All Time Favorite Innovations

• Words
• Aspirin
• Anti-biotic
• Music
• Radio
• TV
• Computer
• Sugar

And yours?

Trains in Germany, Russia and the US: Dots that never connected before

I ride a train at least twenty times a month going back and forth from home to Chicago for work, but rarely think about the infrastructure of what it takes for Metra to make that happen. I find the trains are clean and regularly run on time. The conductors clearly have individual personalities and to the person, embody training in courteously saying thank you and impactfully dealing with inebriated riders and others who pretend to sleep or don’t want to pay. In the worst of winter, the gas burners and blue flames shooting from the switches always amaze me, in the sense that they seem so retro, old school in dealing with the ice.

Today, in a conversation about work, a friend told me that a customer of his company has a plant in Ludington, MI (where I spent Friday night) that makes the vehicles that ride the rails to fix them. They started out making, as he called them, “The Bugs Bunny cars”. You know… the ones that Bugs and maybe some else teeter-totter pump to escape the mind shaft where someone tossed the TNT with the short fuse? The next thing he said, caught my attention. At least in the United States the rails are for the most part uniform in gage and size. Russia has a different size from Germany, they didn’t want to make it easy for them to invade. 

W.T.S. Keeping the Birds Flying

     W.T.S.… What the… Nope. Worm Tending Station, a perfect shelf to feed and take care of the kitchen compost bin. And, a perfect shelf to pot plants and a perfect place for a bar…. If ever needed.

     A few weeks ago, after using the hood of my car for the third time, I began to mull about a flat place, in the garage, where I could work with my kitchen vermiculture compost bin or re pot a plant and not scratch the car. My first serious thoughts included a hinged board with a chain hooked to the wall bent up, a second idea was a hinged board with the chain going up, but the board going down till I pulled it up, and a third idea was a hinged board that someone else figured out. I turned to my brother.

Luckily we discussed the shelf idea while he multi tasked through a garage sale. He understood the vision of a hinged board and called me back to discuss the merits of using a fold up podium he found at a Rotary Club (or some such) garage sale. His wife had a different vision, told him to grab it, they cleaned it up and doubled their money. Another time he called from a Habitat for Humanity store. I could tell this project grabbed him, he wanted to know preferences… width and depth, table or counter height and he asked for the measurements between the studs in the garage. He’d found something.

     But we hit a snag. He asked for a photo of my garage. Unfortunately, I left my car parked in it to take the photo… with the Obama bumper sticker. I didn’t hear another word for two weeks.

     Last Sunday at his grand daughter’s second birthday party, where we didn’t talk politics, he asked me how to get into my garage. Coming home late last night, I opened the door,  pulled in, put the car in park, turned the car off, turned the car on, put the car in reverse and backed out of the garage trying to decide whether to call the police.

     Once when I lived in Chicago, I returned home from work still in daylight and noticed my apartment window was ajar. I didn’t think anything of it, even though I don’t leave windows open on cold days so I opened the front door and realized within a few seconds, I’d been robbed. When the police arrived, they asked, Why did you enter (dummy)?… The robber (they probably didn’t use that word) might be still inside. That never occurred to me. It was then I asked them to check my closets. That robber got in through the window, went to the left and pulled a pillow case off my bed, filled it with jewelry, went to the next room… the bathroom and utilized it…(I hate the word utilize but I think it gives the word picture veracity; the police wouldn’t take the unflushed evidence for a DNA sample), he walked into the kitchen, swigged some scotch but neither swiped the bottle nor finished it, walked into the dining room, did nothing that I noticed, walked into the living room by the window where he  entered, pulled my bike from the wall, put on my Ray Ban Aviators and rolled out the front door with my stuff. I don’t know the chronology of events for sure, but I’ve watched The Mentalist.

     I didn’t call the police last night because the tip off that someone was in my garage was a plastic bag of phone books hung on the door leading to my mud room. Even an anal retentive robber isn’t going to take the time to hang something on the door. Scanning the garage for more evidentiary clues, I noticed the W.T.S. graffitti on the wall. Though I live in the suburbs, it’s highly doubtful a robber carries masking tape, unless maybe HGTV fired Nate and he’s desperate. I unlocked my now locked doors, got out of the car and examined how Jim constructed the shelf. It is masterful, an efficient use of space, the legs fold neatly under and are hung in a way to give it strength for the heavy bag of soil or case of beer. The worms, my original use for the shelf, weigh like feathers, beer or soil is a better measure of its strength. Which reminds me of a story my dad used to tell about a truck driver who stopped his truck more and more frequently as he neared a weigh station. He’d get out of the cab, walk to the back of the truck and pound on the door. Another trucker saw him a few miles after that weigh station at a truck stop (truckers probably call it “a stop”, like public school kids call it school), and asked him, why he pounded on his truck? “I’m carrying about two hundred extra pounds of birds and I gotta keep ‘em flying.” Clearly that truck driver's ingenuity is a driving force in our family.