Emptying the in-box

I keep worrying that I am going to run out of things to write about for this blog, but currently my problem is that I have too much to write about. It is time to clean out my in-box.

When looking at buildings for rent, I wrote that I did not have a picture of the Ho Ho Vac Shop sign. I found one! It was in the background of a picture of the flood waters dated Feb 7, 2008. Remember the high waters of a year ago?

For a couple of weeks I had not seen any real progress on the store that is supposed to be coming, but on Tuesday people were moving in a refrigerator. Maybe the dream will be realized.
On a morning jog about a month ago, I took a picture of a house that looked abandoned. The house is no longer there. A comment noted that there were plans for a development of duplexes.
Here is a better shot of what is left. The unseasonally warm weather in the past few days has melted almost all the snow that we have had for more than a month.

I shortchanged the Van Rensselaer school playground in my descriptions of playgrounds. In addition to the playground that is in front of the school, there is also a big playground behind the school. The row of swings is the longest in Rensselaer. In fact, the Van Rensselaer playground is probably the largest in Rensselaer.
An advantage of having two separate playground areas is that the fifth and third graders can have recess at the same time but not together. That way the fifth graders will not pound the stuffing out of the third graders. (Big kids pick on little kids--it is a law of nature.)
I last showed construction progress at the hospital in mid January. Below is a picture taken on February 8.
I mentioned the old Schumacher factory in a post on buildings for rent. A week ago the Dodge dealership had a sales event there (selling repossessed cars), and I thought I might be able to see what the interior of the building looked like. However, one could only see a tiny bit of the whole building.
After writing about the Rensselaer post office mural, I learned that the Jasper County Historical Society was hosting an exhibit dedicated to post office murals. I stopped by, but was disappointed. They are doing some interior renovation and getting ready to paint, so many of the exhibits that were available for dulcimer event were now covered with plastic.
They do have a new display in their display window, of old medical uniforms and equipment.
Finally, I have several pictures that do not really fit anywhere. For several weeks workmen have been removing the round, decorative things (what is the proper term here?) over the doors in College Square.
I asked one of the workmen why they were doing removing the old roofs. He said that they allowed water leakage that was rotting the plywood.
The other evening a workman was fixing a light in College Square. It just was too neat a scene not to photograph.
On Monday morning there was construction activity just west of Rensselaer on State Road 114 across from Brown's Garden Shop. I asked a workman what they were doing. He replied that they were building a new store for Kirby Risk.