Books, track, and PAPIs

On Thursday the Robinson Library at Saint Joseph's College closed. For the next week or so it will still available by special appointment. The books probably will be sold. The College is getting many demands from creditors and also threats of lawsuits for payment, so items are being inventoried and an attempt will be made to turn them into cash. It is a bit ironic that most of the students in the picture below, taken about half an hour before the library closed for good, were not SJC students but seemed to be students from other schools who are attending the GLVC track championships that SJC is hosting Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

As I left the building, I took a picture of one of the classrooms. The desks are fairly new--when I taught classes in this building, the desks were the old wooden desks that had been in the classrooms for decades. I liked those old desks even though students could not resist the temptation to deface them--they connected back to the past.

Leaving campus on Thursday, I stopped to take a picture of the start of the track meet. Fourteen teams will be represented. Most of the events on Thursday were for the decathlon or heptathlon, though women's and men's 10K races were scheduled for the evening, probably using portable lights.

The commencement on Saturday is scheduled to be streamed live at www.glvcsn.com/sjc/

In other news, the Airport Authority Board met Wednesday night. It is the first of their meetings I have attended this year and the agenda was mostly routine.  The engineer's report discussed finishing details of the navigation aids project that was funded with an FAA grant. Evidence of the grant is the PAPIs that are clearly visible as you approach the airport from the south on Airport Road. (To learn what PAPIs are, see this post from last year.) The lights are LEDs and very bright. If a pilot sees them as red, as they appear from ground level, he knows that he is in trouble.

The Board decided not to seek another FAA grant this year but will let the money roll over to increase the amount available next year. (Recall that the fuel farm was financed largely with an FAA grant using monies that had accumulated for several years.) The managers report discussed hangar rental (27 currently rented), the need for a used and cheap wheelchair to accommodate the occasional visitor who needs this assistance, and moles and gophers that are abundant on the grass runway. The two lights that a vandal shot out (and that were the subject of an article in a recent issue of the Rensselaer Republican) where shown. They cost $400 each to replace.

Finally, it appears that the river will peak below flood stage. The rain was much heavier to our south.