Miscellaneous Notes on Life in a New Place

By Kendall Kroesen

Tan Lines

Are we losing our burn?

Mary Beth noted that I'm turning paler. The weather has been sunny here pretty often, but less often than in Tucson. And I'm probably outside less. I think I'm starting to lose my Arizona burn. 

This made me think about other miscellaneous changes that we have experienced. 


Mileage

I've noticed that we're getting better mileage in our PriusV. We're in the high forties and sometimes over 50 mpg on a tank of gas. The Prius really shines when you have roads with moderate speed limits and few stoplights and stop signs. The gas engine runs when you first start it up and for a little while after that. You can build up a good battery charge and then--at 35-45 miles per hour--back off and allow it to go on the electric motor. Often there are hills that you can go up--at first on battery power, and then with gas--and then coast down the other side, going back to the electric motor. On flat ground you can go a while on battery power and with even a slight downhill you can go quite a way on battery. Stops are the enemy of gas mileage, but on the rural roads here stops are fewer and farther between. I'm enjoying getting around 50 mpg, which was rare on Tucson's city streets!


Water Conservation

Middlefork Reservoir
I still try to conserve water. But I find I'm taking a longer showers here. And maybe I'm using a little more water to wash dishes and to clean the sink when I'm done. It's probably the influence of the giant reservoir northeast of town, from which it gets its water supply. In Tucson, if you know where water comes from, it's psychologically difficult to use it. Doubly so when you think of all the wildlife we have taken that water from. 

Eastern Indiana--in fact all of Indiana--does need more water. But in this case it's not for drinking so much as it is for restoring wetlands. The recent flooding, the argument goes, would have been much more attenuated if Indiana hadn't lost at least 85% of its original wetlands. Wetlands absorb stormwater, slow it down, and meter it out. In the extended period of rain in early August, stormwater rushed into streams and rivers, overflowed their banks, and spilled into agricultural fields, neighborhoods, and towns. 

Potluck

We just got back from a potluck lunch after this morning's Friends Meeting. Some of the people referred to it as a "pitch in," rather than a potluck. I had not heard this before. It turns out this phrase is very specific to Indiana, rarely being used by non-Hoosiers. There's a segment on the wonderful public radio show A Way With Words, that covers the "pitch in." 

Well, whatever you call it, it was fine. I went back for seconds and thirds. I had to try the baked spaghetti with cheese on top. Apparently this is a regional dish to the Midwest and South. I should have taken a picture, but you can see it on this site. I had not encountered baked spaghetti casserole in California or Arizona. Oh, sorry, not casserole, "hot dish." It's a whole freakin' new language here.

Local News

We still have a subscription to the Arizona Daily Star (online). So we have been reading it in the mornings to get news of from our old haunts as well as national and international news. This probably won't last forever. 

But there's no single comprehensive newspaper around here. I always wondered what it would be like--in terms of news coverage--to live in Sierra Vista, Rio Rico, Sells, Casa Grande, or other smaller towns outside of Tucson. When they watch the Tucson news shows or read the Tucson paper, do they feel left out, since most of the news is not about them? Now I'm finding out what it's like to live in a smaller town. I feel a little left out. 

The daily Richmond Palladium-Item is a daily newspaper that's part of the USA Today network. I need to have a closer look, but it seems like a lot of the stories are from USA Today or regional sources, rather than from Richmond itself. There's not enough of the kind of news that I need in order to really learn what's going on in this new place where I live. 

The section of the Palladium-Item website called "Crime/Courts" does have some local crime news, such as a story entitled "Winchester man charged, accused of placing meth in wrong mailbox." That headline was bemusing on a variety of levels. Was putting the meth in the wrong mailbox really the crime we should be focusing on? 


There's also a weekly newspaper called the Western Wayne (County) News. Counties are small around here, so anything that happens in Wayne County won't be far from Richmond. It has a great list of local events and stories about local schools and other issues. And they did a great job of covering the floods in early August. But being a weekly, it lacks the immediacy of a daily paper. 

There are daily newspapers in Indianapolis, Dayton, and Cincinnati. But at least in the case of Indianapolis it has become a skinny purveyor of news from a few national sources, like many newspapers these days. It has less local reporting and of course news from our local area would rarely be found there. 

Social media fills in some of the gaps, but if you are interested in one particular issue or theme, the local Facebook and Instagram pages may or may not have something about it. 

Artificial Intelligence? Turns out AI is only as good as the local news gathered and published by humans. I just asked Google "Is Waterfall Road in Richmond Indiana open again?" (It was closed due to flood damage in early August.) The AI that popped up at the top of the Google page said "No, Waterfall Road in Richmond Indiana is not open." Well, we just drove home that way this morning and it is most definitely open. So since the AI can't go there itself and check, it has to rely on local human sources. And there hasn't been reporting on this--at least not that the AI has seen. So AI is only as good as the local human news gathering.

I'll probably get better at finding local news as time goes on, but it's not as easy as it was in Tucson. I guess it's getting harder everywhere. 

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