From our financial crisis of late, everybody should grab their wallets when so-called experts preach about this or that. Yes, I'm sure that there are true experts, but it is to the point that when Congress want to go one way, we should run the other way.

In Sunday's Crossroads section of the newspaper Jerry Resler makes a very lopsided argument for spending more money on something that people don't want, regional high speed rail. I would be a person that such a system is targeted for. In my business travels, I travel to many of the destinations shown on the map that accompanies the article.  This week I am in Nashville for a conference. I drove there. A coworker flew even after spending thirteen hours at a terminal in his last travel. Had I gone to the same one, I'd have beat him home driving rather than flying.

Both the rail system and flying present the same problem when you get to the last stop. You have to get to your destination from the terminal.  Take a bus? Never! Besides, I usually have a computer, projector and other stuff that you just can't take on a bus and then walk several blocks because the bus doesn't stop near where I'm going.

Cars are going to be the primary people mover for many years to come. Fantastic traffic control systems are being developed that will lead to automobile trains operated by communicating computer systems from car to car. Even today, we have communicating GPS navigation systems being introduced that can reroute other so equipped cars around slowdowns.

Railroads have a place for the future. Rail can move freight better over long distances than trucks. Lets not waste money on passenger trains when personal transportation is where the money should be spent!

PSA stands for Public Service Announcement. All levels of government could do a whole lot better in continuing education for the masses. Case in point are the roundabouts that are being mandated by the DOT and meeting heavy resistance from many of the people. I'm finding more of them in the Chicago suburban area and theirs differ from most in that they have a stop sign at the entrance to give people a moment to observe traffic and plan their route. While one of the reasons for a roundabout is to eliminate stop signs, it is a worthwhile consideration and the stop sign can be removed and replaced with a Yield sign in due time.

Colorado has heavy use of them especially along Interstate 70 through the mountains and into ski resorts. Once I encountered three roundabouts connecting each other  while exiting the interstate and looking to take a break. See them here. They do work. However, they are not intuitive and there is a learning curve. Stop signs at the entrance is part of that but a public education program is needed across the state to teach people both the history of roundabouts, why they are being incorporated within the state and how to maneuver through them. I got my first encounter with them in Colorado. It was a bit unnerving but I quickly got the idea.

The DOT needs to get the message out about how to handle yourself in a roundabout. Newspapers, radio and especially television must cooperate with the DOT for the benefit of everyone.

I continue to be open-minded about the Frame Park baseball issue. I'd like to think that there is a way to make it work in harmony with the other park users and the neighborhood but I can't think of one. My biggest objection is about where to park the cars, as it is with many other taxpayers. I've heard that there is plenty of parking within 15 minutes of the park. That's acceptable? "The church is going to rent out parking space." How about church events that coincide with games? Are the church members going to appreciate working around the ballgames?

A very valid concern is that ballgame people will take up parking spaces that park visitors would normally use. This point is voiced by many and needs to be addressed before proceeding with any binding vote.

It seems that no Waukesha resident has driven around State Fair Park during the State Fair. As it has been for as many years as it's been there, the neighborhood residents become entrepreneurs and have junior out by the curb with a flag, waving people to park on any piece of driveway or grass that they can fit a car on. Tolerable, at best, for the week that the Fair is held, but have that done during each of the baseball games and it will turn residential neighborhoods around Frame Park into a circus grounds.

Is it good for downtown? Any increase in business is good for the business, but are people going to leave their cars scattered around Frame Park and walk back and forth to get a snack, push the limits of intoxication, buy a book or critique fine art? Answer that for yourself.

Promises have been made by the promoters that they will be picking things up and so forth. Such promises are frequently broken by less than adequate fulfillment of them.

Already a popular writer within the city has called for people that don't like the soon to happen Harley Davidson party to leave the city for a few days if they don't like it. Is the council going to send a message to residents to give up Frame Park when there is a baseball game?

The signs of fall approaching have come. The lush green leaves have begun to show their age, green lawns have gone dormant and some cooler evenings have arrived. Make no mistake, some warm and humid weather is yet to come and there are some of us that will have air conditioner breakdowns and have to decide on buying a new air conditioner.

There have been big changes in air conditioning and huge changes yet to come. The recent federally mandate increase in air conditioning efficiency made air conditioners more expensive, but was largely invisible to the public. The next big change is coming in about one year and it is huge.

Air conditioners run on Freonâ, or so many people think. Details and facts about it are boring but lets call it refrigerant for this blog. Refrigerant comes in many types and what type is used depends on if we are cooling the air in your home, in your car, in your refrigerator or in a food store freezing things or cooling beer or making ice cubes. There is no one size fits all purposes type of “Freon”.

About ten years ago, in preparation for next year, a new refrigerant that is ozone friendly was introduced. It replaced the old favorite R22, and is called R410A. Some call it Puronâ. Call it anything you like but chemically it is R410A and air conditioners that use it are offered by all popular makers of furnaces and air conditioners.

What does this boring information mean to you? At the end of next year, air conditioners that use the old favorite refrigerant, R22, can no longer be made. R22 is also mandated to be produced less and less. This means that R22 to recharge your air conditioner will become more and more expensive! Supply and demand.

So we have a choice when we need to buy a new air conditioner now. Will it use the soon to be obsolete R22 or the refrigerant of the future, R410A? It’s like buying a car or truck and deciding if it runs on gasoline or diesel.

I work in the wholesale distribution end of heating and air conditioning. We sell several different brands of furnaces and air conditioners in many states so have a good idea of what’s going on out there. Some dealers are selling their customers only R410A air conditioners. Some still sell R22. Often this is because the price of the equipment is still a little less than R410A and because they are not comfortable with the new R410A.

So my first point is if you are going to buy a new air conditioner for your house, buy one that uses R410A. The only reason that I could see to buy R22 equipment is if you are selling your house soon or short-term cost is more important than long-term expense. But wait. There is more!

A recent blog encouraged new building codes to prepare for the increased use of electricity to heat our homes and fuel our future electric cars at home. When you buy a new air conditioner, you can go a step further into the future and buy a hybrid air conditioner that can also heat your home. This is called a heat pump.

Heat pumps have been around for many years but the notion that they are for warmer southern states have held back the popularity of them here, until recently. I won’t bore you with the technical stuff that excites guys like me. The facts are that heat pumps are air conditioners that don’t only work a few weeks in the summer but also work year around heating your house too!

Heat pumps can heat your house at times for less than the most efficient natural gas furnace. The savings can be greater if you heat with oil or propane. True, it won’t keep the house warm by itself at colder temperatures, typically below 30 to 40 degrees, but an often-overlooked fact makes them attractive even in places like Alaska. 

In our area, if you count the number of heating hours spent above the 30 to 40 degree range, you will find that it is around one half of our heating season! That means your furnace would run around half of what it otherwise would.

True, heat pumps don’t create heat for free, but the trend is for fossil fuels to increase in price greater than that for electricity. An air conditioner that you buy now will be there on average for fifteen or twenty years. So think about fuel cost trends and a heat pump installed now makes good sense.

How much will a heat pump save you? Many dealers don’t like to sell them because many customers want a figure written down on this. Energy prices are very dynamic and there is no crystal ball to assure what your savings will be. However, experts agree that buying a heat pump now is a forward-looking choice.

Whatever you decide, make sure it uses R410A instead of R22 refrigerant!

News item; Cornfield raises hackles in Wales. 

I'm not going to argue zoning. I'm going to get a bit religious here and say that land was intended by it's maker to grow things more than it was to build and pave over, no matter what a politician may deem.

Too often I'll see a farm field lay dormant and weedy while a sign is raised exclaimed "Utopia Estates" is coming soon. The loss of farmland is usually permanent yet the government is mandating more corn be used for fuel rather than food. So it would seem that any patch of land that a planter and picker can manuever around on should be planted with some useful crop rather than sprouting lumber and cement.

If tilling the land reduces tax income, tough! A field of corn doesn't need much in the way of police and fire protection or water and sewer. Nor does it diminish water from our deep wells.

In the past I've criticized new construction as putting a load on our dwindling water resource. This, even though the business that I'm in is dependent on new construction. Briefly, I don't believe that long time residents of the city or county should be put in the same boat of inconvenience to accommodate development and expansion. Those dwindling the resource should be the ones to carry the load. Water wise, this would be prohibiting watering lawns, gardens and washing cars in new developments except with water gathered from cisterns or other non-aqufier sources. On site water recycling of gray water should be included with conservation efforts.

Preparation for the diminished used of petroleum should be implemented in the the building code too.  Electricity is the energy of the future. We will power anything with a petroleum engine with it and we will heat our homes with it. As an expert in the heating and cooling business, I can see gas furnaces going the way of oil furnaces in the next twenty years. Honda has shown a natural gas powered fuel cell generator to recharge electric cars and provide power for the home's electric furnace and heat pump/air conditioner. For those of you with hot water heat, there have been electric powered boilers so don't feel left out.

GM will be introducing the electric car, the Volt, which will run entirely on electricity, recharge at home if desired, but have gasoline back-up so you don't get stranded. In my needs, the electricity range is adequate for most all of my driving around. So the Volt can replace one of my cars and the other can be the guzzler used to pull the boat and so forth.

The building code should anticipate the plumbing changes and increased electrical service needs of the near future and require that it be install NOW in new construction and remodeling of existing homes and buildings. 

News item: Tuesday the common council will vote to award a consultation contract for strategic planning for the next five years.

Suggestion: Spend the $50,000 on road patch!

It's been a year now that I've been transfered from working in Pewaukee to West Allis. I'm in the middle of the action between State Fair Park and Miller Park. Last week it was interesting as I frequently heard the roar of the race cars qualifying for the big race. Not much different than the Harley's roaring up and down in front of my house.

I also suffer the effects of a clogged up freeway when the Brewers have a game where the traffic coincides with the evening rush hour. This is one of the concerns that I have about the proposal for Frame Park. The traffic patterns in the area are not designed well to handle traffic. I suspect that the roads are typical of older cities in that they started out as horse trails and didn't change much when Mr. Ford facilitated us from horse apples to carbon footprinting. 

It seems clear that most people don't think that it would be an attraction to Frame Park. Indeed it could spoil it. I do think that it would be good for the area. I might even consider attending a few games with family. But I don't want to get into a traffic snarl either. Nor do people living or passing through the area.  So it would seem to best be located close to the Hwy 59 bypass. Perhaps the old Nike missle site by 59 and Broadway. It's free from the Federal Government and is just sitting there gathering mulch. I think that there is plenty of room for both the stadium and parking. Has it been checked out and considered?

 Davey Crockett lived in Kentucky and liked his privacy. Once when learning that someone had settled somewhere about fifty miles away, he moved claiming that he needed more elbow room. At least that is how I recall the story.

I grew up with little seclusion. My first recollection was living in the upper level of a duplex. Many of the houses in the area had walkways between them such that you could easily stretch your arms and touch both houses. As time passed, Dad was able to buy his first house. It was one recently built only a couple years prior in a new development near Hampton and Sherman in Milwaukee. Here we had a little elbow room. We were separated from the neighbors by a driveway just wide enough to get the post-war Pontiac past the stoop and their house.

Dad carpooled each day to his job at AC Spark Plug, later Delco Electronics, along with three other electronic engineers who lived in the same development. On the weekends our getaway to seclusion was a long drive out to Dousman to the Fin and Feather Sportsman's Club on Hardscrabble Road. On weekdays we'd meet at the official club tavern on Vliet street and either talk about going to the country on weekends or bowl in the club league. I was young but remember lots of smoke and cigars.

Perhaps it was those early trips to Dousman that made me love the Kettle Moraine Forest so much. It was one of the reasons that when I finally surrendered to the threats from the drug house across the street from my home in Milwaukee, less than a mile from where I grew up, that I moved my young family to Waukesha.

As much as I loved the country, I like the convenience of the city so we bought on the west side of town where the country was less than a mile away. One of the great ways to enjoy lots of the county is to ride a motorcycle through it. You not only get an unobstructed view around you, but you also enjoy the smell and hear the sounds (if you have a muffler) that you miss in a car. This is part of seclusion.

There are signs that seclusion if beginning to elude us. Those curvy side roads that motorcyclist love to cut through now have dirt eroding on to them from someone building their dream home of seclusion in the country. As their elbow room diminishes from others wanting a piece of that seclusion, soon the speed limit drops lower, finally not being much enjoyment to the motorcyclist.

About this time the years without the companionship of my first Siberian Husky moves me to look for a pup who needs a home. Kanook is adopted by Pat and I and I commit to training him to be a hiking companion rather than a runner as his predecessor Kanuk was.

We'd spend weekends hiking the Ice Age Trail and other areas. All the time enjoying the seclusion and communion with Nature. We'd be aware of the hunting seasons and relinquish our enjoyment of the area to the hunters who only ask for a few weeks of time and a little elbow room. One day on a section of the Ice Age Trail seemingly in the middle of nowhere, we came upon a sign saying “Don't Shoot In This Direction”. Now, that is a question that begs an answer so we naturally hiked in that direction. The reason for the sign was soon apparent. Just outside a thickness of trees was someone's home. It was enough to make Davey Crockett's raccoon hat spin.

Now Kanook and I spend more time at the dog parks. Mitchell park has a nicely wooded area to the east, Minooka Park has woods all around. Both are good places to go to think and have a little seclusion.

Now that Fall has come, the leaves of the trees and brush have fallen to the ground. They no longer mask what is beyond the ever thinning thickness of the woods. At Mitchell, you can now see the cars park beyond the woods at the game fields of the Academy. At Minooka, the leaves yield to the houses nested against the park and the traffic on the road alongside of it.

As it is fast becoming in the county, seclusion is an illusion.