these vertical lights coming down from the sky happen in places in northern climates such as Norway, Canada, Wyoming, Russia. Very rare in our part of the woods, but last week was so cold, Light Pillars became visible over Scott Air Force Base/ Mid-America Airport. I saw the photo accompanying the local light pillars, but it is very copyrighted so I could not download it which is only fair to the photographer. 

But here is a link to that photo.

And, here is a stock photo of light pillars from Laramie, Wyoming.

How cool is this?

UPS Dogs

The greatest PR practice in the delivery business comes from UPS. Drivers carry dog treats and give them out at their stops. There is a facebook devoted just to photos of drivers all over the country making dogs' days. Our dog is no different, he absolutely loves our UPS lady who never fails to stop and load him up with treats. Yesterday she stopped and not only treated him, but gave him a huge hug.

This isn't just a gimmick to increase business for UPS, but with so many dogs fearful and aggressive with delivery services, this changes that whole dynamic.

Replanting the forest

Last year a Chilean forest was nearly destroyed by a fire and in the aftermath, someone came up with a great idea for restoring it. They are using Border Collies with seed packs strapped to their backs like saddle bags. The bags have openings in the bottom so that when the dogs run, the native plant seeds fall to the ground where they will hopefully take root.

This is one of the best stories I've seen, certainly Border Collies love to run and love to have a job and could do it all day long.

Why not try it?

Meanwhile in some American city....