Robert Pence

Feed the deer and make friends with them, so they'll eat out of your hand. Then, when deer season comes around, you can whack one in the head with a hammer, avoiding firearms violations, and have free venison for winter! :-D

Looks cozy and pleasant!

As a one-time and hopefully never-again hog farmer (phew!), I need to clarify something. The foul-smelling semi-liquid excrement that pigs produce in copious volume is simply pig sh*t, like most of what's posted on columbusgasprices.com. Hog slop is feed. We added water to a ground grain-based feed mixture and poured it into troughs. The hogs gulped it ravenously, the way SUVs consume petroleum, and it increased their feed and water intake and accelerated their gain to market weight. "Slopping the hogs" is feeding pigs, sort of like pumping gas for suburbanites who will make unnecessary trips driving fast in gas guzzlers. Only thing is, after all that petroleum, the suburbanites end up broke and in poor health and their vehicles end up in the junkyard. Neither fulfills for any useful purpose.

Neat photos! I'm a big fan of small-town festivals. Beautiful historic homes, and an attractive campus.

Have you considered driving to South Bend or Michigan City, parking the car there, and taking the South Shore trains to Chicago? Holiday/weekend service runs every 2 hours all day, fares are cheap, and the Van Buren and Randolph Street stops are right on Michigan Avenue in the loop. Parking is free at Michigan City (I prefer to use the stop at the railroad offices/shops at Carroll Avenue), and the long-term lot at South Bend airport, the easternmost stop for the trains, is fairly cheap. Schedule & fare info for South Shore trains is here.

I read some of that stuff on columbusgasprices.com, along with the entries by noozer and brewmaster/urbanite, and remembered something an older, wiser person told me years ago: "Never try to teach pigs to sing. It wastes your time, and only annoys the pigs."

Neat tour! Feels sort of like Chicago in some spots.

Wonderful photos! You sure captured the experience; the panoramas are grand. You must have applied yourself industriously to get all those up so soon; I still have quite a lot of work ahead, before I'll have anything ready. I'm having to do yard work today; the grass needed mowing before I left, and it didn't stop growing while I was gone. It looks like the finale at Mt Adams was a good time, but I bailed early 'cause I just can't keep up with the young whippersnappers. Best to leave the party while I'm still having fun. Beautiful set of images!

I dated a guy who claimed to be a Recovering Catholic. He relapsed, and we broke up.

Pretty cool, CornerCurve!

Dang! Never misunderestimate KJP's ability to make the uppity mumbo-jumbo clear. :lol:

A great big thank you from me, too. It was a great meet; we covered a lot of territory on foot and by car, and even though I realize we barely scratched the surface, I've come away amazed at how much Cincinnati has to offer. History, scenic beauty, and gracious hospitality from everyone I met during my stay there. Best ice cream I've ever had, too!

Great shots! Finally having seen it first-hand, now I understand why the Cincinnati folks are the most prolific posters and most avid boosters on urbanohio.com! It's one fantastic, fascinating, beautiful city with all history, architecture and topography. I just got home a few minutes ago, and the long drive gave time for the effects of walking up and down hills to settle in. I'm a flatlander and not used to that, and when I got out of the truck and stood up, I became aware of a massive case of sore buns! I got to try Graeters Ice Cream, though, so it was worth the pain. :-D

I'm on the road in about ten minutes. See y'all t'morra!

... and one old fart with a camera and probably a knapsack and a tan Tractor Supply cap. :-D

Bike racks are showing up on a lot of systems. Fort Wayne has had them for several years, and they seem to be well-utilized. Various suburban areas are somewhat navigable by bike, but the roads that interconnect them are bicycle suicide. With the bike racks, a person living in an inner city neighborhood may be able to get to a job in an outlying area, even though the job site may be a couple of miles from the nearest bus stop.

So long as the tree stood there, I never noticed how disproportionately tall the chimney appears. I first noticed it last night as I was preparing the photo for posting. Thieme Drive, the street along the river, didn't exist before about 1911; before that, the area was the campus of Fort Wayne College, a predecessor of Taylor University, and the original alignment of the Fort Wayne & Southwestern Interurban to Lafayette followed the present street alignment. After a flood subsided, at the edge of the river I found a tie plate and rail spike like the ones used on the early interurbans' lightweight rail. After the street was put in, the house and its near-twin were built on the back of a subdivided lot that faced a cross street, and what would normally be an alley behind them is actually a half-block street with houses facing it. It's sort of hemmed in from the back by bigger, older houses that sit on higher ground, so I suppose the chimney was made tall to protect against downdrafts. It's a double chimney that serves a fireplace and once served a coal furnace. The water heater and present gas furnace that backs up the heat pump are connected to what used to be the kitchen chimney, at the back of the house. The rumor on the scene of the fallen tree was that the young man who owned the Chevelle had just taken delivery at the dealer, and had stopped back at his apartment to freshen up before driving it to his parents' house to show it to them, when the storm hit.

I'm sure the owner of this nearly brand new Chevelle felt the same way in 1972. This happened just a few blocks from my house during a storm; a downburst, or high-velocity straight-line wind uprooted a tree that reached clear across the street and did some damage to the house on the opposite side. The car was totaled. I didn't keep any of the wood from my tree; I have gas heat and no fireplace where I live. I thought about calling my brother to see if he wanted it for his steam engine but it takes him quite a while to get around to some things, and I already have trouble enough with the Neighborhood Neatness Nazis, without having a wood pile or a stack of tree limbs in my yard for a couple of weeks. BTW, your house looks like stucco. If it is, it would probably thank you if you were to remove those vines that are trying to climb it. Their tendrils penetrate stucco and masonry and let moisture enter, and then the freeze-thaw cycle causes it to break down.

That's the built-in china cabinet in the dining room. The kitchen is on the opposite side at the rear, and the living room is across the front with the stairway on the left and a fireplace on the right, as you face house from the front. It was built in 1919 and has one large bedroom across the front of the house on the second story, and one medium-sized one on the right rear. It's about 1200 square feet with a reasonably tall, open, dry basement. I bought it in 1972 ($13,250!) and over the years I updated the bathroom and kitchen and put in a heat pump, central air, blown-in insulation and storm windows. I use it as a rental property now, and live next door in a house just out of sight on the right. It and the other brick house next to it were built as a pair. Their floor plans are mirror images of each other, except that the one on the left doesn't have a front porch. Instead, it has a two-story enclosed porch on the left side. They are the only two houses facing the street in that block, and on the opposite side of the street the ground drops precipitously about twenty feet to the St. Marys River. The hundred-year flood plain boundary runs between the two houses; the one on the left is in and the one on the right is out.

Wonderful intimate detail! I've never seen alley signs like those. The cornerstone on the Times-Star Building is pretty fabulous. In Fort Wayne, the street names were often embossed in the sidewalks near the curbs at intersections, in addition to signs on buildings and/or posts. Just about all the sidewalk signs disappeared as the sidewalks at intersections were torn up and replaced with ADA-compliant ones.

When I bought the brick house at 921 Thieme Drive 35 years ago, the Norway Maple beside the front porch was smaller, and a nicer-looking tree. Over the years it has suffered badly in some storms, and has shed a lot of debris on the roof and in the gutters, demanding constant attention to those items. Its roots invaded my sewer and that cost several hundred dollars to fix a couple of years ago. I've spent money on it having it trimmed every few years, and tried to keep it as healthy as possible. I've considered its shade a fare trade-off for the aggravation and expense. When I was looking it over recently, I noticed that it appeared to be developing new cracks and scars in the trunk, and there was some indication where limbs had been removed that it was hollowing out. I had my nephew, who runs a tree service look it over, and we came to the shared conclusion that it would be safest to take it down, rather than spend more money on it. It took about two hours to take down the tree, remove the stump and clean up the area. After all these years, the change in the view will take some getting used to. Looking at the bright side, though, the labor to maintain the property will be less, and I'll finally be able to grow grass and put in some attractive landscaping. The shade and tree roots have stymied every attempt to have a respectable lawn there.

Wonderful! This is one of the most impressive and useful things I've found on the internet. Outstanding job! :clap:

RTA all-day pass only costs $1 with my geezer (Medicare) card. The time between age 65 and when you get feeble and incontinent and lose your faculties ain't all bad. :-D

Taggers should have their tags tattooed on their faces, so their victims would know them on sight. They want recognition, right?

Sometimes elderly people with dementia (often Alzheimer's) get completely disoriented while running comparatively short errands, and end up hundreds or even thousands of miles from home, with no idea where they are or how they got there. I suspect he was on the way to becoming totally lost, and didn't even realize it; I hope he was carrying some kind of identification, so that when a trooper finds him sleeping in his car in Schenectady, they can reunite him with his spouse/family. Because normally-functioning people take logic and memory for granted, we can't possibly comprehend how people who have no short-term memory experience the events and places around them. We can gain a limited understanding when we deal with an elderly parent, someone who was intuitive and perceptive and seemed to know what we were thinking as kids, almost before we knew it, and who made smart long-term decisions in providing for and protecting a family, who can't remember where he/she lives, what his/her house looks like, or anything recent that has taken place outside the last few seconds. People with dementia don't comprehend that they have dementia, and don't remember that they don't remember. (Mom, age 95).