Jasper County blogs

If you scroll down on the right to the About Me item and click on the "View-my-complete-profile" button, you will see that my location is Rensselaer in Indiana in the U.S. If you click on Rensselaer, you will get a list of all the people who say they live in Rensselaer who have blogs on blogger.com, the blogging service offered by Google. Some of them have very little, and others more.

If you are lazy, here is the link:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US&loc1=Indiana&loc2=Rensselaer&start=0

Obviously this will also work for bloggers on blogger.com who live in Remington, Demotte, Wheatfield, Fair Oaks, and Morocco. There are other providers of blogging sites, and I have not looked at them.

Here are a few others that I do not think you will find in this way: young hunters paradise, Re:Marks, The White House on Park Ave blog

Did you find anything interesting in those lists?

Update: I forgot to mention the SJC student blogs. Several of them are very active.

Art in February

There are a couple of art shows ongoing in Rensselaer. The Lillian Fendig Gallery of the Carnegie Center is showing "Limelight on Special Creations until March 6, 2009. It is presented in cooperation with Cooperative School Services. The object displayed are from students who receive services from Cooperative School Services in West Central, KV, Demotte, North Newton, Benton Central, and Rensselaer Central. The picture below is called "Tessellations."
Meanwhile, the 16th Annual Regional High School Art Exhibit is on display in the lobby of the Core Building at Saint Joseph's College and will run until February 27. I was impressed with the basket shown below, which is in a display case. It was crafted by Erica Metzinger of South Newton High School.
I was more impressed with the drawings than any of the other media. Below is a pencil drawing by Andrea Van Meter of Rensselaer Central High School.
Kayla Wiseman of North Newton High School was ambitious to try this drawing of reflections in Christmas ornaments.
I hope this picture by Carrie Firkins of Tri-County High School was meant to make the viewer smile, because that was my reaction.
The Prairie Arts Council cosponsors both of these exhibitions. Their web site is here, and it needs to be updated.

Austin Park

Have you visited Austin Park lately? It is the newest city park, a park that someday may be, it dreams come true, one of Rensselaer's finer parks. As the picture below shows, there are not only plans to develop some gardens and walking paths, but also to put a pedestrian bridge across the Iroquois River.
Right now the only part of the dream that has been realized are the lights. They circle around the park lighting an imaginary walkway.The site of Austin Park was a residential area until July of 2003 when Rensselaer got a week of rain and the largest flood it has ever had. Below is a picture of the Washington Street bridge showing how high the water rose.
Can you see College Avenue in the picture below? It is under the brown water. The white house with porch pillars to the left of center was one of the houses on Austin Avenue.
Below is a picture of Austin Avenue from its east end.
And here is the a slightly different view of the same area.
One could also see the seriousness of the flood from the city parking lot north of the river, as the next two pictures show. There were four houses on the north side of Austin that were built early in the 20th century. There were also two ranch houses south of Austin that were built after 1980. I never understood why someone would buy a new home in such a precarious location. Even before the big flood, it was clear that every few years water would rise over Austin.

When the flood waters receded, FEMA and the city decided to buy up the houses and demolish them. They are in a flood plain and it would only be a matter of time until we will have another serious flood. I did not get any really good demolition pictures. The best I have is the one below.
The pile below was what was left of the white house that was in the picture looking down College Avenue.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this bit of land and how it fits into the overall park system.

Shopping at Save-A-Lot

Today's shopping adventure takes us to one of the three grocery stores in Rensselaer, Save-A-Lot, in College Square. Save-A-Lot is part of a national chain of discount grocers owned by Supervalue. Supervalue owns a number of grocery chains, including Cub, Jewel/Osco, and Albertsons.One of the distinctive features of Save-A-Lot is that the customers bag their own groceries. So after the checkout, you take you groceries to the area next to the windows and put them in the bags that are provided. If they were really serious about having the customers bag their own groceries, they could be like Aldis (none in Rensselaer), which make the customer provide the bags.Save-A-Lot is a decent sized store that has a respectable produce section, comparable with R&Ms but not as big as that at County Market. In fact, County Market is bigger in just about every way, offering more selection in all departments.
Save-A-Lot does not compete on selection. They offer fewer items but often at a lower price. They usually only carry one brand of each item. I suppose it does not matter much with sugar. Sugar is sugar.I know that their yogurt is cheaper than that in the other two stores. And they finally corrected the prices after I complained that the tags said 49 cents but the containers rang up for 50.
I thought I would have something to say about their aisle-long freezer, but I do not.
When I drop by the store, they rarely are restocking. I went at a different time to take some of these pictures, saw them restocking, and thought it would make a nice picture.
They stock and sell a lot of pop. Have you ever noticed that Rensselaer is much more a Pepsi town than a Coke town? Does anyone know why that is?
The store has an aisle of non-food items, such as school supply and even some clothing. Isn't it rather strange how so many stores have little bits of things that are not really what they are about. The grocery store has some shoes and clothing. The drug stores have some food items. It seems that half the stores in town carry soft drinks. Walmart, of course, has everything. Why so much overlap? Why buy slippers in a grocery store?
When College Square opened (which was before I arrived in Rensselaer), the original occupant of this space was A&P, which had moved from a location in the downtown. A&P still exists, but in the late 1970s they abandoned Indiana. I remember the late Ginny Marzke was a checker. After the A&P store closed, she worked switchboard at SJC and took classes, and moved up to be director of placement (or whatever the title was at the time). Then she moved to Indianapolis and worked for 14 years at IUPUI, which named a scholarship after her. She died in 2000.

I am not sure how many other grocery stores followed in this space. I do remember a really happy year or two when one of the grocery stores would drastically mark down old bakery items, and I probably shortened my life about a year by buying a lot of cakes, cookies, and other things full of fat and sugar. I was sad when they realized that they were marking things down too much and stopped subsidizing my bad diet. Eventually, the building was a flea market, and I found a picture of it, taken in February of 2003, after the flea market had closed.
After the flea market, the store was completely refurbished inside. The picture below was taken in January, 2004.
And below is a picture, from February, 2004, before it reopened as Save-A-Lot.
If you remember the names of the stores that occupied this space after A&P and before the flea market, leave a comment.

Going to church the Jehovah Witness way

(I thought it would be interesting to use Sundays to focus on Rensselaer's churches and to see how many Sundays I can go before I run out of material. Indiana is richly endowed with religious denominations, with influences from North and South, East and West. This is part of that series of posts.)

Rensselaer has a small Jehovah Witnesses hall on West Maple Street. According to the sign in the front, there is a public meeting at 9:30. The local hall does not have a website.
The Jehovah Witnesses are adventists, that is, they expect the imminent return of Jesus. The official website of the Jehovah Witnesses explains:

In themselves, recent world happenings are bad, but what they signify is good, namely, Christ's presence. The conditions mentioned above started to be evident in that widely heralded year 1914! It marked the end of the Gentile Times and the beginning of the transition period from human rule to the Thousand Year (Millennial) Reign of Christ.

The Witnesses have a number of practices that have brought them into conflict with others, such as their refusal to accept blood transfusions:

Thousands of physicians around the world are now successfully treating patients without using blood transfusions. In a spirit of respect and cooperation, Jehovah's Witnesses desire to share some findings in regard to transfusion-alternative strategies.

The official website has nothing on the history of the group, but you can find it on Wikipedia.