I can’t believe this. The Daily Iowan (the University of Iowa’s daily newspaper) is all worried about the environmental aftereffects of the flood. What a load of BS! Environmental aftereffects!? What ever did we do before there were environmentalists to cry about natural disasters? Really, people! Floods have happened for millions of years to the Mississippi valley in the Iowa/Illinois area and it has led to some of the most fertile soil in the world. Then in the past century or so, man has come along and put up levees, dams and other structures to prevent flooding. So the hundreds of centuries before the past century was all damage and loss of phosphorus? Really? And the Mississippi valley has had poor topsoil until then? Really? Let’s keep our eyes on the ball here, people. We need to get the thousands of displaced families taken care of. We need to clean up the downtown area of Cedar Rapids (Iowa’s second largest city at about 125,000). We need to reconstruct many of the roads that were washed away in the flood. Heck, we need to find out where the small town of Oakville (population 438) is – we have heard it was last sighted about 40 miles downstream from where it was originally located. We have an entire “laundry list” of items to tend to before we worry about the phosphorus in the topsoil. Of course, they don’t call it “The People’s Republic of Iowa City” for nothing. It’s a “beehive” of political correctness, misguided leadership and lack of common sense.

It was about time. The flood waters are receding here. Everything is still kind of brown and “river-stinky” if you know what I mean. But it was time to change themes. Plus, with baseball season in full swing (pun intended!) and the great history-making run by Fresno State to be the lowest ranked team to ever win an Division I NCAA tournament of any kind and to set records for runs scored in the College World Series, I simply HAD to change it to the Baseball theme!

Happy Birthday, Adam!

I don’t have any of my own pictures, but the flood waters that I posted about earlier are receding. They have taken roads all around us. US6 is going to need major work before it can be used. So is IA22 and County F70. I do have a picture of US6 where the water has receded a bit:

Louisa County (just south of us) has been declared an individual Federal Disaster Assistance County. I was pretty sure it was going to happen. I’ve seen pictures that are hard to believe. Ken Purdy, former teacher/coach at Columbus Community High School and current Louisa County Board of Supervisors member, has a lot of good pics on his site. Click here to go to Ken’s main page. Click here to go to his first page of flood pics. Click here to go to his second page of flood pics.

I’ve seen a lot more pictures than Ken’s but his are very representative of what’s going on here. President Bush was to tour Cedar Rapids today – it was very hard hit by the flood. I’ve heard that over $80 million in damages so far. While the places in his pictures are harder hit, there are a lot more people and businesses in Cedar Rapids.

An archaeological team, digging in Washington DC, has uncovered 10,000 year old bones and fossil remains.

Happy Anniversary, Zach and Jessie!

We’ve had flooding here again this year. I had pictures back on April 30, and thought that was the end of the flooding around here for this year. Boy, was I wrong. We have roads closed; I’m not talking just the county roads or gravel roads either. I80 is closed east of Iowa City where it crosses the Cedar River. US6, US92, IA22, US30 and IA1 were all closed for several days. Some of these may be open now, but they were called closed yesterday. Downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second largest city, has been evacuated; a lot of Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is located, is evacuated. I didn’t go see my dad yesterday because to travel the 17 miles from Muscatine to West Liberty I would have actually had to drive almost 250 miles.

Yesterday Breezomatic and I went 7 miles west to see the flooding at the Cedar River on IA22. This one seemed pretty funny to me. “Restoring America’s Wetlands”?! That seems to be what the flood is doing without any help from the government!

This guy needs to read the freakin’ sign. I heard that he was trying to drive back to his place in his pickup. I thought those kind of people only lived in Arkansas or Mississippi but I guess I was wrong.

This is a nice view of why the road is closed. You can see a tractor and a Jeep that were on the road two days ago but were carried off by the current and by the road collapsing. Off in the distance about a mile or two away you can see where the road comes up out of the water.

And finally, like anyone needs to know this, the road is a dead end. Of course, you can’t even drive to this point without going through a patrolled road barricade.

I just upgraded my PC. I installed new motherboard/cpu/ram/hard drive. It’s an ASUS M2N-VM DVI motherboard, an AMD AthlonXP 5000+ CPU, 2 Gb of Kingston high performance DDR and a 250 Gb Seagate SATA2 hard drive. It’s really sweet! MUCH faster than my old system (Chaintech motherboard, AMD Sempron 2600 socket A CPU, 1 Gb DDR and a 160 Gb Maxtor PATA-133 hard drive). I’ve spent much of this weekend (part of Friday also) installing software on it and transferring data from my old hard drive to the new one. I’ll be hanging on to the old hard drive for at least a couple of weeks just to be certain that I don’t have any data missing. The new system is much faster at starting, at accessing data, at running programs … the entire gamut of my PC experience takes much less time now.

That is one reason why I haven’t been too attentive to the blog lately. That plus NeoCon leads to a lot of time away from home and not much time in front of my home PC. But now I should be about done traveling, so maybe I can get some more content here? Who knows… maybe even something interesting for a change?!?!

Happy Anniversary, Al and Sue!

Just been working a lot. I’ve been working at our showrooms in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, getting them ready for NeoCon. Saturday and Sunday I was helping to get them all (we have seven showrooms in Merchandise Mart: Allsteel, Basyx, Gunlocke, HBF, HON, Maxon and Paoli) ready, computer-wise. I made sure that faxes, phones, computers and printers were all up and running as they should be. There were long hours on Saturday and Sunday to get the showrooms ready. Let me tell you, running through all the showrooms making sure that everything is working as it should can really get to a guy. Had to run patch cords, mount access points, install drivers, change configuration on IP Office… wow.

Monday was the first day of NeoCon and it was killer. I got to there at about 7:30; the show was to start at 9:00am. Lots of standing, walking and going from showroom to showroom. I also heard a “trivia fact” that the Chicago Merchandise Mart is the largest commercial building in the world. I only got to sit during lunch, and finally left the building around 5:30. I stayed at the Renaissance Hotel, which is about three blocks away, so it wasn’t really too bad to get back to the hotel. After the day I went with three others to Greek Town and ate dinner at the Parthenon. WOW! I don’t know the names of all the food I had but it was all delicious! I know I had saganaki (flaming cheese), mini spinach-cheese pie, Greek salad for appetizers. I had the Special Combination, made up of dolmades, moussaka, pastitsio, roast lamb, potatoes, and vegetables. (and yes, it was ALL Good!!!) For dessert we split baklava and galaktoboureko. Oh, man. What a meal!

Tuesday was much the same as Monday. Got there about 7:30 and left around 5:30. Lots of standing and walking… very little sitting. After it was all over, I got with my friend Randy and we and others went to the Chicago Cubs game!! What a great time that was. Talking baseball with Randy, Jim, Mike and John… drinking Old Style Lite beer (Harry Caray’s favorite!) Heck, the game was even a good one. The Cubs came from behind and won it! I called up brother Al and made him jealous just by telling him I was at Wrigley Field – sorry Al, I just couldn’t resist the dig!

Today was just as long, but I got to leave at about 3:30pm for home. And home was never so good. (Well except for the fact that KC went to The Lake of the Ozarks with her friend Norma on a “girls trip”). I’ve still got laundry to do and I’ve got my expense reports to fill out, but all things considered it was a good week/weekend.

Happy Birthday, ZDog!

Happy Birthday, Nick!!