Miscellany for May, 2012 (Updated)

It has been a quiet week for me, and I have not found much to write about. Plus other projects are keeping me busy. Today I heard banging on the water tower and looked up to see three guys doing something up there. The one who was hanging over the side was welding, and I think he was the one hammering on the tank. One seemed to notice that I was looking up at them and seemed to be waving at me.

The Rensselaer Republican noted that the pedestrian bridge linking the city parking lot (which used to be Glazebrook Park) to Austin Park is back on the go list. The surveyors left behind markings that are mysterious to me but mean something to surveyors. The plan is to move the old bowstring arch bridge north of Laird's Landing. It has been a while since I was out that way, but one my early posts was about that bridge.

A week or so ago I traveled north to Shady Pines Golf Course. We had unexpected visitors and wanted to go out to eat, but it was the day of the water main break and some of the local restaurants had closed, plus we had a voucher for the Shady Pines. Their menu was limited, but the food was good and reasonably priced. (We discovered our waitress had a son who had appeared in the college play and were able to tell her how much we enjoyed his performance--it is a small world.)

On the way there I snapped a quick picture of construction just north of Jasper Junction. It is a trucking facility for a trucking company owned by Ron Kasparian. He started his company while he was in college and for a while was renting space in the old Schumacher Building, where American Melt Blown and Filtration is now.

Speaking of Jasper Junction, you may have noticed that they are trying to sell their property. They are not going out of business. Rather they would like to relocate in Rensselaer. CDC, which provides services for intellectually and developmentally disabled adults, also has a thrift store in Monticello. Their original location, just south of Indiana Beach, had a fire, and they relocated near the downtown. The results for their revenue were dramatic. They believe a better location for the Rensselaer facility would do the same here. However, they face two problems: selling the old property and finding a new one.

What else? The river float rescheduled for tomorrow has been canceled. Not enough people signed up to make it worthwhile for the canoe rental company. I have signed up for all of the canceled floats and missed the one that actually went--I had something else that weekend. However, many years ago I did float a bit of the river in a rubber raft--back when my kids still were at home.

My oldest child is planning to attend the 20th year class reunion for her high school class this summer. That makes me feel old. I graduated in the mid 1960s, and my fiftieth year class reunion will soon be here. When I graduated, the people who had been out for twenty years had graduated during WWII, which for me was ancient history. The people celebrating their fiftieth had graduated before the U.S. entered WWI, which was so far in the past I could not relate to it. So I suspect that the kids graduating this year cannot really imagine what life was like in the ancient past when I was in high school. (We did not have computers or the Internet or cable TV or cell phones--how could people live like that?)

Update: On Monday (May 14, 2012) the workers were pressure washing the water tower. The work they were doing last week was to install a ladder from the walkway around the base of the tank to the top of the tank.