I went to the post office this morning to mail off Stephen King's novel The Stand to an eager Amazon book buyer and learned that you can send live chicks via overnight mail. The guy in front of me in line received a box of them. Who woulda thunk it? I didn't actually ask if other kinds of livestock can be mailed; but I suspect this means that if someone should be of a mind to send a bunny rabbit to Hatfield Packing, for instance, they can simply box it up and ship it overnight via the post office.
But enough of livestock. I have to report on the current state of Norristown, which Linda and I visited on Saturday when they were holding a street fair to celebrate their designation of Dekalb Street as an Arts Avenue. While there we had a pretty decent lunch in a little Mexican restaurant at the corner of Airy and Dekalb. And we watched a performance of the Ballet Foklorico De Mexico in a big tent they had set up next to the county jail. And we took the opportunity to check out the old Lutheran Church that's between Airy and Main to see what the Copts have been doing with it. We also stopped in to see Saint Patricio's Church to check whether there have been any more changes since we were there a few years ago for an Irish corned beef.
Norristown when I was growing up seemed to be mostly Italians and Irish and Blacks, but there must have been some Germans skulking around since they had a Lutheran Church. Now the town seems to be mostly Blacks and Mexicans and, surprisingly, Coptic Egyptians; but there is still a marker from the Italian past on Dekalb Street. Al R told me to check for it, and sure enough it's still there, although perhaps it's not as old as he thinks.
LaRoma Pizzeria is still at Marshall and Dekalb; but it's menu says that it's only been the "Home of Fresh Dough Pizza since 1960." In 1960 Al would have been 14 years old.
While we were down in Norristown we ran into Bob and Grace from the ballroom, of all people. It turns out that Bob lives on Buttonwood Street and he's been mostly getting to the Ballroom on High in Pottstown by bus. Small world that it is Bob's son came to meet up while we were talking to him and Grace and we learned that Bob's son recently started in Sam's department at Mascaro.
I was going to write about the slaughter of the innocents; but I've got to run now. I Need to make a salad to go with the pork enchiladas and corn bread that I'm making for dinner. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about the slaughter of the innocents.
Showing posts with label Post Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post Office. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Mmmm! Nice and warm in the house
I just came in from digging out a bit in front of the mailbox. Too late, as it turns out. The mailman had already dropped off the mail. Why would he be early on a day when many of the roads on his route are probably a mess? And a day where he needed arms like an orangutan to reach into most of the mailboxes.
When I went to the Post Office earlier to mail off three books I found that the Collegeville PO has the very best snowplow guy in the United States, or at least one of the best. By 11:00 he had that parking lot completely cleared and wet. Meanwhile, the road outside the post office looked like it got ahead of the Collegeville Municipal plow guys. It was thick with ice and crusted snow.
The guys at the Post Office told me the plow guy should do a good job considering what he charges. Whatever he charges it wasn't enough for the job he did on this snowfall.
Three stems out of the whole clump bamboo grove down by the garden managed to shrug off the wet snow and stay standing. All of the others in that clump, and all but two of those in the long grove of the evil linear spreading bamboo on the other side of the yard, are bowed down to the ground. By appearances it seems impossible they will ever be able to straighten up. Appearances have been deceiving in the past; but I'm not sure I've ever seen the bamboo so thoroughly smashed down as it is today.
The pine trees turn out to be pretty vulnerable to this sort of snow. The pine grove behind the house is strewn with broken off branches up to four and five inches in diameter at the base, and the pine trees along the driveway have large branches still bowed down to the ground. There are also a good number of big branches broken off the deciduous trees. I'll cut the deciduous wood up for firewood next year; but I can't use the pine because it makes too much creosote.
Maybe I'll cut up those pine branches into six foot lengths and we'll make a bonfire with them to celebrate the beginning of spring. Or perhaps we'll hold off having a bonfire and weinie roast til the beginning of April when Jas and Kathy will be back up from Florida.
As always at this time of year the good news about snow is that the sun melts the heck out of it pretty quickly. The driveway was like a toboggan chute this morning when I went out; but it is already getting much less daunting. Tomorrow it should be pretty much normally negotiable, although it will be narrow for a while. The banks of snow on either side of it are pretty high and dense.
Somehow I got completely sidetracked from the reason I sat down to write. When I came in I had to take off my sweatshirt because the house is so warm. The downstairs is now at 72 degrees, down from the high of 73 that it reached an hour or so ago. The upstairs is at 78, down from 79 that it reached earlier. The sun really warms it up a lot when the ground is covered with snow.
I have noticed that the house doesn't hold the heat the way it did when it was new. Back then it used to go up into the 80's (downstairs) on a sunny day and it would then hold that heat until well into the evening. On such days I used to light the woodstove at eight or nine at night and that, in turn, would keep the house in the high 60's til it really got cold outside late at night.
All this is a long way of getting at the fact that a lot of alternative energy things, solar especially, are being written about and analyzed based on the energy production in the first year when the system is new. But just like this house, those systems will degrade as they age. In the case of solar cells I read somewhere that it only takes a very little scratching on the surface of the cells to cut their energy production significantly, because the scratches scatter light rather than letting it go straight through. Naturally those solar cells will work best in the hot and dry areas like the Southwest, where, as it happens, there is lots of sand and dust being blown around that can scratch the surfaces.
I keep an eye on solar power stuff because 24 years ago when we designed this house I specifically settled on a roof pitch that is pretty close to the optimum for solar cells in this latitude. Back then I expected to eventually install solar panels on the roof once they got economical. Well, here we are, a quarter of a century later, and solar panels are still not even close to being a good investment in this area, even with the government tax credit subsidy. Solar assisted hot water would be just barely a good investment, given that we already have the properly sloped South facing roof; but only if it could be depended on to function without problems for fifteen or twenty years, which I don't believe it can be.
Update: I had to go out and put the bucket back on top of my wrapped up fig tree. for some reason that tree is bending over this year.
When I went to the Post Office earlier to mail off three books I found that the Collegeville PO has the very best snowplow guy in the United States, or at least one of the best. By 11:00 he had that parking lot completely cleared and wet. Meanwhile, the road outside the post office looked like it got ahead of the Collegeville Municipal plow guys. It was thick with ice and crusted snow.
The guys at the Post Office told me the plow guy should do a good job considering what he charges. Whatever he charges it wasn't enough for the job he did on this snowfall.
Three stems out of the whole clump bamboo grove down by the garden managed to shrug off the wet snow and stay standing. All of the others in that clump, and all but two of those in the long grove of the evil linear spreading bamboo on the other side of the yard, are bowed down to the ground. By appearances it seems impossible they will ever be able to straighten up. Appearances have been deceiving in the past; but I'm not sure I've ever seen the bamboo so thoroughly smashed down as it is today.
The pine trees turn out to be pretty vulnerable to this sort of snow. The pine grove behind the house is strewn with broken off branches up to four and five inches in diameter at the base, and the pine trees along the driveway have large branches still bowed down to the ground. There are also a good number of big branches broken off the deciduous trees. I'll cut the deciduous wood up for firewood next year; but I can't use the pine because it makes too much creosote.
Maybe I'll cut up those pine branches into six foot lengths and we'll make a bonfire with them to celebrate the beginning of spring. Or perhaps we'll hold off having a bonfire and weinie roast til the beginning of April when Jas and Kathy will be back up from Florida.
As always at this time of year the good news about snow is that the sun melts the heck out of it pretty quickly. The driveway was like a toboggan chute this morning when I went out; but it is already getting much less daunting. Tomorrow it should be pretty much normally negotiable, although it will be narrow for a while. The banks of snow on either side of it are pretty high and dense.
Somehow I got completely sidetracked from the reason I sat down to write. When I came in I had to take off my sweatshirt because the house is so warm. The downstairs is now at 72 degrees, down from the high of 73 that it reached an hour or so ago. The upstairs is at 78, down from 79 that it reached earlier. The sun really warms it up a lot when the ground is covered with snow.
I have noticed that the house doesn't hold the heat the way it did when it was new. Back then it used to go up into the 80's (downstairs) on a sunny day and it would then hold that heat until well into the evening. On such days I used to light the woodstove at eight or nine at night and that, in turn, would keep the house in the high 60's til it really got cold outside late at night.
All this is a long way of getting at the fact that a lot of alternative energy things, solar especially, are being written about and analyzed based on the energy production in the first year when the system is new. But just like this house, those systems will degrade as they age. In the case of solar cells I read somewhere that it only takes a very little scratching on the surface of the cells to cut their energy production significantly, because the scratches scatter light rather than letting it go straight through. Naturally those solar cells will work best in the hot and dry areas like the Southwest, where, as it happens, there is lots of sand and dust being blown around that can scratch the surfaces.
I keep an eye on solar power stuff because 24 years ago when we designed this house I specifically settled on a roof pitch that is pretty close to the optimum for solar cells in this latitude. Back then I expected to eventually install solar panels on the roof once they got economical. Well, here we are, a quarter of a century later, and solar panels are still not even close to being a good investment in this area, even with the government tax credit subsidy. Solar assisted hot water would be just barely a good investment, given that we already have the properly sloped South facing roof; but only if it could be depended on to function without problems for fifteen or twenty years, which I don't believe it can be.
Update: I had to go out and put the bucket back on top of my wrapped up fig tree. for some reason that tree is bending over this year.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Jas is down in Florida or I would ask him about this
While Jas and Kathy are busy enjoying themselved down in The Villages there has been shocking new research that may explain global warming. I went down to Jas's Post Office to try to get the Postal Service's official explanation; but the clerk yelled at me to "Get lost, Schmuck!" just like she yelled at the six people ahead of me in the line that snaked through the piles and boxes of undelivered mail in the lobby.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/
Not that I'm complaining, but both of my faithless brothers have been completely incommunicado since they went to Florida. They don't call, they don't write; it's like they've fallen off the face of the earth. I called Al R on Saturday morning, so I know that Jas was still alive and had been seen as of Friday of last week; but for all I know he and Sam may have been eaten by boa constrictors or alligators out on one of the golf courses since then.
Linda and I are bearing up as well as we can under the strain. On Saturday night we managed to combine the Chasse' with our former Waltz routine up at the Ballroom on High where there was pleasingly sparse attendance, so the dance floor was relatively open for experimentation. Dawn, Barb and Patsy all asked where Jas and Kathy were and how they were doing. I had to tell them that I had heard nothing.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/
Not that I'm complaining, but both of my faithless brothers have been completely incommunicado since they went to Florida. They don't call, they don't write; it's like they've fallen off the face of the earth. I called Al R on Saturday morning, so I know that Jas was still alive and had been seen as of Friday of last week; but for all I know he and Sam may have been eaten by boa constrictors or alligators out on one of the golf courses since then.
Linda and I are bearing up as well as we can under the strain. On Saturday night we managed to combine the Chasse' with our former Waltz routine up at the Ballroom on High where there was pleasingly sparse attendance, so the dance floor was relatively open for experimentation. Dawn, Barb and Patsy all asked where Jas and Kathy were and how they were doing. I had to tell them that I had heard nothing.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Politics and economics explained
Gas was down to $2.16 at the cheapest station I saw on the way home today; and that got me to thinking. There was a lot of complaining about gouging and ripoffs when gas prices went up in the Spring and Summer of this year; but nobody seems to be taking notice of the decline in prices.
I can understand why people get upset when prices go up for what seems no apparent reason, and I can even understand that segment of the population that seems to see rapidly declining prices as proof that the prices are being manipulated by evildoers.
That kind of thinking is probably why a great many people like government run business so much. Government run businesses like the public schools and the Post Office have prices which go up and up and up, nice and steady. And they never, never, never get more efficient and cut prices. They also seldom produce new or better products. If they change at all the way they do things they change so slowly that a tortoise seems dynamic by contrast. I think that kind of stasis comforts people. It must; because 52% of the people just voted for a fellow whose whole life has been devoted to getting government more and more involved in more and more businesses.
Soon we'll have hospitals that avoid adopting new technologies just the way the public schools do, because new technologies cut the need for new employees. And we'll have pharmaceutical companies that are just as good at researching and developing new products as the post office is. And we'll have energy companies so tied up in politically correct environmental regulations and CO2 reduction regulations that they will be just as efficient and productive as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, not to worry, as we pay more and more and more for ever less reliable energy supplies, and as we get poorer quality health care in the hospitas, and as we suffer and die prematurely from lack of new drugs, we'll all be comforted by the knowledge that the government cares and no one is getting rich except the politicians and their friends.
I can understand why people get upset when prices go up for what seems no apparent reason, and I can even understand that segment of the population that seems to see rapidly declining prices as proof that the prices are being manipulated by evildoers.
That kind of thinking is probably why a great many people like government run business so much. Government run businesses like the public schools and the Post Office have prices which go up and up and up, nice and steady. And they never, never, never get more efficient and cut prices. They also seldom produce new or better products. If they change at all the way they do things they change so slowly that a tortoise seems dynamic by contrast. I think that kind of stasis comforts people. It must; because 52% of the people just voted for a fellow whose whole life has been devoted to getting government more and more involved in more and more businesses.
Soon we'll have hospitals that avoid adopting new technologies just the way the public schools do, because new technologies cut the need for new employees. And we'll have pharmaceutical companies that are just as good at researching and developing new products as the post office is. And we'll have energy companies so tied up in politically correct environmental regulations and CO2 reduction regulations that they will be just as efficient and productive as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, not to worry, as we pay more and more and more for ever less reliable energy supplies, and as we get poorer quality health care in the hospitas, and as we suffer and die prematurely from lack of new drugs, we'll all be comforted by the knowledge that the government cares and no one is getting rich except the politicians and their friends.
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