Over eight inches of snow fell in Milton Monday night to transform the landscape into a white glistening powdery scene.

The snowfall didn't stop Milton mail carrier Steve Friend III from delivering Tuesday's mail on Lake Drive. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Tara Woods, left, gets a little help from neighbor Karen Long to clear her car at Shipbuilder's Village in Milton. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Only a few weeks before baseball season. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Ewis McKinley shovels his sidewalk on Federal Street. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Beautiful and strange effects from shadows overlooking the lagoon at Milton Memorial Park. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Nearly a foot of snow covered the sidewalk on Federal Street. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

The Dogfish sign was made even more cool with the snow. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Alex Hamilton, right, and Jeff Clendaniel clear the sidewalk at Dogfish Brewery. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

Cool designs were made by the snow at Milton Memorial Park. (Photo by: Dan Cook )

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Milton gets blanket of snow

A fight over the future of quarrying on Dunedin landmark Saddle Hill is likely to return to the courts after mediation efforts failed.

This comes as Saddle Views Estate Ltd director and quarry owner Calvin Fisher pushes a plan to return the hill to its ''former glory'' by re-filling it, which he says has attracted little interest from Dunedin City Council.

The likely return to court for the long-running conflict comes after the High Court last year ruled there was a consent for quarrying on the lower hump of Saddle Hill, but asked both parties to reach a consensus on conditions.

However, efforts to come to an agreement appear to have fallen over after two meetings, and council staff have recommended councillors leave it up to the Environment Court to decide on conditions.

Mr Fisher said yesterday he was disappointed at the direction from council staff and the lack of interest in his plan to return the hill to its former glory.

His hope was to continue quarrying the top of the hill and then return it to its ''former glory'' by re-filling it with hard fill.

This was a process used at other quarries around New Zealand, which was paid for by charging people to dump hard fill, such as concrete and brick.

This was a much better situation than leaving the summit of the hill in its current state, which due to historical quarrying was ''totally deformed from what it was''.

''When the council says they care about the hill and don't want to put it back to its former glory ... it's just disingenuous.

The fact he heard a recommendation was being made to the council through the media was typical of the ''abhorrent'' and unfair treatment his company had received.

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Saddle Hill legal dispute set to continue

The Pleasant Hill City Council approved a contract that officials say could lead to a better looking landscape.

The city council unanimously approved a new mowing contract that gives the city more legal recourse if a contractor does an inadequate job at a meeting last Tuesday.

Pleasant Hills parks and recreation supervisor Heath Ellis told the council the new contract helps ensure the citys green spaces will be landscaped properly.

Over the years weve seen some challenges associated with making sure (contractors) get the job done, Ellis said. With this contract, we have enough teeth so if they dont get the job done, theyre gone.

Ellis said the previous contract never clarified some important aspects of landscaping the citys parks, cemeteries and city properties.

In the past we never had verbage that basically spelled out, if you fail to do this, this is what is going to happen to you, he said.

He said the current contract adds sections making the mowing contractor liable for damage to trees and turf, as well as protection against bids that are too low.

The contract adds provisions that potential bidders must meet. These include the contractor must have mowed 100 acres per week last year, owned a commercial turf-grass mowing business for the past three years and provide proof of insurance from most recent seasons. The contract also stipulates services rendered on specific days of the week, like mowing the ball fields on Fridays, and specific types of equipment the contractor must use.

These are the things that we find to be most necessary, he said. It lets the contractors know that we are serious.

Ellis said the citys biggest problem in gathering bids for landscaping contracts is that it gets bids that are unreasonably low.

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New mowing contract has 'teeth'

A water sprinkler system on a parking strip spills out onto the sidewalk and into the street in Bankers Hill. The Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College is a popular spot for people looking to transform water-guzzling plants and lawns into a more conservative landscape. One of the displays specifically demonstrates rainwater catchment systems. Another shows the comparison between the typical lawn, the water consumption by various grasses, and a backyard that has a rock, patio and limited grass design.

Has San Diego County done a good job of conserving water in recent years? It depends on which statistics you look at.

Overall municipal water use which includes residential, industrial and commercial consumption dropped by more than 20 percent between 2007 and 2014, according to the San Diego County Water Authority.

But if you focus on homeowners only, the picture is clearly different.

Per-capita residential water use in the region crept up during the past five years despite pleas from the governor, water managers, conservation groups and others to cut back amid Californias ongoing drought. Thats the central finding of a new report from the Equinox Center, an economic and environmental think tank in San Diego.

The report, which will be released publicly Tuesday, showed that San Diego Countys residential water consumption climbed by 4 percent between fiscal years 2010 and 2014.

Although water districts typically track urban water use as a broad category that includes residential, commercial and industrial accounts, the center decided to pinpoint residential use to see whether homeowners are responding to public conservation campaigns.

The group found that the average San Diegan used 88 gallons per day in 2010 and 92 gallons in 2014.

We want to get a snapshot of where we are out there and allow decision-makers to use it in their decision-making process, said Ray Ellis, chairman of the Equinox Centers board of directors. We think the numbers speak for themselves.

The report noted that the increase in residential water use corresponded with higher than average temperatures and lower than average rainfall, with precipitation in 2014 at just five inches about half the regions historical average. The only year during the study period in which water use declined was 2011, which saw about 12 inches of rainfall.

The rest is here:
Home water use up despite drought

There are few structures in the garden more prominent than a gate. A good garden gate can invite a person into the garden, protect the garden from intruders, and becomes a feature to draw the eye. This weekend I put together a gate for my vegetable garden fence (which is still under construction). I managed to complete the majority of work on the gate over the weekend but I still have some odds and ends before I would call it a finished project.

All materials for this project were supplied by Lowe's and the Creative Ideas Network of Bloggers!

I began making the two gates by using 2x4's to create a frame. To connect the lumber together I used an angle drilling tool called a Kreg. It makes these nice little pocket holes and allows you to get a solid grip at an angle with your screws.

I still need to sand down the wood, adjust the frames so they swing easier, fix the trellis insert, and maybe stain the gate. This was all I had time to accomplish this weekend and I'm pleased with the progress! This gate should prevent the deer from waltzing though the front door to my garden. Now I just need to finish the design and the rest of the fence!

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Growing The Home Garden

By Peter HaynesFeb. 15, 2015, 11:45 p.m.

This exhibition takes the viewer on a seductive journey, travelling with the artist as she confronts and meditates on the powerful beauty that is our country.

Charlie Wells - Forms of Landscape.

Tuggeranong Arts Centre, 137 Reed Street, Greenway. Open weekdays 10am to 7pm, Saturday 10am to 4pm. Until 28 February.

Forms of Landscape is an exhibition about the artist, Charlie Wells's, relationship with and responses to the Australian landscape. The exhibition takes the viewer on a seductive journey, travelling with the artist as she confronts and meditates on the powerful beauty that is our country. Wells ushers the viewer around the light-filled space of the larger of the two upstairs galleries of the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. The installation works particularly well with the mainly "serial" (and logical) hang of the thirty pieces allowing for the quiet contemplation of each work but simultaneously insinuating internal relationships within the various series whilst alluding to the thematic bottom line that gives the overall exhibition meaning as well as aesthetic resonance.

Wells uses a limited, yet very effective palette essentially browns, creams and yellows, the latter sometimes declaratively in an acid tone. The palette is a major ingredient in its contribution to the ambient character of the exhibition. The colours are those of the landscape and Wells invests them with a soft and intimate tone that is at once personal to her and quietly conveys her emotional attachment to places visited and loved. She makes (relatively) small works that demand close visual inspection and consequent aesthetic engagement. The poetry of intimate confrontation is beautifully celebrated in Forms of Landscape.

The four works from the "Paddock' series begin the viewer's journey. The title of each "Paddock" is related to a centrally placed coloured rectangle "Yellow Paddock", "Red Paddock", "Green Paddock", "Ochre Paddock". These coloured motifs sit or indeed "float" above fields of lines or (lines of) dots. Each work has thirteen lines, neatly horizontal and clearly evocative of an epistolary format, but here perhaps nature's scripts are transposed to the artist's pictorial vocabulary. Wells's use of repetition is embracingly seductive. The abstract marks or dots in each line evoke aspects of topography. Their overt individualisation secures posts of memory for the artist but posits possibilities for varying interpretations for each viewer.

Formally the central motif contains the slow lateral pull of the linear background. The serial character of the sets of 13 lines underscores the entire exhibition in that it infers the continuity of transactions with nature. While each line is confined to the width of the paper on which it sits, the "possibilities" for eastward extension are always present. Wells however holds this with the floating density of the various centralised rectangles.

The works in the "Landscape Remembered" series are subtly layered conveyors of memories. They continue the warmth of emotional attachment to places seen and loved. In most of the exhibition "place" is not specified. In "Burnt Hill Mullagalah" the nominal title is irrelevant. The landscape becomes a misty evocation of the bush after fire, an allusion to the drama inherent in the cycles of nature. The Fred Williamesque tripartite division of the picture plane is overlaid by, once again, floating motifs (here, leaves) that provide formal spatial depth and illustrations from the natural world. The elision of the natural with the abstract imparts formal and pictorial tension and underscores the artist's insertion of her highly developed aesthetic understanding of her chosen subject-matter.

Wells's making literally embraces the world she pictorializes. Process is intimately entwined with content and is integral to the way Wells visually manifests her philosophical and aesthetic understanding of where she is. Actual physical elements from the places she visualises are embedded into the paper or activate the canvases, literally referencing the landscape she so poetically translates. While this procedural encompassing mostly works, in some instances (eg "Reflections on Dam II" or "Transience") its literalness, its blaring actuality, is arguably best omitted. Suggestion is often a more compelling device than reality.

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Charlie Wells and Forms of Landscape

COLUMBIA, S.C. South Carolina voters often think of themselves as presidential tie-breakers, enjoying their prime role as the next to cast ballots after Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary.

But what if there's a ringer in the race?

The state's senior senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, is flirting with running for president, an idea some initially saw as so unlikely that many thought his longtime Senate buddy John McCain was joking when he mentioned it the first time.

Graham is serious, launching a campaign-like organization and starting to lay the groundwork for a bid. He gave a well-received speech to the influential Republican Jewish Coalition last week in Washington. Next week, he is scheduled to visit California to meet with donors and then head to Iowa.

His potential entry into the race has put his state's political talent into a holding pattern. As they wait for Graham to decide whether to run in a state carried by every GOP nominee since 1980, with Mitt Romney's loss to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2012 the lone exception, they're debating among themselves whether he can or should mount a national campaign.

"Everything's kind of frozen here right now, waiting to see what he'll do," said Warren Tompkins, a longtime Republican operative who ran South Carolina campaigns for President George W. Bush and Romney in 2012.

Added Tompkins' sometimes adversary, Richard Quinn, who ran McCain's 2000 campaign in the state: "I've been with (Graham) since he ran for Congress in '93, and whatever Lindsey does this cycle, I'll be in his corner."

Such loyalty shouldn't be viewed as a harbinger of Graham coasting to an easy win in South Carolina, however. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack was one of the first candidates to enter and then leave the 2008 campaign, and Romney, who owns a vacation home in New Hampshire, came up short that same year in his adopted state's primary.

South Carolina is deeply conservative in the "upstate" around Greenville and Spartanburg, less so near the state capital of Columbia, with a coastline that's home to thousands of retirees and members of the military who have moved from elsewhere, bringing their brand of GOP politics with them.

"When you come to South Carolina and win, it means you've checked off all the boxes: social conservative, fiscal conservative, strong defense, all of it," said Katon Dawson, a former state party chairman who backs former Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2016.

Originally posted here:
Graham's consideration of 2016 upends SC landscape

BRATTLEBORO >> The Harris Hill Ski Jump has been growing, changing and evolving from the very first year it opened way back in 1922.

Construction on the steep hillside that rises off of Cedar Street started the year before when Fred Harris and a small crew of workers set out with hand tools and planks of wood to build a ski jump where athletes could launch out above the winter landscape.

Those ski jumpers used wooden skis with leather bindings, and they kept warm with thick and heavy wool pants and sweaters, bearing very little resemblance to the high-tech, aerodynamic jumpers of today.

The facility, and the sport, have come a long way in the past 93 years.

"My father was born in 1887 and I think he would fall over if he saw all this new technology and the improvements and changes," Fred Harris' daughter Sandy Harris said. "In his heart he would be overjoyed and amazed to think that this is still going on, and that his vision of over 90 years ago is still going strong in his birth place and community."

The gates will open for 2015 Harris Hill Ski Jumping Competition at 10 a.m., Saturday, Feb. 14, with the first trial jumpers launching at 11 a.m. and opening ceremonies scheduled for 12:15 p.m.

Over the next two days some of the best ski jumpers in the world will compete in the International Ski Federation sanctioned event.

Over the past 93 years the facility has seen constant upgrades as the sport has demanded more from the jumpers.

Fred Harris, a native of Brattleboro, helped build the first jump at a cost of $2,200. It opened in 1922 and by 1924 improvements were made to the jump to improve the structure.

Dana Sprague, a local historian who has been documenting the advancements at Harris Hill, said the structure required almost constant upgrades, and he said Fred Harris was the perfect leader who poured his heart and soul into making sure the ski jump was ready to go for the annual competition.

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Always reaching further

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) South Carolina voters often think of themselves as presidential tie-breakers, enjoying their prime role as the next to cast ballots after Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary.

But what if there's a ringer in the race?

The state's senior senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, is flirting with running for president, an idea some initially saw as so unlikely that many thought his longtime Senate buddy John McCain was joking when he mentioned it the first time.

Graham is serious, launching a campaign-like organization and starting to lay the groundwork for a bid. He gave a well-received speech to the influential Republican Jewish Coalition last week in Washington. Next week, he is scheduled to visit California to meet with donors and then head to Iowa.

His potential entry into the race has put his state's political talent into a holding pattern. As they wait for Graham to decide whether to run in a state carried by every GOP nominee since 1980, with Mitt Romney's loss to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2012 the lone exception, they're debating among themselves whether he can or should mount a national campaign.

"Everything's kind of frozen here right now, waiting to see what he'll do," said Warren Tompkins, a longtime Republican operative who ran South Carolina campaigns for President George W. Bush and Romney in 2012.

Added Tompkins' sometimes adversary, Richard Quinn, who ran McCain's 2000 campaign in the state: "I've been with (Graham) since he ran for Congress in '93, and whatever Lindsey does this cycle, I'll be in his corner."

Such loyalty shouldn't be viewed as a harbinger of Graham coasting to an easy win in South Carolina, however. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack was one of the first candidates to enter and then leave the 2008 campaign, and Romney, who owns a vacation home in New Hampshire, came up short that same year in his adopted state's primary.

South Carolina is deeply conservative in the "upstate" around Greenville and Spartanburg, less so near the state capital of Columbia, with a coastline that's home to thousands of retirees and members of the military who have moved from elsewhere, bringing their brand of GOP politics with them.

"When you come to South Carolina and win, it means you've checked off all the boxes: social conservative, fiscal conservative, strong defense, all of it," said Katon Dawson, a former state party chairman who backs former Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2016.

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Graham's consideration of 2016 complicates SC landscape

Feb. 12, 2015, noon

In remote Broken Hill the medical staff use their wits to remedy any manner of injury.

Dr Andrew Olesnicky picture supplied.

According to Dr Andrew Olesnicky hospital emergency departments are like snowflakes all different.

As the Director of Emergency Services at Broken Hill Base Hospital, Olesnicky believes his ED is possibly the most unique in Australia.

Outback ER, a new 8-part series, focuses on what sets the Broken Hill ED apart including how different a life-threatening crisis can be in one of the most isolated locations in the country.

Taking in the Broken Hill Base Hospital, The Royal Flying Doctors Service and the NSW Ambulance service, the series showcases what happens in emergency situations without the resources of a big hospital.

While we treat cowboys we dont want to be cowboys." - Andrew Olensicky

Our ED is small. We dont have huge staff numbers so wouldnt be able to move to a big disaster easily. We are away from 24/7 specialist care so if a patient needs a higher level of specialist care they need to be shipped out to Adelaide, Olensicky says.

The ED at the Broken Hill Base hospital. picture supplied

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Outback ER gives a taste of healthcare in the bush