How bizarre, I would expect schools to be overcrowded not due to insufficient enrollment.
Jordan Elementary School, a Mesa Public School located in Chandler, will likely close next school year because of declining enrollment, with its 486 students assigned to Frost or Pomeroy elementaries.
I went to Jordan Elementary in the late seventies and early eighties.
The last 2 years I have went on cross country skiing to Yurts in southern Colorado near Chama, NM. This year I declined the trip for several reason. Chama is getting hit with record snow this week and my friends did not show at the meeting point on Saturday or Sunday. They have since closed the roads between Chama and the boarder. I am in AZ right now and my other friend Steve (who also usually goes but didn’t this year) has been in touch with the sheriffs department. Here’s his report for today.
Search & Rescue could not reach them today. There are 3 parties stranded: 5, 4 & 2 people according to sherif’s dpt (when I called this PM). Search called off for tonight. 2 snow cats being loaded for deployment in AM. Snow condition are severe… possibly record-breaking.
Hopefully, when they tried to leave the Yurt, they realized they couldn’t make it out and went back. They will be warm and comfortable in the yurt but they are running out of food. I hope they get to them tomorrow.
Update 02/05/08 6:43 am: I’m happy to report that my friends are safe. Apparently, search and rescue wasn’t able to make it to their yurt, equipment issues of some sort. When the owner of the yurt was contacted he said he could make it up, on skis. Which he did and guided them out. Impressive, no? Keep in mind this guy probably skis up to the yurt in between rentals with supplies to restock it. He could probably do it blindfolded. I now get to look forward to the stories.
Chama, by the way, has been declared a disaster area and I don’t think they have figured out how they are going to get back there to pick up their vehicles.
There’s a giant sink hole on Paseo Del Norte, a major artery through the west side of Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. The following comment was posted on the KOBTV’s article on the road closure.
Well, those crews had better get busy! I need to use that road to get to TD’s every day for my daily fix of skin and wiggles!
TD’s is a strip club in Albuquerque.
The former owner of this house was a HVAC contractor who appeared to own their own business. I’m pretty sure about this because I have found their business related items around the house. Since the house was foreclosed on, i assume they went out of business. I have no idea if they installed the forced air heating unit in this house, but if they did I can see why they went out of business.
To start, the heater is a Frasier-Johnson brand, which doesn’t appear to be made anymore and when it was, it was a low end brand. This heater has a EnergyGuide rating of 80, and the lowest scale is 78. Pretty much the least efficient you can get. The main problem is with the filter configuration. Two filters sit in a “V” configuration above the heating unit, but there is no easy way to install the filters.
There is no access panel in the duct work to put them in. The only way I can figure to put the filters in is to push them up from inside the heating unit. I have to reach about 12 inches inside the heater, reach around motors, electronics and whatever where I’m left with about an inch of space to get the filters inside. From there they have to balance precariously on a few pieces of metal in the “V” configuration, where I can’t actually see how they are setting without getting down on my knees with a flashlight to look up inside the duct work. They aren’t sealed against the duct work and one of them keeps falling out of place leaving huge gaps.
I’m looking at possible ways to cut up the duct work above the heater so I can access the filter area. Doesn’t look easy though.
With a name like “Petroleum Club“, you know that not even I can be white enough to get in. It’s also, apparently, a dinosaur. This 15th floor restaurant/club closed up shop after about 60 years of exclusivity.
The membership-only club closed Saturday night, but had been having difficulties for several years. Located on the 15th floor at 500 Marquette NW, the restaurant hosted thousands of business luncheons and banquets during its long run. The closure was not expected and the decision to close was made by the club’s board of directors.
The club could accommodate 150 diners at any one time, but Downtown’s thinning corporate base might have led to its decline. The club underwent a $175,000 renovation in 2004 when it renewed its lease for eight years, but it might not have been enough to stave off declining attendance.
Their dress code
Corporate business dress is always acceptable at lunch and dinner, Shirts without collar for men, jeans, shorts and sportswear are not allowed in the Dining Room at either lunch or dinner.
Their menu isn’t cheap but not quite as bad as I would have expected. They do require a automatic 20% tip.
Grilled Atlantic Salmon with roasted garlic horseradish mashed potatoes and lemon butter sauce: Twenty Dollars
Market Salad with cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts, and tomatoes with choice of dressing: Four Dollars
For a long time the discussion has been more focused on when we would open, and we feel like now is the right time. Taos has a long-standing tradition of being family oriented, and now with so many young people snowboarding, we are turning away more and more families, particularly families that traditionally come to Taos. Opening to snowboarding allows us to refocus on being a family oriented mountain.
I wasn’t expecting this. Snowboards are designed in such a way that it’s easy to sit on your ass or your knees from an upright position. It’s those snowboarders that use this capability and stop right at unloading area of a lift or on a run, right where a skier is going and cannot stop quite so easily, that make them all look bad. Most ski lifts are designed for skiers, not boarders, which doesn’t help things either.
About half the people I know use snowboards, at least I can go to Taos with them now. I will never forget the last time I was there, I lost my very favorite Canon S500
I wrote perviously about how the shower in the master bathroom had leaked. Now that I have researched the issue more, I understand more about how shower floors are constructed. The original floor was constructed as a “mortar bed” and it was not constructed correctly. It was missing the bottom membrane. The mortar was placed directly on the cement floor. The membrane that was installed was brittle and too far under the top layer of mortar. Finally, there was no strengthening agent, such as chicken wire.
I didn’t want to repeat what I considered a poorly engineered design so I looked into solid surface designs. Royal Stone produces a 48×48 solid surface pre-made floor that resembles stone (think Corian). The normal price is about $900, but my drain is not in the location of the pre-made floor so I would have to order a custom made floor. Since they would have to made a new mold for my application the price would be about $1600 at the cheapest. That’s way too much to spend on just the shower floor.
I then found Tile Redi products which are a thick plastic solid floor that you can tile on directly. Cheaper at $679 (not by much), but not in the size I want and the drain hole isn’t in the same location.
Now I’m back to the mortar floor shower floor as the replacement. Considering the price and how a proper floor is suppose to be built, there should not be a problem for the new floor.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portland Oregon on short trips several times this year. There is very rarely a direct flight from the Sunport to anywhere except a state directly next to New Mexico. This time I went through Denver International Airport for the first time. I was pretty interested to fly through Denver this time because of the conspiracy theories associated with it.
Lets start with the murals. I didn’t get a chance to see them, I wasn’t sure if they were past the security area and if I had time get to where they are. I’ve read about them and there many pictures up on Flickr. When you see the giant picture of the nazi dude with the dead children, well that’s just disturbing. There is another mural showing different people of the world bringing down this nazi dude. I think the point of which is to show what happens if the people of the world don’t come together to eliminate the bad guys. Still, this is pretty odd. It doesn’t help the rest of the conspiracy theories.
anomalies-unlimited.com is the main source for the conspiracy theories. As I read through the sites, its easy to dismiss many of their claims. First one being that “Denver already had what everyone said was a perfectly fine airport – Stapleton.”According to Wikipedia, Stapleton was serious too small and poorly designed to be the 4th busiest airport in the US, which is what DIA is now. I believe Wikipedia’s explanation more then anomalies-unlimited.
I won’t go through all the things that anomalies-unlimited points out. Some of it just doesn’t make sense that it’s part of a conspiracy. However there are some odd things they do warrant future inspection. Such as the fact that DIA was 2 Billion (with a “B”) over budget. Where did that money go? anomalies-unlimited seems to suggest that it went to a vast underground military complex that exists under the airport and that the purpose of the airport was really just to build this complex. Seems to me that one would build such a complex under a less busy airport.
My limited experience at the airport indicates that the airport is pretty well designed and huge. I think the A gates went from 1 to 99. Although I generally dismiss the conspiracy theories, I did note something strange at the A gates. There are these mosaic tile images of people standing and walking through the terminals located on the floor. They are kinda weird in that they are top views and you can only make them out if you get up high (there is a higher level one can view them). In between these mosaics are a border and on these boarders are words like “North America”, “Europe” and “Antarctica”. Next to these words are random symbols that seem to have no purpose at all. These are all mosaics which are pretty easy to make out, with continent names in upper case. Near some of these content names are other words in lower case and the tile colors are really close to the back ground making it hard to figure out what they say. The symbols kinda look like random characters from the Zapf Dingbats font. Perhaps these are codes to the Aliens that come through DIA to tell them which continents they need to go through when they arrive.
anomalies-unlimited.com does have one final item that I agree is strange, the odd tablet with a masonic symbol on it. Above that tablet is what appears to be a keypad. What the heck is this thing and why are there no better pictures of this thing than the poor quality ones on their website?
About a year ago most house remodeling projects came to a halt. Costs got a little out of control and I ended up with some large credit card bills. I’ve eliminated those bills and am ready to start back on my projects. I didn’t waste any of that money, it was just a bit too much to spend at once. I now have this radical new idea that I will call “planning and budgeting” and I will apply it to projects going forward.
A quick recap on this project, the house was a foreclosure. Though not trashed, it was pretty dated and in need of remodeling in several places. The master bath showed signs of leakage in the shower. It’s pretty clear that it’s been going on for a while, it had leaked into the adjacent bathroom and into the master bedroom.
I was sure the bathroom wasn’t usable in it’s current condition and would need to be tore down to the studs. As I started to demolish the walls of the shower I found that it was pretty much being held together with tree roots. Roots had grown a good foot up the wall of the shower in between the tile. As the roots took hold of the tile, it probably just made the leaking worse.
This bathroom has not been used in at least 4 years. Yet as I broke up the mortar and shower pan I found the mortar was still pretty wet. There were so many roots that it smelled like a nursery. Finally, I think i have found the root cause. The drain pipe is basically floating, there’s a huge gap of missing concrete around it and I can clearly see where main roots have made their way through the floor (this isn’t the first time I’ve had issues with the cement in this house). I assume that a little water made it’s way around the drain, signaling for the roots to come through. As the roots grew threw the tile the wall leakage just got worse causing more roots to grow. At least I know I wasn’t wrong that there was no saving it.
The demolition is about 99% complete. I intended to get a good amount of this bathroom completed this winter. I’ve got a basic plan put together, but that’s a post for another day.
From the department of “one thing inevitably leads to another,” we present Laboratory Conditions, a film we made on the way to making another film. Scouting for props and locations for our current film project, 72° led us to Los Alamos, New Mexico. We found a lot more there than we bargained for.
Doesn't Fit In 