Pi Day
As everyone knows, March 14, or 3.14, is Pi day. Becky celebrated Pi day by baking a wonderful Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, and invited us over to celebrate with them. What a great pie! Great family! Yay for Pi day!
Tuesday we took our friend Kathy to lunch, and then for a few errands. After visiting the library, we noticed a nice park nearby. It was a beautiful afternoon, and nice to explore a new-to-us park.
The weather forecast predicted a dramatic blizzard for the next morning… Strange to think of very nasty weather right after such a nice afternoon… but it happened! Late on Tuesday the wind came up dramatically, and all night it howled. Early Wednesday a little rain mixed with the wind, and shortly after that, snow. The snow didn’t know which way to go! It would swirl east, then west, up and down… very little sticking anywhere. Except on our windows! We got a layer of ice on the windows making it almost impossible to see out, increasing the feeling of being snowed in. It continued most of Wednesday. Schools and many businesses were closed. I80 was closed from North Platte to Lincoln from sometime Tuesday evening until early Thursday morning. Tim and Marnie, friends from Spokane, were headed across country, and were intending to spend Wednesday night with us. They ended up stuck in North Platte and got to have breakfast with us Thursday.
Most of the snow blew elsewhere, so we only had a couple of inches on our driveway. The wind seems to have picked up a lot of dirt, so when the snow hit, a layer of mud was underneath anything that had snow on it. Cars that were outside looked like they came from a mud bath. Our driveway, even the sides of the house, had a thin layer of mud on them when the ice melted away.
So you don’t get any pictures of the blizzard. Not much to see.
Lincoln Lore
Here’s more on the history of Lincoln, Nebraska.
The arrival of electricity around 1890 made for some dramatic changes in Lincoln. The Lincoln Herald proclaimed that the “coming year of grace 1891, will be the greatest in the history of Lincoln. [There will be] electricity on every [street]car line in the city, a grand union depot, viaducts at all dangerous crossings, factories, and businesses without number.” Two weeks later the downtown Lindell Hotel bragged that it had “all modern improvements: steam heat and electric lights in every room.”
Electric streetcars replaced most horse-drawn omnibuses, and thereby reducing the tremendous amount of manure horses left on city streets. The electric streetcars were smoother starting and stopping, and were lit at night. And no chance the horses would panic and race off with passengers in tow.
Streetcars made it possible to get into town from suburbs, helping the city sprawl out even more. Lincoln had no city parks at that time, but it was said the streetcar ride out to College View, with the newly established Union College, was a nice way to enjoy a picnic.
All was not great with the electric streetcars, however. A major problem was that by 1893, there were 13 streetcar companies in Lincoln. They competed fiercely with each other, even to the point of loosing the goodwill of riders. Other major cities merged lines into a single municipal line, but Lincolnites staunchly refused. Not until 1909 were competing lines merged into the new Lincoln Traction Company.
The streetcars served a vital need in Lincoln… until the personal car arrived. That was a while “down the road,” and the subject for another Lincoln Lore another day.