Silent auction

This morning I traveled east to the Whistle Stop Cafe. The wind was from the south and there was a lot of snow blowing across SR 114. When I came back the blowing snow had stopped. We are finally emerging from the icebox--the temperatures are going above freezing for the first time in several days.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Starting Thursday the days will start getting a little bit longer and the sun will get a little bit higher in the sky, though it will be hard to notice the changes for a few weeks.

I noticed that the Whistle Stop had employment records for Virgil Grissom on the wall of the entry way to the museum. I asked if they were new and was told that they had been there for a long time. I had never noticed them. When Grissom was a freshman at Purdue, he worked a summer for the Monon Railroad.

Coming back to Rensselaer, I stopped by CDC Resources to see what they had in their ongoing silent auction. There are 40 lots of items that were originally used for the Playscape preschool when CDC had a preschool. (If I remember correctly, CDC Resources closed their preschool because state regulations made it uneconomic. Treasure Keepers took over the facility and because they were church based, they were subject to less restrictive regulations. Recently CDC Resources decided that they needed the space for their other operations and declined to renew the lease that Treasure Keepers had.)

There are three rooms full of stuff for sale, all divided into forty lots. So if you want just one or two items, you are out of luck. However, if you want a bunch of similar items, like little trikes or lots of toys, this is the place to go.

 This is the other side of the room. I do not know where all this stuff was stored when the pre-school was operating.

 A close-up on one of the lots.

 The gray things seem to be cots for naps.

 Lots of little furniture was in the second room.

 A third room had more furniture and lots of little chairs.

 You have until December 30 to put in a bid. If you are interested, stop by (they are at the east end of Angelica Street), check out the lots, and submit a bid.

I suggested that CDC Resources Thrift Store submit a bid on each lot to prevent low ball bids from winning lots. When the Rensselaer Central School Corporations had its surplus auction, there lots won for a penny.

There are two donation boxes at the parking lot at CDC Resources-Rensselaer. These are wooden and built in one of the CDC Resources workshops. The donation box by Royal Oak and north of Save-A-Lot are metal and were purchased before CDC Resources realized that they could build their own.

Speaking of the workshop, the people there were very happy today because they had work and were earning money. They were repackaging filters for Donaldsons, taking them from big boxes and putting them into individual boxes.