Robert Pence

Amazing little town. I drove through there years ago, before it became such a tourist destination, but had gotten my schedule jammed up and didn't have time to stop. Thanks for the tour. Galena should have a funicular! (Dubuque has a small one)

The farm where I grew up is about 1/3 mile off a chip-and-seal county road, and is accessed by a macadam private road that now serves two residences and a machine shop and provides seasonal access for heavy farm machinery. We are within five miles of two large limestone quarries where we can get crushed stone of the appropriate size, and we minimize the need for new stone by surfacing the road regularly with a tractor-pulled maintainer. A maintainer differs from a grader in that it can't apply mechanical down-pressure to the blade; the blade is held down by its own weight and the weight of its supporting mechanism. The blade's cant and angle of attack are controlled by hand cranks. Whenever all the stone in the wheel tracks has become pulverized and compacted, and/or whenever potholes start to develop, we use the maintainer to redistribute the loose stone from the crown and margins into the tracks. Usually we don't have to add new stone more than once a year. The road drains well, and the only serious weather-caused problems can occur when sudden thaws with heavy snow accumulations occur after a prolonged cold period with deep frost. Then, an underlayer of frost can prevent surface water from escaping, and the top layer of soil becomes saturated to the consistency of toothpaste, with the macadam constituting a crust on top. When that happens, sometimes you can feel the surface give when you walk on it, like walking on a rubber mat. Aggressive driving or excess weight could cause a vehicle to break through and become deeply mired, damaging the macadam so that it can take a long time to reconstitute itself even after the soil becomes stable again. I remember a few times when the county closed most of the macadam roads for a few days during Spring thaw.

Looks quite well-kept, and the mansion is impressive. I love the mural.

The lone figure among clouds of vapor in the otherwise-deserted, wet street gives that photo an intriguing, apocalyptic feel. Some fine-tuning and possibly grayscaling might make an interesting exhibition print. In this morning's paper there was an AP photo looking down on the sinkhole with the Escalade at the bottom. Some barricades were down there, too. I wonder if the area already had been closed off as hazardous for some reason, and the driver either ignored the barricades or didn't see them in the downpour, and drove where he wasn't supposed to.

Better than I thought it would be, from a couple of the early photos. The downtown looks quite pleasant in spots, and the brick street is good. The "No Idea" building looks like it may have been an early railroad depot, pre-dating the one used by the scenic railroad.

Former Nickel Plate steam locomotive 765, operated by Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society and currently the largest steam locomotive operating east of the Mississippi River, will pull excursion trains on the CVSR in September: http://fortwaynerailroad.org/ http://www.cvsr.com/steam-in-the-valley.aspx

Neighborhoods, urban design, and Pattern Language are valid topics worthy of further discussion, folks, but we're drifting off the (gravel) road. The topic is The Gradual Return of Gravel Roads. Please take the other discussions to a more appropriate section/topic. Thanks.

Wow! I the last video, irony is pretty much defined by the guy up to his chest in floodwaters and carrying an umbrella. I was planning to come to Milwaukee in the near future to update my photo collection; my most recent visit was for the SSP forum meet in March 2005, on a cold, cloudy, wet day alternating between freezing drizzle and snow flurries. I think I'll postpone the visit until business get cleaned up and damage gets repaired. That might take a while.

Dramatic! Almost as intense as the fury of MayDay, but less directed.

I don't know about Kraftmaid, but in my experience Lowe's has been very good about ensuring customer satisfaction. Usually they prefer to give store credit in the form of a gift card unless I'm returning a defective product with a receipt, but that's fine by me; I spend so much time and money in that store that some of the cashiers know me by name and recently one of them thought I was an employee.

Beautiful! It's coming out well-detailed and realistic! Edit: There's a lot of heavy railroad iron in that scrapyard; looks like it might have come from a wreck cleanup. That's high-dollar scrap!

Can a guy be considered bisexual if he likes both men and boys?

Sort of thinned out the traffic on Michigan Ave. for a while. Amazing vantage point and great photos!

Nothing's changed. Having just turned 71, I'm pretty sure by now it isn't just a phase.

Yes. He went very slowly, and I didn't see if maybe he had a passenger watching the right-side mirror as watched the left. The photo was taken near Battle Ground, Indiana, en route from Lafayette to an Indiana DNR property, The Museums at Prophetstown. It's a livestock shelter built to be portable so that it can be moved from one pasture area to another. I wouldn't be surprised if the farmer or his dad, when he built it thirty or forty years ago, measured the bridge and sized the shelter accordingly.

DJ Orion, I'll bet that makes a nice echoing rumble when coal hoppers pass under that bridge. Empties going the other way probably would be louder. :-) My offering for the day:

Disclaimer: The following is stuff I've assimilated by reading and hearing the anecdotes of people who were old when I was in my teens and twenties. I haven't done in-depth research on the topic, but I think some of it is reasonably accurate as it applies to the midwest. Anyway, the topic is a good excuse for me to launch another geezer reminiscence/ramble. < :yap: > Prior to the late nineteenth century, most rural roads and some city streets were just dirt, and rains turned them into quagmires churned by wagon wheels and horses' hooves. Even a muddy road could be traversed by horse-drawn wagons and buggies though, unless the mud was really deep and/or slippery. After the mud dried, the wheel tracks became ruts and ridges For the most part, no government function existed to maintain rural roads. If dirt roads were maintained at all, they were maintained by individual residents, sometimes taking turns and sometimes working together with pick-and-shovel hand labor and basic horse-drawn equipment. The advent of mechanical transportation, propelled by wheels and heavy compared with buggies and wagons, changed the picture. Early automobiles and the steam traction engines used to move and power harvesting machinery quickly became deeply mired in mud, and it took a lot of back-breaking labor to extricate them. On the other hand, the advent in the 1880s of mobile steam power and powerful mechanical rock crushers resulted in both the need for improved roads and the means to improve them. In the midwest, crushed limestone became the surfacing material of choice; eventually it packed into a hard surface that didn't become muddy, and the roads could be maintained in a passable state in most kinds of weather. In the early twentieth century, local government units began to take responsibility for road maintenance. At first, many of them didn't own machinery, and they levied road taxes upon property owners and then contracted with owners of tractors or steam traction engines to maintain roads. The tractors and engines powerful enough to do the job were expensive beyond the reach of small farmers, but a prosperous farmer or a group of small farmers could make a substantial offset to their investment with road maintenance revenue. The road work was done mostly outside planting and harvesting seasons when equipment and manpower was available. What people commonly refer to as gravel roads usually are crushed limestone. Gravel as I think of it is made up of pebbles of harder stone of varying sizes (Think of the pea gravel used in landscaping), and the only gravel roads I've seen in Northeast Indiana are in Steuben County, where gravel is abundant and usually dipped with a dragline from water-filled pits and ponds. It's less dusty than crushed limestone, but I don't think it compacts as well. Crushed limestone roads are easily navigable on a bike with a little practice (stay in the packed wheel tracks, and avoid the loose stuff at the center and on the edges), but gravel can be treacherous. </ :yap: >

MayDay, you gotta' keep them pugs leashed! :wink:

DanB and David, your back-and-forth is in a downward spiral toward personal attacks, and nothing good can come of that. It's not contributing to the thread or the forums in any way. I'll not delete the last couple of posts yet, but please rein it in. If you want to go at each other, take it to PM.

Some of you have seen photos of some of the wrecks on the curve by my house. It used to be a lot worse; there was a big tree straight off the curve and in line with the westbound traffic on the one-way arterial as it heads out of town. Before the city put in a stoplight a couple of blocks up, there was an eight-block straightaway from the last light, and another mile and a half until the next one. There was and still is a lot of speeding there, but then it was a prime venue for late-night racing, and the wrecks were much more frequent and often much more severe than they are now. One night in the 1970s I heard a "BOOM!" sound like a bomb going off close by, followed by the sound of a car speeding away, and they by screaming. I looked outside to see a white Chevy halfway wrapped around the tree and suspended a couple of feet off the ground. The screaming was coming from inside the Chevy. I called the cops right away; given the mangled condition of the car and its inaccessible location there was nothing else I could do, and I didn't want to get too close in case the car blew up. The cops arrived in just a couple of minutes. Across the street, one of the tall aluminum poles that held a cobra-head street light was laying halfway in the street. The cops soon determined that it had been hit by and had fallen upon the other car, and that info helped them to locate the other car and arrest the other driver. The driver of the Chevy turned out to be the son of a foreman where I worked. He was terribly injured but survived, and the intial prognosis said that he might be paralyzed from the chest down and never walk again. A few years later I learned that he had made sufficient recovery to be able to walk and to work for a living, although not without a bad limp and chronic pain.

Who is your ISP? If you get your internet access through a cable TV provider, most likely it's a problem with limited bandwidth; everything runs fast so long as onlly a few users are online, but as more people connect, you get what amounts to traffic congestion and everything slows down.

In 1988 I left a 21-year career at GE that had taken a turn in the wrong direction, to go to work for a small but growing systems integration company that was getting good local press. Eight months later at the company Christmas party, a Saturday-evening suit-and-tie sit-down dinner for 64 employees plus their spouses at the country club of one of the owners, no one had a clue the business was in trouble because of fraudulent sales pitches and pyramid schemes with clients' up-front money by said owner. The first workday of the new year, sixteen of us were called in, one-by-one, to the CFO's office and told that cutbacks probably would be coming. When we got back to our offices, we discovered that our computers had been logged off and our logins no longer worked. It turned out the sixteen of us were the lucky ones; we got out with severance pay. The ones who stayed agreed to work for deferred compensation to help turn the company around, and the deferral turned out to be permanent. The turnaround came when the Feds hauled away the computers and records and locked the doors. The company had been using employees' 401K deductions and tax withholdings to cover business expenses. The upside was that in the eight months that job lasted, I learned the technology (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) that got me a good job at a respectable company, where I stayed ten years until I retired.

Marc, I guess that's a solid testimonial that good photos depend more upon the photographer's eye and skill than on the camera. Your photo threads kick butt, and I assumed you had moved up to a DSLR. The Nikon Coolpix cameras are good stuff, too, especially when you compare the price with a DSLR.

You don't understand yet? You don't no more decline induction to ColDay's hall of fame, than you resign from the Mob. You in, and they ain't no leavin' :-o

Beautiful views! What was the occasion for the Amish man plowing? I love watching draft horses at work.