Technological marvels

Here in Petersburg, there is no Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, and other electronic speciality retailers. We do have a Radio Shack occupying a corner of the "department store." And the other hardware store also sells a few common consumer electronics.

We also don't have a big pet store like PetSmart or Petco. There's a feed store about 7 miles out of town. One of the hardware stores stocks some basic pet supplies from cats and dogs to fish and reptiles. The city's vet died a little while back.

So the town isn't exposed (or perhaps overexposed) to the latest in various gadgets and gizmos as happens in a larger city or a more physically connected area. The 2-year old BlackBerry(TM) device I use is a relative novelty, even though the cell providers around here do offer it. It's been called the BlueBerry or HuckleBerry on more than one occasion.

The star of the show has got to be our Litter-Robot automatic cat litter device. Even the (compared to the Litter-Robot) rather inferior LitterMaid(TM) and similar products are uncommon enough that cat owners are relatively unaware of them. And so the oohs and aahs heard when the Litter-Robot is demonstrated is perhaps a bit like that exclaimed by someone experiencing a personal computer for the first time.

I'm not trying to make this town sound like the backwaters, because it isn't. For a price, or with enough searching, just about anything can be had. It's just that when a town is isolated like this, I think that people by necessity become self-sufficient with the resources that are readily and commonly available, and it becomes difficult to imagine anything different or, perhaps, better (though in many cases, "progress" is not always better).

Maybe there's a lesson here for all of us. Maybe it's that we should be careful about getting so inward focused, whether on ourselves or in groups that we commonly associate, that we forget that there is a world outside of us and that once in a while, we could learn something by taking the time to observe what is going on outside of our comfort zones. Just a thought...

I think the source of our moisture problem may have been identified, or at least a very strong culprit identified. Gerry and Deloris dropped by for a visit last night. (They saw in passing that we had our door open -- the reason was to let the cool air in -- and so they just stopped by to say hello.) We chatted a while and learned that construction here typically doesn't use vapor barriers underneath. What results then is that the moisture that collects -- inevitable given the conditions -- eventually gets absorbed by the floor and moves up into the interior. So we concluded that this is what is happening with our apartment and being in the ground floor. Gerry told us that many houses have one to two feet of standing water under the buildings. Ick!