A slow week

Goodbye Nordberg

It has been a slow week, with no public meetings that I was aware of. There was activity at the power plant where the last of the engines to be scrapped was removed from the building. I missed the actual removal, but did get some pictures of the body of the engine on a 30 wheel truck.

Below are a couple of close-ups.

The City tried to sell it at auction but it did not sell. Here is a link to the auction, which may not be available for very long.

The truck left early this week but another large piece of the engine remained. Work also continued inside the building but I could not see what they were doing.

On Thursday bits and pieces of leftover scrap were being loaded into a dumpster.

Courthouse drainage

Work has started at the Courthouse to install drainage to keep water from leaking into the basement. 

Earlier this week there was a deep hole near the gazebo.

A day later some concrete catch basins or manholes (I am not sure what the name of these are) had been installed.

On Thursday there was a trench leading to the big hole.

Winter

Rensselaer had another few days of real winter this week. It was cold enough so parts of the Iroquois River froze over. 

The winter has been mild overall. As of February 1, the ice cover on the Great Lakes was only 12%, which is lower than it was for that date in 2022 and 2019, but slightly above than in 2021 and 2020.

Days are getting longer. On Friday the length of day from sunrise to sunset is 10 hours, ten minutes, and 53 seconds. (It was 9:16:59 on December 21, the winter solstice.) Each day we get a bit more than two more minutes of daylight. 

Odds and ends

I got the following in my e-mail last week:

Hi, R.A.,

I am a new-ish Hoosier, volunteering for the City Nature Challenge Chicagoland Area. This is a four day contest or opportunity to observe nature. It is free. It requires using a free app called iNaturalist on a smart phone. Here are two links that explain it: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2023-chicagoland-region and https://www.chicagowilderness.org/page/citynaturechallenge. There are lots of ways to participate, from observing a spider in your laundry room, to strolling through a natural area looking for spring flowers, to snapping photos of your catch while fishing.

I am writing to you because I really know very little about Jasper County. While searching the internet, I found your informative blog. I hope you could steer me towards nature groups or clubs at the high school, or hikers, or birders, or other people with similar interests who might enjoy participating. For example, is there a "Friends of" group at a local park?

I am grateful for any help you can give me.

If you are interested and want contact information, e-mail me at my rensselaeradventures at yahoo address. 

What has happened to the Jasper County Chronicle? It got off to a great start in January and now has been silent for a couple of weeks.

Rural Bling announced a grand opening for March 8, 3:00-7:00 pm. The business is already in the former GRG Auto Repair building on South College, but does not yet have retail hours. The grand opening announcement said that another business, Backyard Blooms, would also be part of the grand opening.

Finally, I saw a picture on Facebook of a bank note issued by the Bank of Rensselaer, which apparently was only in business for a couple years, failing in 1855. Rensselaer has an interesting banking history, with a lot of banks, several of which failed.

Along the tracks

A number of things intrigued me recently as I traveled parallel to the railroad tracks. Do you know where the Rex Blacker village is and how many homes it contains? I had not noticed the sign before.

The Rex Blacker Village is very small. Do you know where it is? If anyone can give us the back story on this, I would like to hear it. Rex Blacker died in 2009. He owned the Rensselaer NAPA auto parts store.

The trailer that was serving as the office at the elevator is gone now that the new office/weight station has been completed.

There was a dumpster by the storage lockers on Vine. I wonder if a locker was abandoned. If it was, there could have been an auction--Storage Wars Indiana. (Some evenings the most interesting thing on the cable is a re-run of an episode of Storage Wars. So many channels, so little worth watching.)

There are for sale signs on the property at Walnut and Scott. I think Talbert has used this lot in the past. However, most of what is along Walnut is a mystery to me.

Also a mystery is the business in the large building north of the tracks on Melville. It seems to be a machine shop of some sort. I was intrigued by a Fed Ex truck either making a delivery or picking up a load.

Finally, I discovered a new business ready to open on Walnut Street, R&R Auto Repair. It it located just to the west of the city buildings near Walnut and Melville. It will be the third auto repair business in that area, joining Rich's Cycle Solutions and MG Repairs.

The owner gave me his business card, which has contact information.

Update: The Rex Blacker Village is the Habitat for Humanity area along the east end of Elm Street. Currently there is only one house there.

I met a wide load (on a slow Wednesday)

As I meandered my way toward Saint Joseph's College Wednesday morning, I met a wide load. It was stopped at the intersection of Washington and Front, and you can see the new street pavement. On the other side of the bridge is more new pavement, the section from the bridge to Grove Street that was done last week.

 I do not know what the cargo was. It looked a lot like the base of a wind turbine, but my guess is that is was farm related. Whatever it is, there is a special truck trailer designed for it.

I met a second one a little behind it. It had difficulty making the turn where the highway branches off from College Avenue. Look at all the wheels on the back end.

 If anyone knows what it is, leave a comment.

I have a small garden by the hoop house. I noticed a large sphinx moth on one of my garden stakes.

 I thought it might be the moth of the horned tomato worm so I contemplated killing it. I killed three of the larvae this summer, but not before they did a lot of damage to my tomato plants. I pulled the wings out a bit to get a better look and it did not fly away. Checking the Internet after I got home, I now doubt that it is the adult of the tomato worm. It looks a lot like a Waved Sphinx Moth.

 The day was hot and muggy so I thought it would be refreshing to relax by the pond at SJC and admire the scaffolding reflecting in the cool water.

I was shocked to see an almost waterless pond. The college will be doing some upgrade work on it, changing it so that the water recirculates. Until now the water from the fountain was fresh water from the water tower.

Floor

I stopped by the library today and noticed that there was construction (or demolition?) in the entry way and bathrooms.

Some of the tiles had buckled, and they tried to get estimates on replacing the bad tiles, only to be told by multiple contractors that they could not fix the problem area, and that the only way to get it fixed was to replace the entire area.

My home repairs are often like that. What on surface seems like it should be a small task often ends up being much more involved that anticipated, and that is why I hate home repairs.

I have not been posting much this week and do not be surprised if the light posting continues for a while. It is a combination of not much happening in my world and a desire to focus on some other things. A year ago I felt bad when I missed a day. Now I do not.

What happened to November? It sure went by quickly.

Roofers

Dangerous work on a cold December morning. I wish I had been carrying a better camera.


(Oops. This was a post that I prepared a long time ago--either a year ago or two years ago--and then was not sure that I wanted to use, so I dated it far in the future. The future arrived without me realizing that this post needed to be re-dated or else it would appear. It is out of the queue now.)

I missed both the Santa's Village yesterday and the Band Booster Breakfast yesterday last weekend. Others were there and posted.

Something strange in the drive up

One weekend I noticed a truck at the drive-up approach to McDonalds on the south side of Rensselaer. I wondered why a semi-truck was ordering there.

A closer look explained all. It was not getting food. It was a McDonald's truck delivering food.

 

(Some days a bit of junk food is all that is available.)

A friendly chat

When I saw the FedEx and UPS delivery trucks parked next to each other behind Walgreens, I had to stop for a picture. Then I noticed that the two drivers were talking to each other. I wonder what they had to say.
If the USPS truck had also been there, it would have really been a great picture. Instead I think the vehicle that is visible between them is a garbage truck. I suppose that is where most of the stuff that gets delivered ultimately goes.

---

After writing the text above, I searched my folder of deliverance pictures for any other pairings, hoping to find something like Coke and Pepsi trucks, or Miller Beer and Budweiser. The best I could find were beer and milk
and milk and Coke.
(Why all these truck pictures? Because they illustrate how Rensselaer is tied to the larger economy. Without them, life as we enjoy it would not be possible.)

Update: Here are pictures of another UPS truck, with a story that says something about the economy.

Still more elevator pictures

As I have been spending some time with this blog, I have come to realize that I enjoy taking pictures more than I enjoy writing. I find interesting things to photograph in many places, but I have also discovered that I especially enjoy taking pictures of machines. (I guess that makes me a capitalist.) Almost every time I walk by the grain elevators, I am tempted to snap a pictures. In December I gave into the temptation when there was a truck filling with grain. The truck is a big machine, but the elevator is an even bigger one. There was also a contrast of horizontals and verticals, and the red of the truck provides an interesting highlight to the otherwise grays and whites of the elevator, sky, and snow.
Here is a close up of the corn pouring into the truck.
Then I noticed the name of the elevator up on a metal bin, and had to take that as well.

Just garbage today

In Rensselaer, the city picks up garbage. Outside the city limits, a private contractor does. In the city there is a wide range of garbage cans, but in the country there is uniformity. Or is that conformity?
This picture was taken along Bunkum Road. This may sound strange, but I thought these garbage cans were rather pretty. With their bright red color they resemble Christmas presents. Or is that taking the idea that one man's trash is another man's treasure a bit too far?

Yup--it is a slow day.