Hospital open house

Yesterday, Sunday, the Jasper County Hospital had its open house to show off the renovated and newly constructed areas. People were not allowed to wander around and look for themselves. Everything was done with guided tours.

The first stop on the tour was the new outpatient area, which is in the old part of the hospital where the surgery units were previously. It has its own waiting area, which you can see through the doorway on the right.

The little cubicles look pretty much like the old ones. The old outpatient area is presently unassigned space. No decision has been made yet about what it will become.

Then we entered the newly constructed section. The main part of the upper level of the new addition is the surgery unit. It has four operating rooms. The whole area was closed to the tour--stray people might bring in unwanted microbes. Instead there was a video that showed what was inside. (The picture below was taken through the window in the door.) In addition to the operating rooms, there was a lot of space devoted to storage of supplies and equipment. I had a hard time following where they were in the video, but probably would also have had a hard time making sense of it if we had gone in. There are so many little rooms that the whole hospital is like a giant maze.

The MRI truck will no longer be parked out in front of the hospital. The new addition has a new MRI unit. The tour did not go into the room with the machine, but we could see it from the control room.

Then it was time to go to the lower level. This very comfortable-looking bedroom, one of two, is part of the sleep-study area. The hospital does a lot of sleep testing for truckers.

While the subjects are sleeping, there are monitored from this room.

Another unit in the lower level, one with windows, is the oncology unit. There were a number of the big chairs around a central nurses station.

The final stop before the cookies and punch in a conference room was hospital records. We did not get to go in there either, and there was not even a good view through the window.

The renovated and new units looked very nice. I hope I will not need to use them any time soon.

Not yet--update

The LaRue Pool in Brookside park was scheduled to open today. It did not--technical problems with the pumps or seals. The water is ready though probably pretty cold. The pool should be open on Monday.

Update: Those of us waiting for LaRue Pool to open may have had a dry weekend, but those who bought passes to Lake Banet had fun at the beach.

Bunny problems

I have been slow to get my garden planted, but maybe it does not matter. Below you can see how my broccoli is doing.

 The tomatoes, which mostly are volunteers, are missing leaves.

 Can you see the row of beans in the picture below? They should be about six inches tall by now.

The bunnies have been eating almost everything that I planted in my garden. Why can't they eat the weeds? I have loads of creeping charlie--why can't they stuff themselves on that?

I have mentioned my bunny problems to several others, and they have commented that there do seem to be a lot of rabbits around town this year.

My love of wildlife stops when it inconveniences me. I think I finally evicted the raccoon that was living in the attic of my garage. He may have gotten some revenge--he was able to get into my garbage. I tie the lid on to keep the raccoons out, but he found an alternative way to get it. There was a hole the size of a half dollar on the bottom. He (or she) knocked over the can, and then pulled part of the bag out through the hole. It made quite a mess.

Though I think the garage is now raccoon free, I have a new wildlife guest. I had a new light put in this spring, and barn swallows found that it was the perfect place to build their nest. They are very messy birds, and the mess can fall on the car. I will let them raise their young, but then I will find a way to eliminate the top of the light fixture as a future nesting site.

On a more pleasant topic, the LaRue pool is scheduled to open Friday, June 8. The Lake Banet beach is already open and this year the public can buy passes. The SJC person I talked to said that the response from the community has been strong.

A Sun day adventure

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently out of town and far away, in Utah (and Nevada). While I was there, something special happened--there was a solar eclipse. Unfortunately, it was not a total eclipse, but a less dramatic annular eclipse.

Just in case you do not know your astronomy, an annual eclipse is an eclipse in which the moon passes in front of the sun, but its disk is too small to totally block it. The reason this can happen is that the moon travels in an ellipse around the earth, and its distance varies as it "circles" the earth. For this eclipse, the moon was at its far point (or apogee) in its path.

Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada had made preparations for the big event, and there were plenty of people who decided to view the spectacle from the parking lot of its visitor's center.

The park ordered special solar glasses, which this boy is holding, but they sold out before I could buy one. However, my son-in-law had access to a couple of welding helmets, and they were enjoyed by quite a few people

The park had set up several telescopes for viewing. Naturally they had to have filters. (I heard that someone tried to look at the sun with binoculars using the solar glasses, and the sun melted them.) People could see sunspots using the telescopes.

One of the telescopes that the park had was hooked up to a computer, and people could see the sun on the display.

I was able to adjust a camera to take a picture through the welding helmets. I set the ISO to 800, the shutter speed to 1/2000 of a second, and the F-stop to 2.8, and I was able to get an image of the start of the eclipse.

A bit later I took a picture through the second welding helmet, which had a greenish tinge.

Near the end of the event, someone figured out that you could take the dark glass out of a helmet, clean it, and get much clearer views.

Below you can see what the eclipse looked like during the two minutes in which the moon was directly in front of the sun. A park ranger and a fellow who had been giving programs dressed as Galileo present the eclipse to the crowd.

So I do not have any pictures of the ring of fire--the clouds ate the eclipse. It did not get dark--people who did not know that there was an eclipse going on were unlikely to have noticed anything unusual. Even ten percent of the sun gives off a lot of light.

After the sun dropped below the cloud, I was able to get a shot of the moon leaving the sun's disk.

Rensselaer had an annular eclipse on May 10, 1994. I did not have a welding helmet or a camera that could get good pictures, so I had to take pictures of the images on the ground. The leaves of the trees act as pinhole cameras, and you could see the eclipse everywhere under the trees. I did not get similar pictures in Nevada because the Visitor's Center did not have good trees and also the sun was very low in the sky. The picture below is from Rensselaer, May 10, 1994. Do you remember this eclipse? It also was an annular eclipse.
(This week we will have a transit of Venus--a rare event.)

Redbud Trail dedication

This morning the Redbud Trail was dedicated with a surprisingly large crowd in attendance. The trail itself was established in 2004 and redbud trees were planted in 2006, but the trail has never had an official dedication, so today's ceremony fixes that omission.

There were several short presentations at the JC Cruiser Shelter in Brookside Park, and then the official ribbon cutting.

After the ribbon cutting, most of the people walked the trail through Weston Cemetery and over the Talbert Bridge to Bicentennial Park, where the girl scouts planted two more redbud trees that they had purchased with cookie sale money.

A brochure prepared for the occasion had a map of current and planned trails.