Hoo Boy, it's been sultry today. Not North Carolina quality, but sultry enough. It rained about 1:40 am briefly, and today has been cloudy and damp. Prior to today there was a ride to the lake, which was very pleasant. The mille foil is developing its end of season very yellow shade.
Today we rode the Aubrey L. White parkway. One starts out riding over the Spokane River, which is very attractive. The head waters of the Spokane River are in Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho. The water comes to Spokane, and then joins up with the Columbia River and heads out to sea.
Today was interesting. Instead of riding in to the Bowl and Pitcher area of the park, we went left and kept riding. There is an amazing water reclamation plant out there. Who knew? It's just enormous. This is a screen scrape from Google Earth. Look bottom right on the facility grounds, those are giant digesters.
From the Spokesman Review we learn the following.
The steel-walled digesters use bacteria to process sludge into fertilizer. The gray-green structures are 89 feet in diameter and hold 2.8 million gallons each. In concrete galleries below ground hang a maze of pipes hooked to 75-horsepower pumps that can circulate sludge at 8,000 gallons a minute. The new tanks were created with sections of fabricated steel shipped from Iowa and pieced together. Foam insulation covers the steel, and an aluminum shell surrounds the insulation. Pumps are underground to reduce noise. The egg-shape design is safer, officials said, and allows for better mixing, less maintenance and lower energy use. The tanks include “robust foam control” to minimize accumulation of foam on top the sludge, a problem that contributed to the failure of the pancake-shaped tank in 2004. An earthen containment dike surrounds the tanks to prevent sewage spills in case of another accident.
It's a lot of infrastructure.
Here is a picture of a digester from the article I linked to.
This is not a digester, it's some sort of storage container.
Easier to see, because it's next to the drive way. They have an unearthly look about them.
Like the facilities in Tucson, this one does not smell unpleasant, it smells like hot soap. After water reclamation is complete, it's discharged in to the Spokane River. One wonders why the water is not used to recharge the local aquifers.
I'm not a fan of Ann Coulter, but this is funny. It was on twitter for a couple of days, being re-tweeted.
That's it! That's all I have to offer.
Simply because they are not food, no hot dog has passed my lips in about twenty years. And these won't make the trip, either.
ReplyDeleteLove the Ann Coulter tweet.
Ann Coulter, "stand by your man" - what a fickle girlfriend!
ReplyDeleteThe digest-er looks amazing! What a grand thing it would be to paint!
Those have got to be the nastiest flavours I have ever seen.
ReplyDeleteOh my god, who comes up with these ideas for nasty flavors and for hotdogs???
ReplyDeleteThe photos from the bike ride are lovely and the water reclamation plant is very interesting.
and I thought my posts from the weird food department were bad enough. gross. I'll have to look and see if they show up at my grocery store.
ReplyDeleteI cannot even believe those hot dogs. Who the heck is buying such things?!
ReplyDeleteAnn Coulter's tweet IS funny, but it kind of scares me that I agree with her about anything. (Same way I feel about Liz Cheney.)
Sultry here too. Ick. Those hot dogs are REAL?? Omg.
ReplyDeleteThose hot dogs are truly weird, and I would not be trying them any time soon. Yes, the Ann Coulter tweet is funny, but what Steve said.
ReplyDeleteOMG, the hot dogs; hard to believe those are real. Thanks for the shout-out to NC humidity/sultriness. It has been a beast of late. This morning for a bit it was 80F with 80% humidity. Try that one on for size!
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