Roman & Mayan Roads

My friends currently located South of the U.S. border are amazed at the condition of the public roads and the functioning of the transportation system and its buses. Many of the older city streets are cobblestone or brick and these surfaces produce a slightly irregular ride compared to the high speed system we are used to driving on here in the USA, at least our newer urban roads.

We still have many brick and stone roads in older American cities that have been paved over with asphalt so we do not really notice them. The Egyptians, Romans, Mayans and other cultures used rock pavements of various sorts to improve transportation and these are not dissimilar to those still found in parts of the world today, including Mexico. The challenge to producers of buses is immense when one considers how diverse a range of roadways they must traverse in a lifetime that can approach thirty or forty years. I thought it might be useful for me to show the s/v Faith crew the important parts of the life cycle of the these buses they are riding since I have both access to a high speed Internet connection, time and with my background in geology in the construction materials business, a perspective they may appreciate.

This is a picture of the bus Sandy and Patty used yesterday in PV.

After being crushed it is shredded to reduce its volume for transportation.

The metal is melted......

.....and poured into forms.






Some of this metal is used to make these shock absorbers.




And some is used to make these heavy duty springs.

These are what they do not install on the buses and taxis that use cobblestone streets because they would not last 5 minutes. A solid piece of I-beam is simply welded into that space where a suspension system would normally be located. This is simply ingenious!

An actual photograph of a Puerto Vallarta cobblestone street.

Notice that there is no vehicular traffic. This is due to the fact that every vehicle in the region is in a shop having its suspension system re-welded. The health benefits of walking are not lost on the population and there is no cry from the public to pave over the street system with smooth surface.

Too Bright to Eat

As we prepare for the annual feast, let us be thankful for cooperative birds.

Fireplace for those next 200 Rainy Days

While I have been continuing to work on the maintenance of rental properties, I thought it would be nice to do something for our own casita so I am installing a fireplace where the TV used to be located.

Of course this work meant that we just had to acquire a 52 inch LCD HD TV to fit above the fireplace. We blame this need for a bigger screen on age.

I have yet to install the mantel, which I am building out of some of the Western Red Cedar milled from the trees we dropped when we built the big garage. And the hearth still needs to be added, but this is the sort of project that is best for our rainy days. It has probably rained a few more inches since my last entry on the subject and the ocean is churned up with a 16 foot swell and winds gusting to about 45 mph. We can clearly hear individual waves at night from two miles away when we are starting to drift off to sleep, as long as the wind is not blowing too strongly.

If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see my self portrait as well - if you look closely.

Arizona Rainfall Total

There is a reason we live on a lake. It rains here, a lot. A whole lot. When we made the decision to move to the Northwest after our sixteen year Phoenix imprisonment, the choice was in part because we did not want to live with air conditioning eight months out of the year. But one of the deciding factors was that it is so green here. Green in so many shades and hues that for this desert rat it was an awakening. Water falling from the sky in great quantities has such a transforming affect upon the landscape and it was something outside of all of my other living experiences, even way beyond anything I experienced on the Gulf Coast. There are so many lakes, streams and rivers here that no single map of Oregon adequately shows all of the water flowing across the landscape. When I have been by any of our local rivers, fishing or just observing, I usually think of the dessicated surface of Arizona and how nature distributes its largess so unevenly. The normal daily flow of the Columbia River is almost identical to the flow volume of the Salt River through Phoenix during a 100 year flood event - about 200,000 cubic feet per second. Of course the drainage areas are not comparable, but that is in part due to the great water flow itself cutting into the land and capturing its territory.

I started out this post preparing to just report to my Arizona cousin that we have had 6.53 inches of rain since Halloween and that the timing of the recent visit could not have been better. That amount of rain is only about an inch shy of the average annual rainfall for Phoenix, if my memory is still functioning. I have been constructing a fireplace in our living room and one of the only items that is outside of my ability is the connection of the chimney to the existing roof, which happens to be some sort of petrochemical membrane that requires a hot glue and completely dry surface to bond the parts together. At the present rate of precipitation it may be next June before the fireplace is usable because we will not be able to complete the chimney hook-up.

Last night Julie and I were watching yet another post mortem on the election when a sudden, loud sound made us both jump up, wondering what sort of container had fallen from one of the kitchen shelves, shattering on the floor. It sounded like a 20 pound glass jar of dry macaroni breaking. It turned out that the plastic trash bag temporarily covering the cap-less chimney had reached its elastic limit. Apparently, a Glad 55 gallon yard debris bags, stretched tightly over a 10.5 inch diameter opening can only hold about a gallon of water before the pull of gravity exceeds the strength of the molecular bonds of the thin plastic. In an instantaneous dump water going down a metal chimney sounds amazingly like dry macaroni hitting the floor. I learn something new every day.

Again, this rambling is entirely within the limits I set for myself with this blog. Almost nothing is off limits, as long as my granddaughter may view it, and switching directions is encouraged.

McBama or O'Cain - You Choose

No matter what your selection might be my personal choice would be that you vote. Period. The above bumper sticker (for $4.99 on cafepress.com) is cutsie, but not true with its declaration that "they're all the same". Call me a cynic.

This is an historic election and time will tell whether or not the direction of this country, especially in the global perception, plays out well for us.

Regardless of who is at the helm after the votes are tallied, they will be facing a huge Federal budget defecit and record amounts of borrowing by the government, which will affect the agenda of the country for years to come. I was curious about who is purchasing all of the debt obligations we are offering to the world and got sidetracked without finding the answer. Did you know that there is a Bureau of the Public Debt within the Treasury Department?

This is interesting stuff, which is why I found myself sidetracked for too long, and it is something I will have to get back to so that I can understand how our sales of debt to other governments may affect the decisions of our government in the future.

Anyway, to my friends and family I just wanted to let you know that I wonder about this sort of stuff, in a rambling sort of way, and that every chance I get I cast my vote as an upstanding member of the Repmocratic Party. In Oregon we have this great mail-in voting system, which actually allows us to gather up an armfull of pro and con stuff on the issues and candidates, sit down at the kitchen table with it and sort out out how we feel about all of it. It is the best system I have ever participated in and it is hard to understand why it is not universally adopted. More rambling. Oops.