Cicada

I found a cicada on the street and it was content to sit on my finger for a few minutes before it flew away.

There are many species of cicada. They spend their larval stage underground sucking sap from tree roots. They emerge as adults to mate and lay eggs, so they do not live very long. This one may be from the genus Tibicen, and it looks a lot like this species.

Something is missing

The gas pumps are gone from the BP station on the corner of Washington and Front.

The T-Mart station is undergoing renovation, inside and out. There will be no gas until October, but the convenience store is open and was doing a good business when I stopped by.

Cooperatives at the Tuesday night farmers' market

Tuesday night's farmers' market was sponsored by three area cooperatives. Farm Credit Mid-America ran a tractor pull for little kids. My little friend Irma was only able to peddle a bit over five feet, which gave her third place. (Guess how many kids were in her age group.)

I asked one of the people at the Farm-Credit table when they would be moving into their new building on Drexel Drive and was surprised to hear that they planned to move in about five weeks. The contract for the building specifies that it be finished in mid September. That explains why workers are on the site at least six days a week and for long hours. The exterior seems to be finished and yesterday I noticed that the curbs had been installed.

Another of the three cooperatives sponsoring the event was Co-Alliance. I was not familiar with them, but they own the large elevator in Remington as well as the elevator in Wolcott. Their handout said that they are a cooperative partnership of five businesses: Midland Co-op, IMPACT Cooperative, Laport County Farm Bureau Co-op, Frontier Co-op, and Excel Co-op.

The third of the three cooperatives sponsoring the event was Ceres Solutions, which is the company formed when the AgroKey Co-op (which had been Jasper County Farm Bureau Coop) joined with two other cooperatives. I asked what the story was about the building being torn down behind the CountryMark station, which Ceres Solutions runs. The building seems to have been built in the 1950s and was initially used for bagged fertilizer. More recently it was used to store appliances sold by Jasper County Farm Bureau. It is being taken down to allow better traffic flow for the diesel fuel pumps of the CountryMark station.

(Leaving Rensselaer this morning I saw the new Welcome-to-Rensselaer sign south of Rensselaer that Rensselaer Main Street recently installed.)

Everything is better with bacon (Part 3)

As promised a week ago, here is part 3 of the series looking at the opening of the Pig Adventure.

Going through the shower room to get to the viewing area of the Pig Adventure, I met an escaping pig. 

The pig was unsure whether she would be a permanent feature of the exhibit or if this costume was only for the grand opening event. I was surprised that several little kids really liked her and were not frightened.

The first room you enter at the Pig Adventure, before you go through the shower room, has a variety of interactive screens, some in the floor. Onethat interested the kids was part of a display that illustrated the differences between how pigs used to be raised and how they are raised in the Pig Adventure. Gone are the pig sties with pigs wallowing in mud filled with their own excrement. In are clean quarters where pig poop is removed quickly and pigs stay clean and disease free.

The restrooms had unusual labels.

While some women might maintain that all men are boars (and maybe even bores), I doubt if they would maintain that all women are gilts. (A joke with the punch line "gilty pleasure" seem to be needed here, but I cannot think of any.)

The Pig Adventure has lots of informative signs, like the one below that tells you that in six months a pig can weigh 280 pounds.

One sign said that the farm has 18 boars that are used to stimulate the females during artificial insemination. They are robotically led along the stalls and their scent does the job.

There are pictures in the main hallway. The photo shown below is also used in some of the printed material.

Also along the hallway are some pictures that spoof famous artists. This is the first of three questions in this post: Can you identify the artist that this pictures spoofs?

I arrived at the grand opening a bit early so I had some time to wander around and check out the grounds. This is the fountain in the Green Gate Garden.

Below is a bit of the garden. Here is question two: Can you identify the large plant that is most prominent in this picture?

I e-mailed the people at Fair Oaks Farms before the event to learn more and found that I could pick up a media kit. The media kit included the cute little pig shown below. Here is question three: Can you guess what useful function this little pig performs?

Update: The three questions were answered correctly either in the comments here or on Facebook. (Almost every post here is linked on the Rensselaer Adventures Facebook page.) The artist is Andy Warhol. Other artists spoofed are Rene Magritte and Piet Mondrian. The plant is horseradish, which is used as a condiment. I never use it, though I tried to grow it once without much success--the plant died. There is some at the historical society's log cabin at the fair grounds, and the women who were minding the cabin this year at the fair did not know what it was. The little pig was actually a USB flash drive with several movie clips about the Pig Adventure on it. The head pulls off and it, not the body, contains the drive. It is cute, but because of its odd shape, it takes a bit too much room--if you have USB slots that are close together, it interferes with adjacent devices. Amazon sells one that is similar.

North of the tracks

A week ago I was stopped at the rail crossing on Cullen Street by an unusual vehicle on the CSX tracks. A bit of googling for CSX GMS-2 revealed that it was a track inspection vehicle, with GMS standing for Gauge Measurement System. You never know what you will see passing by on the CSX tracks.

There are a number of construction or destruction projects happening north of the tracks. A foundation has been prepared for a house on the corner of Merritt and Milton.

Construction is further along for a house near the intersection of LeeAnn and Franklin in the Madison subdivision. There is also a concrete pad next to it that looks like it will become another house.

Construction continues in the Eger substation on Melville. Castongia's John Deere is adding a small addition on the north side of their building. I saw work on a building behind one of those mystery (to me at least) businesses on Merritt just to the east of the highway. I am unsure if it was an old building being remodeled or a new building. And a building behind the CountryMark gas station has been mostly demolished.

A picture of the building a week earlier when demolition was not as far along gives a hint of what the structure looked like.