Robert Pence

embed a hidden webcam so you can see what their costumes are, and a receiver and speaker so you can address them in some costume-specific threatening way. :evil:

How 'bout them babies? Seen at Prairietown, Conner Prairie Historic Settlement, near Noblesville, Indiana. Various kinds of squash make pies that can challenge or beat pumpkin. My maternal grandmother was one of the best pie-makers who ever lived. She got hold of some squash one time that were as big as pumpkins, with long curved necks. They were a very pale yellowish-green in color, about like ripe honeydew melons. She turned them into the best Thanksgiving pies I had ever tasted.

It's sometimes available at local farmers' markets or roadside stands; if you know of any orchards that press their own cider and run their own stores in season, try them. Unpasteurized cider starts to turn (ferment) almost right off the press unless it's chilled immediately, and the unpasteurized cider in those places, if it's sold in jugs at room temperature, has a preservative (usually potassium sorbate) added to retard fermentation. If you intend to ferment the cider for an alchoholic beverage, that won't work because potassium sorbate kills yeast. The wild yeasts and bacteria that take over in an uncontrolled environment are likely to yield a nasty unpalatable vinegar instead of enjoyable hard cider, and even naturally-fermented hard cider will soon progress to vinegar. To get unpasteurized cider without potassium sorbate, you have to request it from the producer during pressing season, and either be there with your own ice-filled coolers to collect it and chill it immediately, or if he's willing, have him freeze some so that you can pick it up later. You have to keep it frozen until you use it. I haven't bought any in several years, but I used to get it from an orchard man at a local farmer's market that was open on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If I gave him an order on Wednesday, he'd have frozen plastic jugs ready for me to pick up first thing on Saturday.

On a downhill in an urban setting with traffic and hard surfaces to collide with, that sounds scary. When I was seventeen, I dozed off on an idyllic late-spring morning while riding on the county road where my family lived. I woke up in the grass on the shoulder, headed for the shallow side-ditch, too late to keep from dumping. No traffic, slow speed, soft grass, no problem.

Looks like hard times in another disappearing small town. The only buildings that appear to be maintained are the two churches.

The inclusion of a manure spreader in MayDay's "bumpkin rant" reminds me of a brief experience. Not of spreading manure -- remember, I grew up on a dairy farm. My experiences with a manure spreader were not brief, but many and prolonged, not just pulling it through fields with a tractor and getting thumped in the back with an occasional errant clump, but filling it with pitchfork after pitchfork of winter-steaming half-composted straw and cow-poop fresh from the barn. No, I'm talking about a latter-years visit to my Mom's house. She had DirecTV, and looking for an better pastime than getting drunk and passing out (she never had alcohol in the house) or standing out in the freezing rain until I got pneumonia and died, I was flipping through channels hoping to find something I could watch without opting for the freezing rain. I caught a brief segment where some professional wrestling icon was sitting on an implement seat talking about his solid country roots and "this here wagon that my ancestors brought all their earthly possessions west on." When the camera zoomed out for a more comprehensive view, I could see that he was sitting on a 1930s New Idea steel manure spreader. Those guys are actors more than they are anything else, and I think a lot of them are smarter than they let on. I wasn't sure whether he was ignorant enough to think he was telling a plausible story, or making a reference to professional wrestling being all bullsh!t, or making fun of his audience for being so ignorant they'd probably believe that story.

ColDayMan had a birthday last year about this time, too. Seems he's workin' it for all it's worth. :wink: Have a happy!

Beautiful! Now I see what all the fuss is about! Great photos.

I've heard Alpena mentioned often, probably in connection with Air National Guard, but haven't been there. Thanks for posting the photos. It looks like a pleasant town with a good CBD. It's time they restored the cupola to city hall.

I've heard of people making bicycle tire chains from sash chain. It sounds like a painstaking process, but apparently they work well on ice.

I have no brothers-in-law, only brothers. One of them hates me, though, and he's a psychopath. Fortunately he lives far away, and I'm appropriately alert when he's in the area.

Wonderful, lively, colorful photos! I haven't been there since 1975. Clearly, it has changed tremendously since then. My recollections were of friendliness and hospitality and excellent public transport. I rode there on my motorcycle, and only took it out of the hotel parking lot once during my week-long stay, to visit the only place on my itinerary that I figured I couldn't reach by bus, trolley, or subway, a gallery of Indian and Eskimo art in Kleinburg, about 25 miles distant. Upon arriving in Kleinburg, the second vehicle I encountered on the main street was a TTC bus. The zoo and the Ontario Science Center were among my favorite attractions. The former was beautiful and spacious and well-kept, and the latter was loaded with nerd appeal, without being so nerdy as to turn off non-nerds. Yonge Street seemed to run 24 hours with an alternative economy and culture taking over at night, and I felt safe anywhere I wanted to go.

Simple home remedies and other handy tips 1. Avoid cutting yourself when slicing vegetables; get someone else to hold the vegetables while you chop. 2. Avoid toilet seat arguments with your wife; use the sink. 3. For high blood pressure simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure. Remember to use a timer. 4. A mouse trap placed on top of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button. 5. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives. You'll be afraid to cough. 6. You only need two tools in life -- WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct tape. 7. If you can't fix it with a hammer, you've got an electrical problem. :-D

I don't get the resemblance. I only see one pickup truck parked in a front yard, and it's sitting on its own wheels, not cement blocks. It doesn't have a big, ugly, mean dog chained to it either, and I don't see any rusty mobile homes with duct-taped broken windows.

I've heard about this place often over the years; it's nice to see what it looks like. Looks like a substantial town.

Nice job! Excellent photos, interesting scenes.

Sad that a city has no little respect for the memory of the people honored by construction of that glorious building. Has anyone salvaged anything from it? I'm thinking seats, light fixtures, and of course the stonecarving above the entrance. All that limestone would cost a fortune to buy now. It should be salvaged in large pieces; it could be recut if necessary for reuse. Constructing some sort of monument on the site, I'd think, would be an appropriate use for it.

I've never been required to cultivate a relationship with Mac. My first exposure to remote-access computing came with teletype-like terminals and then dumb CRTs, with remote access via a dial-up 300-baud modem. I got my first PC - genuine IBM - in 1983. It had a monochrome monitor, 256K RAM, two 5 1/4 floppy drives at 360K per disk, no hard drive, and ran DOS 2.0. Later I worked in the insurance & financial services industry and then for IBM providing on-site user support for OS/2 and various iterations of Windows from 3.1 on up. Windows 95 and 98 got a little squirrely at times, but for the most part I had little trouble after those. In the workplace probably 75% of support calls came from people who brought trouble on themselves by installing some screen saver or game that a friend or relative gave them, that turned out to be contaminated with a virus. Other than that and the agents who took their laptops home and let their kids surf the internet with them, we really didn't have many problems related to hardware or operating systems.

I was thinking that too. Where did he go? He went to Chicago. I believe he posts occasionally on SSP.

'Nuff o' this nonsense! Y'alls gots me jonesin' bad fer Lee's!

Excavating the sub-grade eastern railroad approaches for Terminal Tower, as I remember reading, involved removing more dirt than any project in history up to that time, with the exception of digging the Panama Canal. There's an excellent book titled "The Nickel Plate Story," by John Rehor, that tells a lot about the construction of Terminal Tower and about other related depots and Van Sweringen properties in and around Cleveland. The first edition is highly collectible (I bought it when it came out), but I think it's gone into reprint at least once. You probably could run down a copy through ABE Books or Alibris. It's a big book, with a lot of history of the Nickel Plate and the railroads the Van Sweringens acquired in building their empire beyond the Cleveland area.

Look before you sniff. Edit: One of the people who saw the photo identified the little hunter as phiddipus audax, the daring jumping spider. I have zillions of those around my place, especially around both the front and back doors, every summer, but they're usually less than half the size of that one. A little internet research says they're prone to attack if they feel threatened, can jump up to fifty times their body length, can reach a little more than 3/4 inch in length, and bite. Their bite is no more dangerous than a bee sting; in other words, so long as you're not allergic it's painful but not dangerous.

It would be too expensive a fix for America's grand old stations, but what we need to consider over the long run is more "open-plan" stations like you see in Europe's big cities. Their big-city stations are open and airy with wider platforms and few, if any, choke points. Amtrak's coach waiting area in Chicago is claustrophobic. The ceiling is too low, the seats uncomfortable, and every gate is a choke point. If you go over to SSP and look in the General Photography section under the Trains topic, you'll find a lot of photos by well-traveled forumers, taken in other countries of spacious train sheds with shiny floors and vast sklyights arching over the platforms. Compare those with many of our major-metro stations, with dimly- but harsly-lit subterranean boarding areas, platforms constricted by pillars, and low ceilings still begrimed with soot from coal-burning locomotives that haven't operated there since shortly after WWII. If Union Station is to be retained as a national hub, platform capacity has to be increased a lot. The last time I rode the Lake Shore Limited into Chicago we arrived an hour late and missed our time slot. Consequently, we passengers sat on the train in the throat of Union Station for another hour, waiting for a platform to open up so the train could back up a few hundred feet and unload passengers. An additional level of track platforms might be a solution. Going underneath the present ones isn't feasible unless they plan to pass out snorkels to boarding and detraining passengers, and going above probably would involve removing buildings that have been constructed in the air rights. On the upside, they could then incorporate through platforms so that travelers could ride, say, between St. Louis and Minneapolis without changing trains, when the market develops. Commuter trains could operate from the lower-level platforms, and intercity trains above. Signs of intelligent life among the Chicago media? Maybe the prospect of an actual mayoral election, instead of just another Daley re-coronation, has gotten some oxygen into their lungs.

I would have guessed a little earlier than 1910-1912, because I didn't see any automobiles (Model T Fords were around by then, and they were mass-produced and showing up almost everywhere), although I might have missed them. You guys know Cleveland history better than I do. I doubt if that was an everyday practice, and the May Co. is draped with bunting. Some patriotic occasion?