Change your clock and change your batteries
Springtime is a time for a new start and while March 20 is still a little way around the corner, there is an equally important date to remember.
That date this year is March 14. Daylight savings time. Not only a day to remember to change the clocks, but other important things to remember.
First before you go to bed on March 13, remember to turn your clocks ahead one hour.
It will be a little darker in the morning to begin with but the longer hours of daylight at the end of the day will be greatly appreciated.
With all this snow and cold we have had this winter, a little more sunlight may make us cheerier, or at least we can pretend.
But besides the change in the amount of sunlight and changing the clock, there is another important thing to change. The batteries.
With each time change, get in the habit of changing the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
When changing the batteries, test your detectors to make sure they are functioning properly. It’s quick and easy and most importantly a new set of batteries and testing your alarms could save your life. A cheap price for a set of batteries when you think about it.
And if you want to spring ahead with another project, take a look at those New Year’s resolutions that may have slipped by the wayside and renew them.
Didn’t make any? Maybe now is the time to start them with daylight savings time.
Get ready for spring so you can enjoy the longer hours of daylight, be ready for summer and if you set a goal with change, reward yourself this summer with it.
No matter, remember to change your clocks for daylight savings time on March 14 at 2 a.m. or the night before. Replace and test all your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Spring ahead and think warm thoughts for the spring and summer of 2010.
John E. Suhr
I’ll run in shoes – for now
Be warned. Reading (or listening to the audiobook) Born to Run by Christopher MacDougall can inspire you to do weird things.
A few months ago, one of John’s facebook friends asked if he had read it yet. He hadn’t, and conveniently one of the kids got it for him for Christmas. Not being one to sit down with a book, his copy was an audiobook to load on his iPod.
So, as John ran he would listen to the book. He listened to it on the way home from visiting Adam at Christmas. Before too long he was finished.
Was it as good as Adrian said? Well, it was a good book.
There is not a lot in this world that is more boring than riding a bicycle inside. Yes, a person can watch TV, but my eyes haven’t been working that well to see the screen clear across the room. It seemed only right that I should borrow his iPod and listen to his book.
Besides, it was time to get back into running for the first 5K of the season around St. Patrick’s Day.
It’s amazing how peoples’ opinions can vary. What was a good book to him was inspirational to me!
So this magazine writer hears about people way back in some canyons in Mexico. They can run for days on end with almost no effort.
He finds them – twice. They eat differently. They run differently.
I don’t really want to change my diet much. I like meat. The idea of salad for breakfast wasn’t bad though.
Even before the chapter blaming injuries on running shoes, many comments were made about how they land on the balls of their feet instead of their heels. And they run either barefoot or in shoes with very little support.
Realistically, now is not the time to try barefoot running. Not outside, anyway. And it didn’t take too long to find out that the treadmill surface begins to feel like sandpaper within a minute or two of running barefoot. The belt gets hot, too.
Even without running barefoot I could practice running on my toes. And practice I did. At first it seemed like it was just going to really work the calf muscles. No problem.
A couple of days later I did it again. Calf muscles – no problem. But one foot was sore. Comparing feet, it was swollen too! Enough, in fact that it was a week before it could be used for running again.
So. That’s this year’s excuse for a possibly poor performance at the first run of the year. Not only did I start training late, it was interrupted too.
And the barefoot running will probably have to wait until spring when it can be in the grass. Or possibly chia. Those running people eat a lot of chia.
By george/by George
Flood prospect stirs up some old memories
All of this snow on the ground and the threat of high waters got me thinking back to my younger years and what it was like covering a big time flood.
My first job, over 30 years ago, was with a weekly in Ada, MN. The town is about Webster’s size and located in the Red River Valley so they are no strangers to floods.
My first winter there was about like this one. By late February-early March every time it snowed the county had to call out the bulldozers to get some of the worst roads passable.
When spring broke, it was good Friday and preceded some 60 degree days on top of a three inch rain. The rain really put a dent in the snow pack but it also unleashed the Wild Rice River and many of its Red River tributaries.
By midweek nearly every field for as far as you could see in any direction was a sea of water.
I know, I went up in an airplane, which is an experience unto itself.
The few fields that weren’t inundated, were by now rich black dirt and 30-40 degrees warmer than the water covered ones. When we flew over one of those warm fields the thermal inversion would rocket the small single engine plane we were flying in upwards of a 100 feet or more.
It made for an interesting flight.
The headwaters of the Red River are here in South Dakota but along the way it is fed by nearly a dozen rivers in North Dakota and Minnesota.
The Red builds up around Wahpeton and really widens out as it encounters each tributary. The timing of when each tributary breaks loose plays a crucial factor in the extent of the overland flooding.
It’s a gradual progress as the river moves north. The water backs up against every road it runs into. It pools up behind them until it tops this road and the next and the next.
When the river crests in Wahpeton, Fargo residents know they have three to five days before it gets to them.
The further north you go the worse it gets. Grand Forks, until they spent a gizzilion dollars for protection was one of the worst spots.
Way up in Winnipeg they got tired of the flood waters and built a huge diversion channel to take the overflow water around the city.
It’s a novel site to see. A big green strip though the city with dikes on each side that gets farmed when the water goes down.
Fargo is in the process of trying to build something similar, but they will still have to face the river’s wrath until that project becomes a reality.
On our way back to the airport the pilot and I noticed what we thought were two cars going down the main east-west highway.
“That isn’t possible,” the pilot and I agreed. The road had three to four feet of water across on it on that particular stretch.
We swooped down for a closer look and it turned out that two farmers whose farmsteads were surrounded by water had pulled out their speed boats and were tooling into town for coffee and more sandbags.
The next day I covered a county commission meeting where the highway superintendent gave the board the lowdown on the roads.
He was particularly proud of how well a new concrete arch bridge was taking the river water. It was a nice day so the county dads decided it might be a good time to go and have a look-see.
We got there and the seven or eight of us were standing on the new bridge watching ice flows, trees and miscellaneous stuff flow effortlessly under the bridge.
Then all of a sudden, around a bend in the river floats a full size barn headed straight towards the county’s new bridge.
The road superintendent said he was sure his new structure would stand tall, but nonetheless urged us all to get off the deck just in case.
We did and stood on shore as the barn edged against the upstream side of the bridge where it bobbed twice, creaked, cracked and was sucked under.
When it came out it was in about a thousand pieces. The whole thing took less than 30 seconds – a full size barn obliterated.
On another day a colleague and I went to a farmer’s place where he and a crew of a dozen or so were busily sandbagging a ring dike to protect a machine shed that was brim full of wheat.
The crew completed their job and we were all headed back to town on flooded roads.
My colleague’s vehicle was last in a line of four because the other guys knew the safe route – or so we thought.
As the vehicle ahead us was chugging through a particularly dubious stretch where the water was topping the tires we noticed the back end of the truck sank down for just a second.
My colleague and I agreed maybe it would be wise if I went out in my chest wadders to check and see if the road was washed out.
I hopped out, camera around my neck timidly taking a step at a time. About 10 steps into the fast moving water I watched in amazement as a 60 foot, four foot wide culvert rose up out of the water, stood on end for a second then catipulted 30 feet in the air before being swept out into the middle of the half section.
My colleague yelled at me, “George I hope you got a picture of that.”
“Ross,” I replied, “I didn’t ‘cause I was kinda tied up trying to pull my tongue out of the back of my throat.”
He, of course, was just as amazed and didn’t take a picture either despite having a camera around his neck too.
After that we both decided it would be safer to drive an alternate route back to town – one that was dry.
Back in the office we related our experience to the boss whose only comment was, “two cameras, two photogs and no pix.”
We also called the road superintendent who went out and barricaded the trouble spot.
Later, I reported about a couple of local wahoos who, after having a few tall cool ones, decided to go out and tour the flood sites.
They paid no attention to the county barricade moving it out of the way so they could get a better look. They paid the price though when their car fell into the hole and was swept out into the middle of the field where the now infamous culvert stopped it.
Fortunately none of them suffered any serious injuries but they did admit that wading through waist high, near freezing water in Red River Valley gumbo was a life altering experience that they hoped they would never have to relive again.
After going through umpteen different floods I can honestly say they bring the best and the worst out in people.
It’s a great feeling to pitch in to save someone’s house. On the other hand the floods can make some folks down right crazy.
It’s no fun at all when one neighbor threatens to shoot another over a plugged culvert or his dike is six feet higher than it was supposed to be.
One grizzled old norwegian farmer may have put floods in prospective when he uttered this at a meeting, “Fellas there are two things I won’t abide from my neighbors. My wife sneaking across the road in her nightie from his place after dark or his water doing the same thing.”
bye george
