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That'd be grrrrrreat! But he posted it on FB so he has like one million requests already. None of which he has responded to. 😄

Tell ya what, meet me at the bar at Frank's Club Napoli Pizza in Silvis, IL, my hometown mom and pop pizzeria in business for just under 60 years. Almost nothing in the place is newer than the mid-'50s or early '60s... bar is to the right...

View attachment 109601

I vaguely remember (well most things, but) you saying you went to college down in Carbondale, IL. The inside of that reminds me of Paglias Pizza in Cape Girardeau, MO and Carbondale, IL. I haven't been to the Illinois location in many years, but was at the Cape location probably 15 years ago when my daughter went to SEMO for a semester.

Back in the day, if you were 18 you could drive across the bridge (with a corner in the middle and just wide enough) to Carbondale and drink beer/wine. MO was 21.
 
I vaguely remember (well most things, but) you saying you went to college down in Carbondale, IL. The inside of that reminds me of Paglias Pizza in Cape Girardeau, MO and Carbondale, IL. I haven't been to the Illinois location in many years, but was at the Cape location probably 15 years ago when my daughter went to SEMO for a semester.

Back in the day, if you were 18 you could drive across the bridge (with a corner in the middle and just wide enough) to Carbondale and drink beer/wine. MO was 21.

I'm old enough to remember when Illinois was 21 and Iowa just across the Mississippi River from us, was 18. Half the kids from the Illinois side were in Iowa on Friday and Saturday nights! BTW, I did go to SIU-C.

The cool thing about Frank's is that wherever I'm in town and go there, it is exactly like it was when I was 6. And they have a separate building full of those period tables and chairs for replacements, so it is gonna be like that a long time yet. Now going into the third generation of the family. I hope it NEVER changes.
 
My father worked at a government meteorological test site in the 1960's, and it was located on the highest hill in that area (Upstate NY). He told stories of the guy that plowed the roads, driving a big V-plow. The guy would drive down the middle of where he thought the road was at 40+ MPH, and the snow would fly 100'+ off the road.

At that time there was enough winter snowfall that the snowbanks could get too high from repeated plowing, making plowing difficult or impossible. The solution was to drive fast and literally blast the snow into the fields and woods.

For scale, look at the car behind the plow. That's a BIG truck.


V-plow.jpg


My dad laughingly told the story of driving home at 1AM, over a foot of fresh snow, and the plow had not been through (that would happen at 5AM or so).

My dad was driving carefully, trying to stay on the road. At one point he stopped and looked around as best he could in the moonlight. He realized he was in the middle of a field. So ... he carefully backed up until he was certain he was on the road and kept going. He was happy he didn't get stuck. There was a ditch, but it was so full of packed snow that he didn't realize he had crossed it.
 
I was sitting on the deck and thought, heck, I'll take a couple pix. So glad that our deep wintertime is over. Eight days of cold, with lows to -7 and -5. I had a cup of coffee every morning on the porch, so I got to watch it all freeze up and all thaw out. It's 57 outside now and I had to get some my deck time in because huge rains are coming soon. You can still see snow here in the foreground in my barnyard and back in one of my back pastures that is shaded by trees.

IMG_3740.JPG

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We used these old storm windows to cover Ms. Jswordy's raised beds of greens and just let them get buried under 6 inches of snow and ice...

IMG_3742.JPG

...and by golly if they didn't do just fine, all the way down to -5 and -7 for a couple days, as well as single digits other days! We picked the heck out of them before covering them because it was hit or miss whether they'd make it. The soil is still frozen but warmth and rain will get them going again soon.

IMG_3743.JPG

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We covered the arugula bed with plastic-topped boxes. It did fine, too. We'll be back in the salad biz in no time. No finer salad than one made with garden fresh greens.

IMG_3745.JPG

Next up, maybe flash flooding... lol.... what a year.
 
I'm having difficulty figuring out what that apparatus would be doing. Is is a LANL thing?

Yep, Los Alamos nuclear testing project circa mid-1970s. The influence of Richard Hamming at LANL was high during that period.
 
Yep, Los Alamos nuclear testing project circa mid-1970s. The influence of Richard Hamming at LANL was high during that period.

I still wanted to know what this apparatus was trying to accomplish. Google Images came to the rescue to identify it as a scyllac machine (Theta pinch - Wikipedia), which was aiming at nuclear fusion for power generation. This concept of plasma confinement was superseded by the more familar Tokomak (Tokamak - Wikipedia). I had never heard of a scyllac before. It didn't help my poor brain that the photo is of a portion of the machine, which turns out to actually be a 360º ring.

Scyllac_in_1973.jpg
 
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IIRC you guys are still in a drought and could use a good slow soaker!


I was sitting on the deck and thought, heck, I'll take a couple pix. So glad that our deep wintertime is over. Eight days of cold, with lows to -7 and -5. I had a cup of coffee every morning on the porch, so I


got to watch it all freeze up and all thaw out. It's 57 outside now and I had to get some my deck time in because huge rains are coming soon. You can still see snow here in the foreground in my barnyard and back in one of my back pastures that is shaded by trees.

View attachment 109641

View attachment 109642

We used these old storm windows to cover Ms. Jswordy's raised beds of greens and just let them get buried under 6 inches of snow and ice...

View attachment 109643

...and by golly if they didn't do just fine, all the way down to -5 and -7 for a couple days, as well as single digits other days! We picked the heck out of them before covering them because it was hit or miss whether they'd make it. The soil is still frozen but warmth and rain will get them going again soon.

View attachment 109644

View attachment 109645

We covered the arugula bed with plastic-topped boxes. It did fine, too. We'll be back in the salad biz in no time. No finer salad than one made with garden fresh greens.

View attachment 109646

Next up, maybe flash flooding... lol.... what a year.
 
My father worked at a government meteorological test site in the 1960's, and it was located on the highest hill in that area (Upstate NY). He told stories of the guy that plowed the roads, driving a big V-plow. The guy would drive down the middle of where he thought the road was at 40+ MPH, and the snow would fly 100'+ off the road.

At that time there was enough winter snowfall that the snowbanks could get too high from repeated plowing, making plowing difficult or impossible. The solution was to drive fast and literally blast the snow into the fields and woods.

For scale, look at the car behind the plow. That's a BIG truck.


View attachment 109622


My dad laughingly told the story of driving home at 1AM, over a foot of fresh snow, and the plow had not been through (that would happen at 5AM or so).

My dad was driving carefully, trying to stay on the road. At one point he stopped and looked around as best he could in the moonlight. He realized he was in the middle of a field. So ... he carefully backed up until he was certain he was on the road and kept going. He was happy he didn't get stuck. There was a ditch, but it was so full of packed snow that he didn't realize he had crossed it.

My father worked at a government meteorological test site in the 1960's, and it was located on the highest hill in that area (Upstate NY). He told stories of the guy that plowed the roads, driving a big V-plow. The guy would drive down the middle of where he thought the road was at 40+ MPH, and the snow would fly 100'+ off the road.

At that time there was enough winter snowfall that the snowbanks could get too high from repeated plowing, making plowing difficult or impossible. The solution was to drive fast and literally blast the snow into the fields and woods.

For scale, look at the car behind the plow. That's a BIG truck.


View attachment 109622


My dad laughingly told the story of driving home at 1AM, over a foot of fresh snow, and the plow had not been through (that would happen at 5AM or so).

My dad was driving carefully, trying to stay on the road. At one point he stopped and looked around as best he could in the moonlight. He realized he was in the middle of a field. So ... he carefully backed up until he was certain he was on the road and kept going. He was happy he didn't get stuck. There was a ditch, but it was so full of packed snow that he didn't realize he had crossed it.
Those big guys are still around! I remember watching them plow the small development I lived in at the time of the blizzard of '78. Because they had not plowed the road until 3 feet of the white stuff had piled up, the plow had to ram the snow, back up 50 feet and ram the snow again. Took them hours to [plow us out.
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