I use a weather app called Dark Sky with my iPad. It very accuratly shows the precipitation forecast for the next hour via a false color radar picture, and also the history of the last 2 hours or so. As you can see there is a hole in the rainclouds over Lincoln. It also has “Jets” going away from it to the east and west. When you slide back the history of the radar picture you can see that that hole stays exactly over Lincoln, as well as the Jets.I watched that phenomenon now for two days (4/17 and 4/18) and it stays there. Never went away through all the flooding rainfalls of the last days.

Is there a black hole over Lincoln, swalloing up all the water in the clouds? Or is it some kind of secret experiment by DARPA or NASA or FEMI Lab? Or maybe the fine city of Lincoln found away to turn off the rain over their city? Oh how I wish to know! Maybe someone from Lincoln can answer what happens there?

Also interesting is the band of rain clouds to the left of Lincoln. It runs very straight from north to south. When that band hit my area, the sky turned black in seconds and a short but heavy gust like a train coming through and an enormous amount of water hit my house. It took place for just one or two minutes and then the sky was calm again. Wondering too, what that was. Never experienced something like that before.

And while the rest of central Illinois is drowning I just keep looking at that hole.

Just look at it.

P.S. Disclaimer. I swear on the grave of my dead hamster that this is not photoshopped, except for the name of my street in the top box and my exact location on that screen.

I am recycling things. I’m not talking about washing out yoghurt containers or running around town and pick out aluminum cans from public trash bins. But in a way, if I was as consequential as I would like to, someday I might even do that. Watch me, Springfield.

I grew up in a country where recycling was mandatory. Not out of a governmental consciousness for the enviroment (although they claimed so) but due to economical reasons. The German Democratic Republic (most people know it as East Germany) had an economical system in place wich was bound to be insufficient. Mostly because of corruption and misgovernment but also due to lack of currencies and ressources. But whatever the reason was, the recycling system was almost perfect compared to todays recycling efforts of, say, United Green Germany or the United States of A.

We even recycled food scraps back then. For a time, on every street corner there where bins called “Speckitonne” wich I would roughly translate as Fatty-Bin. Those bins would be emptied out every week and what you did was you threw your food waste in there and then a truck took it to the big cooperative pig farms and there they fed the contents to the pigs. Sounds disgusting? Well, the pigs where probably fed a more healthy diet with that than the hormone-infused meat-packs of nowadays. And the only disgusting part of it then was that sometimes those bins tend to smell a bit toward the end of their weekly cycle. But I still love the idea, despite the occasional reek: what a perfect way to recycle food. One of the reasons why this probably wouldn’t work today might be sanitary restrictions regarding livestock husbandry, although pigs are omnivore and can stand pretty much anything they got into their stomachs. But still. What a nice idea that was. No more food waste.

Another thing we were obliged to do was as kids to go around the neighborhood twice or trice a year with a hand cart and collect old glass bottles and newspapers from elderly people who where not able to get rid of that stuff recycle-wise by themselves. Now you might think: Thats nice, but, obligatory?! But here’s the knack: when we delivered that stuff to the recycling center, we got paid. And not too bad, either! Sometimes we where forced to donating that money to charity (oh, sh*t, socialism again), but we were also free to go around the neighborhood on our own accounts and keep the money to ourselves. Yes, capitalism, sort of. I made quite some money with that and I felt morally great because we donated like hell to honorable causes (there where even donation-races between schools). What a nice idea, too. The Lemon-stand of the socialist world. Mostly disappeared nowadays, even in Germany; in the U.S. only the Boy/Girl Scouts keep up something similar with their collection drives of aluminum cans.

I grew up with a father who had accustomed himself to a great extend to those recycling regulations because of, I would guess, beeing part of the citizenry but also because of him growing up in the years shortly after WWII. Austerity must have been the dominating condition for most of his childhood/teenage years. So he valued naturally every reusable/recyclable item and taught us kids to do so either. No matter what: items, services or utilities. Everyhing had to be considered a recyclable ressource or be handled with frugal conduct. Collect bottle caps and corks. Don’t throw away old aluminum foil. Switch of the light when you leave a room. Don’t run the water while you brush your teeth. Turn off the shower while soaping yourself. Clear your plate. Put on an additional sweater if you’re cold. Use writing paper on both sides. Don’t put the newspaper in the trash. And so on.

He collected almost everything, but not everything. A broken piece of scrap plastic was a broken piece of plastic and got into the trash, but most pure materials would be recycled (Yoghurt containers didn’t exist in our consumer environment back then. Heck, Yoghurt didn’t). Yes, sometimes this bordered on messiness of some kind. He still has his basement full of stuff he’ll never use anymore, so I guess my siblings and I will have to take care of that someday. We’ll probably take it to the recycling center. You can find them nowadays (again) in every district in Germany.

Antother example of my influences: In the year 2000 I was responsible for the graphic design for the exhibitions of several West African countries for the World Expo in Hannover, Germany. Through my research I learned a lot about those countries. On of those countries was Benin. The inhabitants of Benin are quite remarkable: although one of the poorest countries in West Africa they have found a way to support most of their basic material needs through recycling: they are making water buckets out of old car tires, build houses out of aluminum cans, built toys and kitchen utensils out of scrap metal and even make art out of it, and appear altogether happy to have developed a whole culture around the idea of recycling. They even import trash from neighboring countries and recycle that. This is quite a remarkable achievment, especially when you have a closer look at those neighboring countries, wich do not nearly so well despite the geographical proximity and similar circumstances.

When I buy some new furniture or a new piece of equipment or a new tool there are often packages of screws and additional material for eventualities of the future user. I store away every single piece of that. I surely will find a secondary use for those. Before I have to throw away something I dismantel it, free it of every screw and reusable item I can’t find before I put the not recyclable components of it (- most is) in the trash. For most of the usual household items this doesn’t take much time. What took me much time though was to find an ordinary battery recycler here in the Springfield/IL area. All of the usual recycling companies refuse to take batteries. This shows how costly it is to recycle batteries. But before you throw them happily in the trash: one AAA-battery on the usual landfill will poisen thousands of gallons of groundwater. A similar pollution is caused to the air if it is burned. This is serious. Don’t throw them in the trash. Find someone who takes it and then pressure you local government to introduce mandatory battery recycling in your district for those companies who sell them and make a profit out it in the first place. That might drive up the prices for batteries a little, but you see, if you want to save money, you use rechargeables anyway.

I’m not on a mission here. But I truly believe that one way out of the dependencies on ressources is recycling. And its also about saving a lot of money. If you are irritated about fuel prices think twice why they are so high. Because demand is so high. Car driving contributes to the lions share of the demand, but: A lot of oil goes into the production of plastic materials (soda bottles and shopping bags for instance but also kids toys). It irritates me to unspeakable amounts when I see the mountains of one-time-used plastic crap piling up on the front lawn of desperate garage-sales. If you love nature, think twice. Most of the logging today is done for the production of your newspaper and telephone books (who uses those anymore anyway??). Recycle ‘em.

I’d rather use glass bottles instead of aluminum cans but I do understand that in this vast country of America, weight is an transportation issue (and therefore an issue on the CO2 footprint and fuel consumption and costs) and so the only way to deal with it is to recycle both and to do so strictly: glass and aluminum. Same goes for cans, but I do see that we have a sanitary problem here: Where to store them for extended amounts of time before you have collected enough to make it reasonable to bring them to a recycling center? Those cans are often food cans wich tend to mold and smell and attract unwanted animals like ants and racoons, if you collect them outside your home. Washing up those cans is only a half satisfactory solution –> waste of water and energy. If you have a big garage for storing it you can keep out the racoons but not the mold, the smell, and the ants. I have not figured this one out yet. So any suggestions are welcome in the commentary section to this article. I’m sure there are a lot more smart recycling solutions and ideas out there and you are most welcomed to post them in the commentaries too. I will add more of my ideas and practices about recycling there too.

I know this article isn’t news to most of you guys who read this, but as bored as I am sometimes, I indulge myself in writing up stuff like that anyway and imagine that there is some reader who hasn’t cared about those things that much and does now a little bit more. Making the world a little bit better. Just a little bit.

In Illinois, when you are dependent on a temporary visa like a Work Visa (H1-B), you’ll be issued a Temporary Visitors Drivers License. On that Temporary Drivers License there is a remark: “Not valid for identification” and it is presumably to prevent dependents (as I am) of a Work Visa holder (as my wife is) from getting legal work, which I am not supposed to get (since I got no work permission for the duration of the visa). One might want to discuss this from several angles if this is a reasonable practice, but as a visa holder you are not in a position to change anything about that for the duration of the visa.

Now to that temporary drivers licence. I must assume that (outside of Chicago) I am the only moron running around with such a thing as the following endearing little story will illustrate. It is just one of many many incidents but may stand exemplary for the fun I have executing the simplest tasks in rural America. My drivers license looks exactly like everyone elses except for that remark and the experation date which concur with the end of my visa, and the title bar background is blue instead of red and has the abbreviation TVDL which stands for Temporary Visitors Drivers License (is there such a thing as a permanent visitor?).

Every now and then I get into trouble because of that since of course this remark arouses questions when I buy alcohol for instance. I always have to discuss with the sales clerk why it is not necessary to identify me but just to prove my age (I’m old enough btw., but what am I telling you! Today I watched a cashier in a supermarket asking a 90-something, who could barely hear anything, asking him very loud for his birthday. He said it was recently, last week or so. That was fine with her and she punched in a fantasy date). But I got used to that and therefore I carry my international drivers license as an additional weight of bureaucratic importance with me which, alas, seldom works. But anyway. Buying beer leaves me at least in the position to leave and buy it elsewhere if the local mental disposition is too restrained to see the prove of age with all of those documents, apart from my appearance, you know. I could carry my passport around with me, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. You see, it is the most valuable and important document I have as a foreigner in the United States, and for that reason it is stored away in a save place.

But I misread my fortune cookie in Charlston, Illinois, wich said: “Go for new opportunities. Now is the best time.”  I thought I would go for fishing fun. Actually we where on a vacation trip in eastern Illinois. So I took my six year old son and we walked straight into the local Walmart wich was apparantly the only place in town to sell fishing licenses. So much for slimming down government. The clerk asked me if I had a fishing license from the previous year. I didn’t. Then he asked me for my drivers license and I could see dark clouds arising on his forehead when he scrutinized my license after I gave it to him. After a while he said he could not use it because it said Not valid for identification. I grabbed my international drivers license and gave it to him with the words that he could prove my identity with that. He didn’t agree and asked me if I had other identifications with me like my passport. Coincidentally I had my laptop with me where I have stored copies of all my legal documents including my passport and visa and I offered him I could show him those on screen. He looked at it and said he must check with the shift manager. After arrival the shift manager said it would be the simplest thing to call the DMV and ask them about the validity of my drivers license. They called the DMV and they asked in return to fax that thing over. I was beginning to wonder why the issuing department of my drivers license wasn’t able to immediatly give the Walmart clerk a satisfactory answer about it. I mean, there is a number on it, right? What is that number for?
Meanwhile my son was beginning to throw precious fishing equipment off the shelves because at that point 15 minutes had elapsed and everyone with a kid knows that is an eternity in a department store waiting for something (herewith I refuse officially to call Walmart a supermarket).
The clerk told the DMV guy to immediatly call him back at his desk when the fax arrived and then hung up and went away with the shift manager. 10 minutes later I was busy yelling at my son to stop examining fishing equipment by watching it falling to the ground. I explained to him: you break it, you buy it, but secretly I was hoping he’d break something just for the sake of it because the whole thing began to get on my nerves. Then the telephone rang. No clerk at his desk. The phone rang for 2 minutes, still no clerk. The son kept examining fishing equipment by pulling precious fishing poles out of their holding devices. The phone rang again. 20 minutes now. Still no clerk on his desk. I stopped to reprimand the son; I didn’t care anymore about anything because this was rediculous.

After 30 minutes the clerk came back and in tow with him a group of 7 people. There was the shift manager who kept reassuring me that he was very sorry for all this trouble, then the department manager and the general manager of Walmart. With them there was another guy who said he is the security manager and a police officer and another police officer who declared he is the sheriff of Coles county and they were here by chance because of a pledge drive for the police on the parking lot. Then there was another guy who was grinning all the time but said nothing. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt but that was the most substantial thing to be said about him. I guess he was just there for the fun which would without a doubt unfold itself soon. The sheriff showed me my drivers license and asked me if this was my drivers license. I agreed, of course. My son simultaniously begun to ask me questions about complicated and shiny fishing equipment and I hissed at him in German to put that stuff back where he found it. That must have triggered something with the sheriff because now he explained to me that he was investigating here something, namely if this was a case of forgery. Now consider this: would I fake a drivers license and make it in a way which surely would cause me trouble by the faintest scrutiny of a Walmart clerk? With a 6-year-old in tow? To get a fishing license? My goodness.

The sheriff put a very earnest look onto his face and said that he must ask me what he’ll ask me now because it is required by law. He asked if I had any weapons on me. At that moment, my mind was swinging around three main pillars:

1. In some kind of astonished wonderment: wow, this is the real America, like, in television;

2. My son, who had his hands on a box full of tiny lead balls, threatening to roll them all over Walmart;

3. Is a Leatherman tool a weapon?

And then I remembered that I had a Swiss army knife (3 inch blade) with me and I answered: Yes, a Swiss army knife. I said that because the Swiss have managed to resist invasion for a thousand years only with those army knifes and bycicles. That had to be some kind of a bad-ass weapon, right?

All those guys who where at that moment standing in a semi circle around me and my son with the box of tiny lead balls in his hands where gasping silently and simultaniously took a step back as I put my hand into my jeans pocket and pulled out — slowly! — the swiss army knife and put it on the counter in front of the Walmart clerk. Then I grabbed the Leatherman tool from my belt and put it there too. People all around the store where watching in expectant rapture.

Then for a few seconds nothing happened. Everybody was looking at this miserable little heap of bad-ass weapons as the men of ordnance where taxing its potential harm. Its modest potential in regards of a killing spree somehow seemed to relax the police guys a little because now they could clearly see that their 9mm guns would be a considerable advantage to a little Swiss army knife and a Leatherman tool and they would leave the Walmart tonight most likely unharmed.

It relaxed the sheriff so much that he pulled out his cell phone and called the DMV to check my drivers license. After he explained thoroughly how it looked and what it said on it (“Yeah its got a blue field with TVDL on it! And there’s a number on it too!”) as if he had never seen a drivers license before and the blue color in the title bar was questioning its complete and utter function. Then he spelled the license number. After a few seconds they obviously explained to him that everything was fine. It was that simple! It is a mystery to me to this day why the Walmart clerk was not able to do this in the first place.

After a lot of “Sorry, but we have to do this” and “We are required to!” from every direction everyone left. The sheriff  told me as he left that he had never seen such a license before and therefore couldn’t possibly know what it is. I was silently wondering how that was possible in a college town like Charlston with its thousands of abroad students each year. He waved goodbye with the happily remark what a fine day this was now that everybody had learned something new. Yes indeed. So far this little piece of knowledge had consumed just a little bit under an hour of our preciuos fishing experience.

Anyway. Now it was the Walmart clerk and me again. He finally and super nice got into action. He punched in my information and then suddenly stopped, asking me: What’s your social security number? I answered: I don’t have one. (You see, as a visa depentend you don’t get a social security number to make sure you don’t obtain surreptitiously government money or get secretivly into work).

The clerk: “Oh-oh.”

It was time to pull out my secret weapon, again. And this time I hoped it would count. My laptop. I explained to him extensivly why I don’t have a social security number, pulled on screen the document which said why and finally asked him if we could try it with my ITIN number. ITIN has become my last resort in a lot of ways. It is an abbreviation for Individual Taxpayer Identification Number and I have to have it because I need to pay taxes and the system must assign me a number to process me somehow. He asked me to show him the document and thanks to my nerdiness I had it on the computer too. After a thoroughly scrutiny he punched in the numbers and then in somber voice asked me if I am a resident of Illinois. Yes indeed I am, I said, that’s why I have an Illinois drivers license, haven’t I? Oh, no no no no no. And then we indulged ourselves in a lengthy discussion what makes me an Illinois resident, even a temporarily one, having an Illinois drivers license, paying Illinois property taxes, beeing here all those years and beeing issued an Illinois ITIN and so forth. This was important, because as an Illinois resident I would pay far less for my fishing license than an out of state resident (wich state would that be? Germany?) He assured me countless times that all he wanted was the best for me and save me some money. Save money, live better.

And I believed him at that moment. Because we had something in common: All we both wanted — no! the three of us if you allow me to include my son who was perilously crouching under a shelf full of tool boxes — was: to leave. With a fishing license. Please. Maybe: Save time, live better? Almost two hours now. My son was now silently whining (trembling lips, dogs eyes and all that). We were hungry and exhausted.

So in the long end we got it. A tiny printout, which did not quite look as important as the effort it demanded to get. I would have liked to be rewarded with a certificate with golden trimming and an old-fashioned sealing with the mayors bold sign beneath it. But anyway. I shoved it into my wallet, grabbed my sons hand and we left. On our way to the car I was brooding over the peculiarity why it is so expected to put something into the system (money, effort, sweat, tears) but so hard to get in return something out of it (fishing licenses, work permissions, general appreciation). Wich goes – by the way – for every country I have lived in so far.

The only thing my mind came up with was a picture: a slot machine.

These animals I do watch running, wiggling, flying around in my back and front yard:

White tailed deer (doe, buck, fawn), coyote, fox (brown and red!), turkey, rabbit/hare, cat, racoon, squirrel, chipmunk, marten (I guess, maybe mink?), snake (black, rat, king and not identified ones), mole (their evidence at least), barred owl, hawk/eagle, bat, crow, blue jay, cardinal, goldfinch, woodpecker, nuthatch, titmouse, chickadee, sparrow, starling, wren, hummingbird, fish – minnows? (when the creek isn’t dry like this year), insects (wasp, hornet, firefly, lots of dragonfly, japanese beetle – ugh, summer chafer, ladybug, bumble bee, etc),  sometimes a cow.

All wild, except the cows. The cows are just astray. However.

What do I need to go to a zoo for? Rhinos? Meh.

To be continued because not complete.

Later, due to his advancements as a computer engineer my dad was eligible for a russian type four stroke car that was a licensed rip-off of a Fiat (wich now owns Chrysler, hehe, circles are closing here certainly). We sure were proud of it, because now there was enough space so that I would not have to sleep on the floor boards during our 18 hour trip to my grand parents house in eastern Poland, instead I was able to sleep on the suitcases in the back of the station wagon-like back of the car (though the dimensions of the car where still compact… very compact). The make was called ‘Lada’.There where other Russian makes around town these days, ‘Wolga’, wich was the Cadillac of our time (spacious, grand and stylish sort of), mostly used for cab services and ‘Moskvich’, also preferably used for cabs but also for politicians and the likes.

25 years later those cars have vanished from the streets of Germany. You might find some refurbished Old Timers here and there, but because of the bad memories of those failure prone machines nobody has too much inclines to keep them alive.

But Russian pride and economic desperation does. Those cars are still around on the country side in good ol’ Russia. As you can see in those pictures below. I just took the most delightful ones of course and I apologize up front that I’m not able to track down the source other than I think I got them from a post from boingboing, a website full of curiosities, where I’m sure you’ll find out quick who made them, if you have a quick internet connection (I do not). Nevertheless: enjoy. The first picture involves a ‘Wolga’ and the second one a ‘Lada’. As I understand it, both where made in the former Russian province of Kasachstan. Enjoyable life there, apparantly.

Rise Against – Make It Stop (September’s Children) from LGBTQI Georgia on Vimeo.