Driving With Trains

This summer as part of the Geographic Alliance of Iowa class, we got to tour the national brain center of Union Pacific. It’s called the Harriman Center. Part of the tour was a presentation by Operation Lifesaver. The Union Pacific tries to prevent accidents through education. Keep an eye out for trains and drive safe. Union Pacific offers classes to both adults and youth groups. Back when trains carried passengers, they used to run to a schedule, but now there isn’t one. Any time is train time.

Vehicle	Stopping Distance
Car	200 Feet
School Bus	230 Feet
Semi	300 Feet
Amtrack (Less than 10 cars in a train)	600 Feet
Coal Train (Almost 18 football fields long)	5280 Feet

Trains can’t stop in time if they see you on the tracks and trains can’t swerve. The weight difference between a train and car is the same as a car and a pop can and hitting you will affect a train as much. Don’t stop, pass or shift your car on the track. Stay back, at the minimum a train sticks out 3 feet from edge of track. Things can stick out an additional 3 feet beyond that. Cars should be at least 15 feet behind the crossing sign post, that’s the law. Many accidents happen because one train passes and people don’t realize there are dual tracks and another train is coming. The number under the crossing sign tells you the number of tracks. Trains have the right away 100 percent of the time.

Volunteer in Comics

You might have noticed that this past two weeks many comic strips have been pushing hard to urge people to volunteer. Volunteering is always a wonderful way to make a difference in your community. Visit the website that is behind the campaign:

http://www.handsonnetwork.org/MakeADifferenceDay

More information on the comic campaign from a Washington Post blog.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/2009/10/riffs_picks_from_comics_volunt.html

Compliment Guys

How many people can honestly say that they do something each day to make the world a better place? It might not be as hard as you think. Take a look at Ian Skarbek and Brett Westcott of West Lafayette, Ind. They spend part of each day standing on their college campus and just giving away compliments. You don’t have to go to that extreme, but if you like to be complimented on something, try giving an unsolicited compliment to at least one person every day. After all you have to give them to get them. Pay it forward.

http://www.americanprofile.com/heroes/article/35448.html

P.S. Giving a comment on your favorite blog counts too.

Updating Blog Site

I finally got to some long overdue blogsite maintenance. I updated my about page. I pulled a couple of blog links that have gone dormant because their author’s are now writing at Beyond Little House, where I will also be posting Laura posts in addition to here now. Finally I added a link to my Youtube channel that I just uploaded and one to Beyond Little House. Please look around, explore, this page and the others.

Cows with Strange Equipment

It amazes me sometimes just how much non-farm people don’t know. Just recently AFLAC insurance started to run a new commercial about a farm. Some of the animals are a little creepy looking. The good thing is they feature a Hereford. Herefords are the best beef breed and what we raise. However, you NEVER put a milking machine on a beef breed. They don’t make enough milk for it to be worth your while. It’s just WRONG. You can view the commercial at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2oz2PHdzlA

The part with the seriously WRONG cow is at second 19. Oh, milking machines have to be hooked up to some place for the milk to go and they don’t go up and down like a bunge cord.

This is the worst cow since Barnyard the Movie, where the MALE cows have udders. Take a look at them in the trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqHn_BXOQXs

When You Get the Jokes

Lately it has really come home to me that you really know you are part of a group when you start to get the jokes, the small references, the reuse of a phrase. When you use one of them and someone gets the joke or you get theirs, you know you are home. I had that experience just lately several times. (Once standing on the pageant grounds in De Smet, once reading a posting on a message board, and once when a particular message popped up off my e-mail. Of course, I have a wide and diverse set of homes, I once spent a weekend where one day I was giving a lesson on how to Ebay and the next I was getting a lesson on how to use a telegraph, my various homes present a broad and unique mix.) I thought I’d try to mix in as many as I could below just to amuse myself from all over. I really wanted to get a red shirt reference in their too, but  I couldn’t quite figure out where.

 Just recently I’ve had several instances of that that I’ve especially noticed references online and in person showing up and ringing a bell, yeah, that sentence kind of got away from me. I’ve really put some elbow in it and it’s been putting a big stupid smile on my face. I’ve been looking for something in a fairy ring and enjoying the violets. It’s so nice to be with people with whom you can do the Dance of Joy and they understand. Probably nobody got all those, so don’t hit yourself with a slate if you didn’t, but as you wish.

It’s  a really good feeling to feel like you are a part of something, so whatever you are really interested in join a group today.

If You Lose It…

Smaller is better seems to be the motto in technology. Also, many cell phones, memory sticks, etc. look nearly identical and in my job at the library I see many of both lost daily. It’s easy to leave either someplace.

However, we can take steps to speed their return. There is a national campaign in place to get people to put a tag in their phone under ICE (In Case of Emergency). Then if someone else has to use your phone in an emergency or to identify the owner of a lost phone, they know just which number to call. With the tag in place, it’s obvious what number is an emergency contact or the person who can reconnect the phone and its owner.

This second idea is all my own, I’d like to suggest that any time you get a new memory stick, you create a new word document called “This belongs to.” Within the document put your name and contact information so that if it’s lost, it’s easy to return it to you. We find lost USB sticks at the library all the time. Try to describe yours (Uh, it’s black, it slides in and out with a little plastic switch). It’s worse than describing your suitcase. So take the time to create your file now and pass this tip along!

Welcome back to Me

Welcome back to me. I’d like to apologize to everybody for dropping out of sight online for the last couple of month. There has been some sickness going around here and I’ve had it, but good. It’s been a different kind of illness, it’s been mostly stuck in my head. I’ve had a terrible time concentrating and getting blinding headaches if I tried to read and concentrate, especially online. Every time I thought I was better it came back and hit me again. I finally got to the point where I’ve at least read all my e-mail and I hope that I can slowly catch up with some of the things that I thought and in some cases said that I’d have done by now. I still have to get in fairly short bursts, but now I’ve started again. I hope that I can play catch up. Again sorry for disappearing, but in one of the best pieces of advice I every learned is from the bee story on Captain Kangaroo, “The best I can do is the best I can do and I’m doing the best that I can” and I’ve been following it.

These Happy Golden Years

In a letter dated Feb 26, 1967,Eugenia Garson, the force behind the Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook,  wrote Rose that she had the hardest time finding the music to These Happy Golden Years. She struck out at the Library of Congress and many other music libraries. Finally she found by chance in a small private collection in New York. It had originally been published in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1879. Let’s all thank Mrs. Garson and her daughter for not giving up and listen to this great song that gave us a great title. Find it on “Laura Ingalls Wilder Speaks” available from most of the gift shops.

Walnut Grove Depot

You never know what you’ll come across when you are searching the web. When I was looking for something else entirely I found this page of old (circa 1920s) family photos of Revere, MN. Not only is that just down the road from Walnut Grove, but that’s also where the depot that now is part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum came from in the early 1980s. It was a hard trip, it even fell off into the ditch once along the way, but it finally made it and has put in years of faithful service. So I just had to check out the photos and low and behold, there was the depot in its original location. You can see it the best in the photo on the right in the second row. Take time to stay and look at a typical Midwestern small town from that time (note the wooden grain elevator like those in an earlier post).

http://tinyurl.com/d684bo

It makes me think, go ahead and follow the rules of good photography and get close up photos of people by all means, but don’t forget to take some really wide shots, too. It’s been my experience that even family members in years to come will be just interested in that. (Oh, look it’s Aunt Jean’s kitchen! That’s before we took the playhouse down. Remember sitting under that old tree before the ice storm?) So make sure you are taking some of those for the future too.