Common Ground

I, for one, don't mind the snow all that much this year. Oh, I don't care for shoveling. Bad back, knee, shoulder and so forth you know. When it does snow I hope that it is enough to fire up the big snow thrower, so it's the dusting's that I don't much care for.

One thing here in Waukesha that I don't miss from my last house in Milwaukee is the fire hydrant in front of the house. As I was the one with it, I had a responsibility to my neighbors to see that should someone have a fire, the fire fighters could safely access and connect to it. That meant shoveling from it to the road and with enough space around it to put the wrench on the valve head and open it up.

The fire chief has made a goal of a maximum seven minute response time from alarm to the scene. I'm curious how many more minutes can be spent trying to get to a hydrant that is not shoveled out? Or if frantically digging one out, if anyone has slipped and fallen against one?

While driving around before last nights storm, I checked out the status of some fire hydrants in various areas.  I see that they vary from well done to "where in the snow bank is the darned thing?"

Check out the one closest to your house. You might want to check your smoke detectors and buy a fire extinguisher or two also in case you can't find it!

 Pardon me Mary, for sharing your blog title for the day but I don't know what else to call this.

You've seen the car commercials touting their agility and how ABS (anti-lock braking system) can help you avoid an accident.  I usually think to myself that I doubt that I could react as fast as those drivers in the commercials that have the whole thing orchestrated for them.

Today, Christmas morning, Pat, Kanook and I were home alone after having a houseful of family over last night.  As is usually the case when I am not at work, we go out for breakfast and let bacon grease splatter in someone else's kitchen. Coming home, we made a detour to see if a food store was open and then took a little used side road towards home. What happened next could have been a scene from one of the aforementioned commercials.

As we were about to pass the entrance to a drug store that was open today, there was a car coming from the opposite direction when suddenly a car from the store's parking lot pulled out into the street in front of us! It was a situation that I know I could not help but collide with that car. It is hard to describe what happened next as it all took about two seconds. As the exiting car realized his mistake, I stomped on the brakes and immediately felt the pulsation of the ABS working. The exiting car managed to stop about halfway into our lane. I knew that I would slide into it but for whatever reason, instinctively steered around and between it and the oncoming car safely, all the while the ABS working the brakes, allowing the car to be steered.

Both the oncoming car and I stopped. Each of us gathering our wits about what just happened. The exiting car sped off without stopping, no doubt fearing some words from either of us drivers. I was not angry. Both Pat and I were amazed that everyone safely came thought the event without so much as a scratch on person or property. 

I am a pilot and a motorcyclist. Both require a little more skill than driving a car. However, I know my limitations and at 55 years old I am not as quick as I was in my youth. I'm not a believer in guardian angels, but it does make me wonder, if not for me, was there some kind of intercession for one of the other drivers or passengers?

Two seconds.  I will be thinking about this for a long time to come.  I no longer do not believe in miracles. Merry Christmas.

The Moreland and Delafield area got a shot in the arm after the loss of the Sentry Food store, by the confidence of Star Bucks in the neighborhood. Replacing the Amoco gas station that had been closed for years and the remaining business attempts, it was long an eyesore not doing anyone well.  From my observations, their gamble is paying off as I see a steady stream of cars visiting them for a cup of various bean brews. This can only help the area as they provide no real competition threat to the surrounding businesses yet provide an increased visibility for them.

Soon to open adjacent to Star Bucks will be an Edward Jones Investment Service. If you have not noticed, there seems to be more Edward Jones' spring up around the area than there are Walgreens and McDonalds. This office will be the home of my friend Sara Dieringer who is currently sharing office space on Silvernail and is anxiously looking forward to having her open house at her new digs next month.  I like her conservative investment style and advice for the long run. Retirement, while some years off, looks like it will be better than expected, thanks to her.

So the next time you find yourself with a few thousand dollars that you don't know what to do with, don't go spending it on something frivolous. Drop it off at Sara's office but keep a few dollars and get a super double latte next door!

I wish all of you a very merry Christmas!  Thank you Jesus for all you do for us. May we all live long and prosper.

Here's one I bet isn't coming up in the city's water conservation contest. Oh, I have a bunch of them!  When you order that cold soda or ice water when you dine out, you've noticed that the glass or cup has water condensing on the surface. Especially in the summer.  If you dine out a lot, take some napkins and wrap around the cup.  When done with your drink, place the wet napkin in a small baggie to prevent evaporation. Also put the remaining ice in the baggie too! Collect enough that you can squeeze the water out and use the water for your plants or to fill your swimming pool. If you have a small lot you might water your lawn too, but do it on the right days so as not to create a police investigation and explain that you've been smuggling water from Christina's!

Let's not forget the other recyclables being used for this!  The napkin can be hung to dry and reused, thus saving countless trees and extending the life of our landfills. Or, it can offset the cost of purchasing personal cleansing items. The baggie can be reused too. No need to wash it and waste more water than you saved.  Hang it in the sun and the ultraviolet light will sterilize it.

And a suggestion for Mayor Nelson. To stimulate more water conservation consciousness in the public, have the library do a movie festival featuring the movie DUNE.

The clink that makes the drink.  Ice. Order a soda and ice comes with it. Sit at a booth in a restaurant and a glass of ice water is soon placed in front of you.  You fellow conservationists may think that tossing that ice is wasting water. It is, but did you know that having ice in your drink, even if you melt it and drink it, still is a waste of water?

When we think of ice, many of us either have an ice-maker in our freezer or fill a tray with water and let it freeze.  We wonder why that ice looks so cloudy while the ice from a restaurant is clear and clean looking. The answer is why you might want to order that glass of water with no ice or your soda with no ice.

Commercial ice makers, the ones that make the nice clear cubes of various sizes, actually use about double the water than what you get for ice cubes. The secret for clear ice is moving water. A pump flushes water over a freezing cold cube tray that is vertical. Water rinses down from the top of the tray and is recirculated.  While the pure water freezes clear, the minerals that add cloudiness begin to concentrate in a reservoir that is flushed out after each batch of ice. So for every pound of ice that is made, that much water is flushed out and down the drain. Think of it this way. If your soda cup is half full of ice cubes, it took a full cup of water, or more, to make that ice.

There are a few other things worth knowing. Many soda dispensers have the ice machine on top of the dispensers.  This is the most efficient use of water as the ice always comes from the bottom of the storage bin and falls into your soda cup.  If you see someone carrying buckets of ice and dumping ice into a dispenser, they are scooping ice from the top of a storage bin.  Much of the ice melts on the bottom or turns to poor quality and ends up going down the drain or is discarded.

So, if you want to do your part to save the planet, specifically Waukesha, skip the rocks and order your next drink straight up!

I never thought of dumping the stale water from Kanook's water bowl in the plants around the house. I'm sure after spilling the water on the finished wood of the bay window, that effort would stop quickly. I'm waiting for someone to explain how they are melting all the snow on their property into a cistern for use in the spring and summer to water their grass and wash their car, parked on the grass, of course. Actually, I have washed the car on the front lawn and used to wash the motorcycle in the back yard until the water softened the ground and it tipped over. However, repeated incidents of that did eliminate the need to have the lawn aerated!

Putting politics and emotions about our water situation aside, conservation is a noble effort. In my younger days, the Saturday night bath was customary.  Now, I refuse to stop my daily showers.  In one of the chain mailings that I receive at work against the will of our IT department, was one speaking of personal hygiene in the not too distant past. I was surprised to see things done to replace the daily (or weekly) bath or shower.  For instance, it is why perfume and cologne was in wide use. Another was about the use of flowers during a ceremony.  I don't dare go any further than that.  Another was an actual magazine ad from pre-WWII days where Lysol was actually recommend for cleaning something other than floors.  All this made it clear why the Bible refers to scented oils so much back then.

There is a serious side to this blog however.  You know that I'm in the heating and cooling business and one of our products is central humidifiers.  Humidifiers evolved from pans of water in the furnace with evaporator plates or water wheels to evaporate the water into the air-stream.  What remained was a crusty container able to breed most any spore that passed it's way.

Next came humidifiers with water panels or pads, that had fresh water running over them to keep them clean and help reduce mineral build up. It seems like there is a pattern here. Anything healthy requires lots of water. These newer humidifiers allowed a fair amount of water to go down the drain.  I'm sure someone in the city had discovered that they can reroute the drain hose into a pail and water their flowers with it

For commercial jobs that needed lots of water for humidity, steam generating devices have been used for many years. One of our local furnace companies, Mueller Climatrol made a steam humidifier for residential use, but that and the company are in the history books now. Which leads me to the point of my blog.  Honeywell has just introduced a state of the art residential steam humidifier.  What water isn't boiled off to humidify the home, is flushed out from time to time to keep minerals under control.  I endorse this Honeywell Steam Humidifier as the top choice if you are in the market for a whole house humidifier that conserves water.  These can be purchased from your favorite furnace company.  It is so new that they might not know about it.  Ask them to check with their distributor about it.

Every comment that I've made in the past regarding snow removal in Waukesha has been positive and this one will be no different.  Way back when, I did a little alley plowing in Milwaukee and drove the big plows and blowers at Timmerman and Capital Airports. So, I know a little bit about what the city street plow drivers have to contend with. It has always been that the biggest complaints about plowing usually come from areas where cars are parked on the streets, making difficult to plow and leaves the street a mess, no fault of the plow drivers.

Yesterday I was in Kenosha for work and the residential roads were not good on the east side of town.  This was likely more due to lake effect snow than on-street parking, but I still saw places where plows had to maneuver around cars and the mess that remains after the car is removed from the pile.

We in Waukesha are fortunate not to have lake effect snow and we are fortunate that most streets are clear of parked cars. However, there are exceptions and I've wanted to write (complain) about this for some time now.  If you search my earlier blogs, I began a short series about some quality of life issues in the city. One that never went beyond the draft stage was about needless parking on the street.

Until I was transferred to another office, I came home on Moreland each day. Each day there was one or two cars parked on the street during rush hour and would cause a bottle neck for the two lanes of traffic. Depending on the mood of all the drivers, merging was seamless or traffic came close to having fender benders. I never saw any reason why that car could not have parked in the driveway, which was empty.  All I could think is that they parked there to make some kind of statement. I've never discussed this with the city but as more traffic comes this way while going home to the outlying developments, no parking signs will appear. Probably AFTER there is an accident with injuries. This is what happens when common sense and courtesy fail.

Back to the snow plowing and parked cars.  I frequently see a driveway full of cars and it is inevitable that some will be parked on the street to let someone else get out or be able to stage their position for later exits. I can sympathize.  I once had five vehicles in my driveway, but am fortunate that they can fit side by side.  Now that the boys are grown and gone, I wish I had a single lane drive every time it snows! I also had relation in Milwaukee with a big house, but no driveway or alley. It was either park in the street or have no cars.

Which brings me to an observation and a question on why it was done this way. That is, driveways are staggered such that they don't face each other. That makes it difficult backing out of one's driveway when a car is parked across the street. One of the few times that I parked a car in front of my house, my neighbor, that was three occupants ago, backed into my little Ford Escort. They weren't used to any car being there.

So I have made a couple points that I'll summarize. First is that the plow drivers have done a great job of clearing the streets. Second is that where there is less that clear streets, it is usually due to parked cars, either legally or illegally parked. Plow drivers can't do anything about that. Common sense and courtesy can, or an ordinance.