The signs can stay another week

Again this year the storefronts downtown are decorated with signs urging the Bomber football team to victory. On Saturday they responded by winning the sectional championship, defeating Wheeler, which came into the game come into the game with the same perfect 11 wins and no losses that the Bombers had.

It was a classic sectional championship, with Rensselaer rated number one in the state and Wheeler rated number four. What surprised the sports reporters from Northern Indiana was not that Rensselaer won, but that they shut out Wheeler, which had averaged over fifty points per game this season.

This Friday the team will travel to Bremen for the regional championship. Regardless of what happens in that game, the football team has had a terrific season. It is interesting that two other Hoosier Conference teams are still alive in the playoffs, Tipton and West Lafayette. Tipton will be leaving the conference, but Central Catholic will be joining, and Central Catholic looks like it is the team to beat in class 5A class 1A.

I recall that many years ago the SJC baseball team made it to the finals of the NCAA Division II tournament, but lost. Their success made some of the team members just about insufferable the next year. I hope that success on the sports field is being handled better by the Rensselaer football players.

My candidate for cleverest sign is the "Bank on a Win" sign at Lafayette National Bank.

My candidate for best artwork is the sign in the Balvich dental office.

Field work

I was south of Rensselaer this week taking pictures and noticed some really interesting clouds.

OK. Actually I took the picture of the tractor and noticed the clouds later. The big tractors take up almost the entire road.

A bit further down the road I saw people digging in a harvested field.

They were installing drainage tile. This area is almost a mile west of US 231 where there are some houses that have water problems with big rains. Habitat for Humanity wanted to build out there but were told not to.

I wonder where the tile is from. Recently I found that there Francesville has a large factory making drainage tile. As I have written this blog, I have learned a lot and have become very aware of how much I do not know about this area.

This beautiful stream in not a river or a creek. It is the Howe Ditch, which joins with Carpenter Creek a mile downstream and then empties into the Iroquois. In some parts of the country, the farmers must irrigate. In our area they must install tile and dig ditches to take away excess water.

Addendum: On a completely unrelated note, I learned today via my mailbox that the Big Top Flea Market has a new owner, Clint Johnson, who took over from Howard Marshall. See the article here, with one of my pictures.

Used to be a house here

The other day I was traveling down Airport Road, and as I approached the intersection with SR 114, I noticed a bulldozer. Then I noticed that the soil had been smoothed, not plowed, and it struck me that something was missing. The last time I had been here, there was a house on this corner, and it was now history. It was listed and pictured in the Jasper County Interim Report, which rated it notable, saying it was built around 1915, was well preserved, and "featured a full-width front porch with doric columns."

The house that was being demolished on Rachel Street is now totally gone and all that is left is dirt.

The same is true for the house at the five corners near the Church of the Nazarene

A few days earlier they were still hauling out the old debris and bring in the new fill.

So much destruction should be balanced with some construction. A week or so ago they workers were still laying concrete blocks for a wall of the hospital expansion.

In some news from Facebook, the Ritz Cinema is for sale.

Election Day

One of the things that has struck me this election season is how few lawn signs have been up in Rensselaer. There seem to be fewer now than there were for the primary a few months ago. This lack of signs is local--in several trips out of county, I saw many more signs in other towns.

One factor is probably that we have few competitive and interesting races. The Senate and House races seem noncompetitive. Ellsworth seems not to have foreseen what having Obama on his side would mean when he decided to run, but figured it out soon after because he has been running as a former sheriff rather than a sitting congressman. In the primary the Republicans had a slew of candidates running for the House and selected probably the weakest of them because he had a bit of name recognition from 2008. It is hard to see that Leyva has even run a campaign. It is always a bit sad when people do not know when to step aside and make way for others.

On the county level, the sheriff's race seems to the big one judging from the signs. There are also signs for a couple of county council races that are being contested--many of the local positions are uncontested. The Democrats have won the sign race--they have noticeably more signs than the Republicans. I know very little about the local parties, but the sign wars suggest to me that the local Democrats may be better led than the local Republicans.

I have seen a lot of polls and predictions about the races nationally, but the only poll that counts is the one takes place today.

Over the weekend-Updated

Did you have a very scary Halloween?

On Friday afternoon the Rensselaer Library sponsored a Riley Read at the Gazebo on the Court House Lawn.

For a number of years there were Riley Reads in Brookside Park. I think they were sponsored by a women's sorority. (If you remember, you can fill that in.) The attendance was never very big, and in that respect, the 2010 version was true to its heritage. (I always enjoyed the cookies--they were great. And I remember a fire--was there one there, or is my memory faulty?)

On Thursday and Saturday nights the Rensselaer High School Drama Club presented "The Foreigner," a comedy with some absurd plot elements but which gave a couple of seniors a chance to show their acting range. Here Betty, the owner of the Fishing Lodge, is shouting at the main character Charlie on the assumption that if he does not understand English, it may help to speak very loudly.

Charlie, pretending not to understand English, thwarts an attempt by a corrupt local official and a con man posing as a preacher to steal the Betty's lodge and turn it into a headquarters for the Klu Klux Klan.

The performance on Saturday was sparsely attended, with fewer than 100 people in the audience. There were also very few high school students. When I was in high school a very long time ago, the plays were almost exclusively attended by the students (but then my high school days were a bit out of the ordinary).

The next high school play will be "Anything Goes" in April, 2011.

As for Halloween and Tricks and Treating, there were a lot of rather old "kids" who stopped by our house. One of the "kids" I had come to the door had a goatee, and it was real, not part of a costume. If there is no age limit on this, maybe I should go out and beg candy next year.

Update: The students at St. Augustine School are doing an interesting alternative to a Halloween party. Today, which is All Saints Day, they are dressing up as their favorite saint and having a costume party. It is rather interesting that at least two of our holidays have come from elevating and secularizing the day before a Holy Day--Halloween, which is the eve of All Saints Day (All Hallows Evening), and Mardi Gras, which is the day before Ash Wednesday. The word "carnival" comes from the Latin for "Goodbye Meat."

Update 2: Below is a picture of the various most original, most authentic, best girl's costume and best boy's costume from their afternoon program. Can you identify any of the saints?