Another busy weekend

It was a busy weekend. On Saturday the Bomber football team set out for Fort Wayne and a repeat meeting with Bishop Luers High School. They got a firetruck escort through town before they headed east, where they finished their season. They had a great year, losing only to a team that next week will defend their state title.

The merchants had a "Rocking Rensselaer" promotion but I was too busy with other things to see much of it. In the business news, the Ritz is now operating under new ownership. I saw by a flier that the local Subway is also under new ownership. I stopped by the old J&L Antiques and Things to see the preview for an auction that will be held soon. And I noticed that Curves is moving again.

Going through town late on Saturday afternoon, I saw a sight that you probably would not see in Chicago. I was told that we are in the shotgun part of the deer hunt.

And a new house or duplex is under construction in the new subdivision along Sparling.

1000!

Wow! I made it to 1000 posts on this blog--380+534+86.This may be a good time to tell you a little about how I do this blog, what the future holds, and why I am delighted that I could post this milestone blog today, a day that has special significance for me.

For well over a year I have been trying to do a daily post. Usually the process starts with pictures that I think tell a story. In the past I took most of them while jogging, but unless or until my legs start feeling a lot better, I will no longer have that source of pictures. After I download them to the computer, I review, select, crop, and resize pictures then upload them to picasaweb via the blog. The pictures from my cameras are from one to five megabytes; the pictures I upload are almost always under 100K both because they are resized and also because I save them at a low jpeg quality.

After the pictures are uploaded, I add text, usually including a few typos. Some of the typos I find before the post goes public, and some I only find later. Those who read the post early see a lot them. Then I schedule when the post will appear, usually for the early morning. On mornings that a post does not appear, it is often because I messed up the save, either with a pm instead of an am, or the post gets saved instead of published. (If you have played with blogger, this may make sense. Otherwise it probably will not.) Sometimes I have been able to prepare posts for several days ahead, and if anything time-sensitive comes up, I reschedule the future posts.

I receive all comments that are made in one of my e-mail accounts, which is helpful when people post on ancient posts. Occasionally I get spam comments that direct people to commercial or porn websites, and I delete these as soon as I see them.

Anyone can see the statistics that are available on the sitemeter tag. I also have access to statistics from blogger, the Google company that hosts my blogs. I have earned $96.77 from the Google Ads that you see on the side of the page. That works out to almost ten cents per post. If a post only took me a minute, that would mean I earned $6.00 per hour blogging. Unfortunately, I think the average amount of time per post is in the half hour range. I will let you figure out how much I earn per hour with that. The place I get this number tells me that I have had 78358 page views during the time this blog has been active.

I have access to another set of statistics that only goes back to May 2010. During that time, the most viewed page is this one with 385 page view. Here is second (197 views) and third place (145). (If you open up to rensselaeradventures.blogspot.com, it does not count as a page view for this tally. The traffic to these pages is coming from search engines or links from other places on the Internet..) (Don't ask me to explain these rankings--I have no idea of why they are as they are.)

Although I have been trying to post daily for over a year, I have decided to quit trying to do that. I have another project that requires long and tedious stays at the computer, and hence posting is a lot less enjoyable. I will continue to post, but less frequently and more sporadically.

You might have noticed that I did not post on a few days recently. That was because I wanted this 1000th post to be dated November 21, 2010, which would have been my father's 100th birthday were he still alive. He was born Richard Rataczak in St. Paul, Minnesota on November 21, 1910. At the age of five or six his mother died and he and his siblings were sent to an orphanage even though his father was still alive. According to the keepers of family history, his father was an irresponsible loser. After a few years in the orphanage, he and one older brother were adopted by a childless couple in Long Prairie, Minnesota. After high school, he attended several colleges--St. John's University, Marquette, and finally the University of Minnesota, where he earned a degree in pharmacy. A year or two before his death I asked him to tell me about his early years, and he refused. He said that the memories were too painful.

He married when he was about thirty. My parent's first child was stillborn, the second had Down Syndrome, I was third, and two brothers followed me.

He served in World War II as a pharmacists mate aboard a submarine tender, the U.S.S. Proteus. He never saw combat--a submarine tender was meant to resupply submarines at sea and not to engage the enemy. He was very impressed with the Pacific and the islands that he saw while in service, and was also impressed with the discipline of the Japanese sailors he observed after the war. During the 1950s or 1960s there was a television series that recounted the exploits of various submarines in the Pacific, and he remembered most of the subs.

After the war he worked briefly for another pharmacist, and then set out to open his own drug store in small town America. We moved from Stewart, Minnesota to Morton, Minnesota to Little Falls, Minnesota as he searched for a viable business. In Little Falls his was the smallest of three drug stores, and when a small chain (then a new phenomenon in the drugstore world) opened around 1960, he closed and went to work for one of the other two drug stores. After a year or two, he found there was more opportunity in St. Paul, and moved back there, working for a couple of local chains. The rest of the family followed a few years later. His experience convinced me that I never wanted to enter the retail field, and has made me very sympathetic to the problems of those who try to run their own stores. What he did not see was that the automobile would completely change the way people shopped, and those changed patterns doomed the retail business in small towns. You can see the effects of that revolution in every town in our area.

I need a picture, don't I? My brother recently sent me the one below. My father must be in early adolescence because pictures of him a few years later look considerably different. So it must have been taken sometime between 1920 and 1925. There is not much resemblance between him and the young man who is next to him, but they were brothers. The two on the right were his adoptive parents, and I have no idea of who the old guy in the center was. One of the reasons I really like this picture is the clothing my father and the others are wearing. I do not know much about the history of clothing, but I think that my father is wearing knickers.

Addendum: Sometimes late comments can be quite interesting, though few people will ever see them. For example, see recent comments here and here.

Hospital expansion update

I had to spend some time waiting at the hospital on Friday, so I wandered out to see how construction was going. The west wall has had the facade of limestone block applied so it matches the main building. I am not sure why the fake windows are there--maybe the architects thought that a blank wall would be uglier.

Most of the rest of the new expansion is still cement block, but the wall nearest the back of the hospital has scaffolding for the masons and some of the block.

I was surprised to see what the blocks looked like as they came from the quarry. One of the workers said that they create them from slabs by appling pressure at the top. Notice how the top four pieces neatly fit together. (This look of limestone blocks has been replicated in cement blocks, for example in Dwenger Hall and in quite a number of other local buildings, especially garages, built early in the twentieth century.)

Stop by Sunday for a special post.

Some SJC happenings

SJC had a couple of concerts in the past few weeks. On November 7, the choir had its fall concert in the Chapel.
They have a new director this year and I like his style. However, no one has stepped up to the role of super soprano that was filled for the past few years by several very talented women.

On November 14th a jazz concert had two parts. The first was the vocal jazz ensemble.

That was followed by the jazz band under the direction of Paul Geraci. They have a lot of very good saxophonists.

There were not many band shows at football games because there were not many home games this fall. The band looked very good for the last home game.

Speaking of football, a couple of students who I saw in many classes won conference honors. Congratulations especially to Andy Adamiec and Wes Schroder, first team defense and offensive lineman of the year, respectively.

Also a cultural note, the senior art show is on display in the Core Building Lobby for another couple of weeks. This painting reminded me of this site, which I found when I was looking for things on the Internet appropriate for a two-year old. (She was not as impressed with it as I was.)

By the way, the mystery photo from a few weeks is just a few feet from this painting. The corner stone is on the right of the central entrance to the Core Building lobby. I think it was from the old administration building that burned a year or two before I arrived in Rensselaer, but that is just a guess.

(When I was on the SJC website to get a link for this post, I noticed that they were highlighting their bloggers.)

Around town-updated

After working at the computer most of the morning, I finally got out yesterday afternoon and looked around town. I was surprised to see that Irene's Consignment shop now is Amy's Attic. I thought the switch was supposed to be at the end of the month.

I forgot to congratulate the football team on their regional championship, won at Bremen in overtime. This Friday they will be in Fort Wayne facing Bishop Luers High School, the team that beat them last year at semi-state and the defending 2A champions.

I mentioned a week or so ago that the Ritz Theater was for sale. (Update: According to the Ritz Theater Facebook page, the theater has been sold.)

There was some activity in Weston Cemetery and Bicentennial Park this morning--some more foundations for the bridge that I thought would be built two years ago. The activity may not tell us that a bridge is imminent, but it does say that the project has not been abandoned. (I titled that old post "Part 1" because I expect a Part 2 would follow. It has not yet.)

Finally, there was a serious fire last night in a house on Susan Street. It was causing some traffic back up as the parents picking up their children at St. Augustine's School had to stop and take a look.

It is a reminder of how vulnerable we are to the unexpected.