Vakkotaur

jmaynard and I left for Merrill, WI Saturday afternoon and arrived in the evening. I must've been tired as I didn't notice just how dark everything was in the area. There were many areas without electricity and my folks were in a smaller one of those areas. Good use was made of a generator and so things were kept running. A gas oven meant cooking and baking were not badly affected, and there is a (properly vented) gas space heater that kept part of the house warm. The bad side was that the generator would not run all night on a tank of gasoline. Had it been colder, that would have meant someone tending the generator every hour or two all night. As it was relatively (for northern Wisconsin in late December...) it simply wasn't run through the night.

As it was a clear night, sistaur and I went out stargazing for a while. There was still glow from all the lights of Merrill, but there were no nearby mercury or sodium vapor lamps mucking up the view. The Winter Milky Way was visible and I could make out the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer as a fuzzy patch without any optical aid.

Sunday morning we were still using the generator for power, but eventually we saw a Wisconsin Public Service truck go by and a little while later we were "on the grid" again. Ann, Jay, and I spent some time doing some last-minute Christmas shopping which turned out rather better than might have been expected.

Sunday evening was the big Christmas dinner. A guest brought an astonishing amount of cheese and sausage and a fair amount of Coca-cola as well. These were not some holiday gift pack items, either, but standard bricks of cheese and very large sausages. Jay and I now have a nontrivial amount of cheese and sausage in the fridge (and freezer) and we didn't take all of it.

After the big meal came the opening of the presents. The earlier shopping was shown to have gone well as any doubts about some items were quickly erased. Everyone seemed quite pleased, which was and is good. Conversation and snacking went on for some time.

Today was mainly snacking and packing and the trip back. The trip back was nicely uneventful, with one minor exception. Between Mankato and Lake Crystal traffic was stopped and a group on horseback crossed the highway and rode along it. This was not just a few folks out for an afternoon trail ride, but something more as the traffic had been stopped by the police and I could see a feathered headdress on one of the riders.

Streetlight.

What did you just picture? A bright somewhat orange light? A bright pure yellow light? A stark blue light that seems to be at once too bright and too dim?

The first thing I picture is generally that last choice, the bluish mercury vapor light that was the only streetlight I saw around when I was quite young. They cast light, and could seem bright, yet somehow also seemed dim. It's probably that the light was mostly blue. One result was that holiday decorations that were put up on the light poles really stood out. They were bright and brightened up the pole they were on.

I remember, somewhat, the old decorations, curved somewhat spiral wreath-like things with lights inside colored plastic globes. These were the most common decorations in Merrill. At one entrance into town there was another item, it was made to look like a candle in a holder, and also a sign that vertically spelled out NOEL. Downtown, there was one corner where a string of lights was strung overhead, diagonally across the intersection. All that looked impressive at the time, the streetlights still gave the light, but the decorations stood out.

Then came the sodium vapor lamps. These have some advantages. They're cheaper. They give more light. They don't use mercury. The low pressure type are a pure yellow, the high pressure type are more broad-spectrum (whiter) but have a bit of orange to them. Merrill, like many other places, switched to the sodium vapor lamps. Merrill also got different holiday decorations.

It was rather disappointing to look at. Part of that is the change of decorations are a change away from my childhood memories. The old decorations likely were in bad need of replacement, but they're what I remember. The other part is that all decorations seem washed out when bathed in the bright sodium vapor light. In that downtown area, not only were the mercury vapor lamps replaced with sodium vapor lamps, but there were now two lamps per pole, making things brighter still. With my interest in astronomy and a dark sky, I found such excess offensive and wasteful.

Moving to Fairmont, I still notice the decorations which are, of course, different. Pretty much all street lighting is now sodium vapor. I prefer the yellow low pressure sodium vapor rather than the high pressure. Some say it's unnatural. Well, it's bright light at night, of course it's unnatural. But low pressure is cheaper to run and maintain - and easier to filter out, something I consider important. The decorations hung from light poles are, like the ones in Merrill, washed out by the bright streetlights even though the decorations use exposed bulbs now.

Fairmont seems to do more with street-level decorations, having illuminated wire sculptures in parks. These stand out better than the pole-mounted things. Fairmont also feels more commercial, mainly from timing. Merrill would put up the decorations sometime in November, but would leave them unlit until the night of Thanksgiving. It made for more of a contrast in the season. Stores might do Christmas stuff early, but the decorations weren't lit until Thanksgiving.

Fairmont has a parade in November to start off its Christmas shopping season. This is done the weekend before Thanksgiving. The lights go on for or during the parade. The first Friday in December is another shopping event. While I like these for my chance to meet Gerry and the team of belgian horses again, if it weren't for that I'd likely not care. I was a bit surprised the first Winter here, when a parade blocked off the way I'd intended to get home from someplace (with my rapidly cooling supper) and also when the decorative lights were lit, to me, early.

Some time back, jmaynard and I returned home from supper or some such and saw a rabbit on the lawn. This was unusual for Jay, but not for me. I had been used to seeing rabbits when I lived in the country in Wisconsin, and Fairmont is a small enough town that seeing rabbits is not unusual. A bit less common than squirrels, but hardly rare. Seeing deer in the area, that would be rare.

When visiting my folks this weekend we saw several deer in the field across the road. I hadn't commented on it here as it wasn't unusual. It was something I expected to see, off and on, there. Only when I read another's LJ entry about seeing wildlife did it occur to me.

I wonder how many other "little things" I don't pay all that much attention to. It's not that I miss them or ignore them. They're just so common, to me, that I do not regard them as anything unusual and so don't comment on them.

This happens indoors, too. I'm familiar with how our house looks inside. There are original inks of comic pages, and Animaniacs cels hanging on the walls. I'm used to them. But when my sister visited it struck her just how much Animaniacs (and other cartoon) stuff was around.