Roadside trash apparent after mower

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JOEL KLASSEN
I continue to be amazed by the enormous amount of trash on roadsides after the mower makes a pass. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is on the 13-Mile Road or close to the big city. The result is the same: bottles, cans, paper sacks-you name it-are strewn all over the place.

Never do I see anyone throw it out the window of a vehicle. Maybe it happens at night.

People frequently ask me about what is developing on the corner 11 miles south of Hillsboro on Indigo (13-Mile Road). We even discussed at our staff meeting whether it’s a story.

Curiosity got the best of me last week. When I went by there, I stopped and approached a couple of men who were working on the premises. As soon as they jokingly determined that I wasn’t representing the Internal Revenue Service, I met the man who is building a home for himself and a place for his race cars, among other things. He said he was from Newton, grew up in the Lincolnville area and has quite a few relatives in Marion County.

The process of naming the original Hillsboro streets makes sense for the most part. In fact our founding fathers were pretty good with letters, numbers and trees, but I don’t exactly get the presidential streets located east of Main.

I get the A, B, C, D and F streets south of Grand Avenue, the First, Second and Third streets north of Grand Avenue, and the tree streets west of Main street that are in alphabetical order: Ash, Birch, Cedar, Date, Elm, Floral Drive.

But what happened with the presidential streets: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Wilson, Kennedy, Eisenhower. They’re not alphabetical, not in order of service, and not in any local sequence I can figure out. If anyone knows why these streets are named the way they are, I’d like to be clued in.

I wonder how much household and business equipment has burned out with lightning strikes and fluctuations in our city electric current since televisions, computers and the like became standard equipment in most homes and businesses.

There is a way to avoid this problem in most cases, but it takes a little money. You can buy what is called a UPS (Uninterruptible Power System) for less than $100, even as low as about $40 for a small computer and monitor. A UPS is a surge protector and battery backup all in one. The one that runs our server operates off a battery all of the time and uses city power to just feed it.

We have 10 of the silly things sitting around here, but when the squirrels goof up the power, we’re ready. Our computers act like nothing ever happened. And, if the power stays off long enough, you just shut everything down and lose nothing.

Waiter spills soup on gentleman’s lap.

“Looks like there’s soup on your fly.”

You can stretch your dollars at Hillsboro’s new Health Post fitness center: If you don’t have cable television at home, you can watch it while you train.

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