The other day at dinner we were talking about Centralia, Pennsylvania which, 1962, accidentally lit its underground coal deposits on fire. The fire has been burning there for forty-five years now and there is no sign of it stopping. In fact, the neighbouring town of Ashland is being threatened by the fire now. You can learn more about the town’s early history on Wikipedia. For example, this is the town that Bill Bryson spoke about in his book “A Walk in the Woods” – which both Dominica and I have read and neither of us recalled this story when it was mentioned – and it is the town on which the Dan Aykroyd classic Nothing But Trouble is based upon.
Other relevant sites about Centralia, PA and its ongoing fire include CentraliaPA.com, Damn Interesting, Roadside America, PA Highways, Washington Posts’s Article “Zip Code 00000″, Odd Things I’ve Seen, Gribble Nation, Fogonazos, Abandoned but Not Forgotten, RV With Us, BlogCritics, Encyclopedia of Earth, and many more. In addition to traditional articles and blog posts there is some nice media to check out such as Centralia: A Modern Day Ghost Town and Footage from the Real Silent Hill on YouTube. A quick search on Flickr turns up a wealth of images as well.
Today is my last day of my early week. I am pretty tired today – it adds up over the course of the week. But the weather is nice today. Back home dad says that it hit 94F in Rochester yesterday and it might be as hot today! Nothing like that here.
Fridays are almost always slow in the office until the late afternoon rolls around. I am happy to have RSSOwl installed now as it has given me a chance to get caught back up on my favourite feeds like the Dilbert Blog, Wil Wheaton in Exhile and Little Yellow Different.
Oreo, our little Boston Terrier, got used (his likeness) on DCist’s birthday page! And one of my honeymoon pictures from Halifax got used on a blog post about a cruise ship coming to Halifax.
I also missed when Oreo was featured for a second time on The Bostonist. They originally used his photo in an article about the Menu Foods pet food recall. They ran a second article about him a little later. They had asked permission to do an article on him but I was unaware that they had. But today I found it.
I ate lunch in the office today and, as often happens, was racked by horrible mid-afternoon drowsiness. I just can’t handle eating a lunch without feeling awful all afternoon. It is all that I can do to keep myself awake.
I decided that I needed to leave work on the early side because my evening work was beginning to pile up and it would be best to get the commute home out of the way prior to all of that work or else the evening would drag on forever. And it is a perfect use of my useless mid-afternoon drowsy period to get my driving over and done with for the day (for some reason the drowsiness keeps me from functioning in a technical role but doesn’t seem to affect my driving even though it used to be the opposite about ten years ago.)
So around three thirty I drove back to Newark and hopped back onto my desktop as soon as I arrived. It is a good thing that I did drive home early as my evening work, which was supposed to be done before six, ended up stretching out until eight o’clock! What a long day.
Dominica got home from work at six and spent her time packing so that we would be ready to leave as soon as my office work was completed. We left as quickly as we could and saved dinner for the Patterson, New York Thruway rest stop which has a Nathan’s Original because Dominica is totally in love with their crinkle cut French fries. I think that their fish sandwich is pretty good so we have started eating there now when we are traveling up i87 to Albany.
We made really good time on our drive, thankfully. We drove the Mazda PR5 as we are trying to put miles onto it as quickly as possible as our concern is that the vehicle will most likely rust before it has significant powertrain issues. That and we would like to sell it as soon as possible so the more we drive it before we sell it then the less we can ask for it and the easier it will be to sell. I am going to be working out of Manhattan starting quite soon and once I am working there we will no longer have a need for the PR5 and we would like to save the insurance and parking costs which are roughly $2,500 a year. When we need it, we have the 1988 Mazda RX7 convertible that we can break out of storage and put onto the road should it become necessary.
It was just before midnight when we pulled into Frankfort. We were quite tired but stayed up for about an hour visiting before setting up the futon mattress on the living room floor and attempting to get some sleep. Our first night here is always tough because Dexter is always so excited that we are there that he really doesn’t let us sleep at all.