I found the story of this town very interesting, and felt the need to write a little about it. Centralia was established as a mining town and was originally named Centreville until 1865. Centralia was incorporated in 1866 and it’s main business was Coal Mining until the 1960s when most of the mining companies went out of business. During that time, the town would burn their trash they would dispose in empty mining pits. The town would get a couple of volunteer firefighters to monitor the fire, and make sure it doesn’t get out of control. Well, this fire was never extinguished and had spread from the lower depths of the pit to a hole that led to an abandoned mine shaft. This fire was started in May of 1962 and burned throughout the 1960s and 1970s despite attempts to extinguish the fire. Throughout this time, locals almost forgot about the problem until 1979 when a refueling station owner lowered his wooden measuring stick into his underground tanks to measure the fuel. When he pulled the stick out, it felt extremely hot and after taking temperature readings, found the temperature of his underground gasoline to be 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Word spread quickly throughout the town of the seriousness of this problem that was thought to have been contained. State officials were notified and in 1981 a 12 year old boy was playing in his backyard The boy would have likely died if it hadn’t been for his cousin who pulled him to safety. Ironically that same day a state representative, state senator, and a mine safety director was in town doing some investigative work on the mine fire problem. Through out the next few years, people were evacuated because of safety concerns, and in 1992 Pennsylvania claimed eminent domain over the town and revoked their zipcode. Some families still stayed in the town despite having their properties condemned, and the apparent safety concerns. Since then, homes have been demolished and more recently in 2007 the Moyer residence was shredded but remained occupied until this time. You can still see smoke pillowing from the ground because of this almost 50 year old fire that was the death of this town. It is believed that the fire could burn for another 250 years with the amount of coal that is estimated to be below the town of Centralia.

This town is extremely fascinating to me, and I hope that I can one day visit this almost empty town. It’s crazy to think that just one minor misjudgment caused many people to have to leave what was once their home town.

You can see more more photos on Flickr
And Read more on Wikipedia

Well, this weekend I decided to do a redesign my blog. My old theme was a modified Green Marinee Wordpress theme that I found 3 years ago and was looking pretty out dated. I hope everyone likes this new theme and feel free to leave comments. I can’t seem to figure out how to get rid of the underline styling on my Flickr images in the sidebar. I’m no CSS master and after tinkering for 10 minutes, became frustrated and said screw it. I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween, I know I did. Katy and I went to Goshen friday night and brought some friends with us to a Goshen College party. Besides having to break up a fight due to my dumb ass friend, it was a pretty good time. Note to self: Do not allow a friend to pee on a stranger. Cheers!

I finally pulled the trigger, I sold both of my bikes in the past 2 weeks. I sold one to my brother, which didn’t really bother me. Partially because I still had a bike that I could ride, and because I knew it was going to a good home. But today, I gave up my last bike to some guys that I will probably never see again. And above all, it was a bike that I had dreamed about owning for 6 years. It was the most powerful and well designed streetbike that I had ever owned. My 2004 Honda RC51 will be missed, it has been to the race track 3 times since I have owned it and down to deals gap once just recently. Now that my bike is gone, I feel kind of empty. Especially, since I work so much it was nice to commute on a motorcycle to break up the monotony of everyday life. I enjoy everything about riding on two wheels, and now that joy is gone. Also, it’s going to be that much harder to buy a motorcycle when I get back since the money I got from the sale of the bike is going towards paying it off. So it will be another 2 years until I get a motorcycle. Fuck that’s a long time. But it had to be done to do the things Katy and I want to do. I’m not sure if I should be mad at myself or just sad. I just have to be careful to not take my anger out on Katy, because it’s not her fault and it wasn’t her decision. I think I’m going to go sulk. Thanks for listening. I’m going to miss riding on two wheels, a lot…………

A motorcycle driven by 28 Year old Benjamin Snook crashed Saturday May 24th, 2008 just south of North Shore Drive on Cassopolis Street in Elkhart, Indiana. Ben was traveling at a high rate of speed when going around a bend and veered into oncoming traffic, striking a car at about 7:07pm that was heading south. Benjamin died from head injuries later that evening. You can read more about the news report here

News reports like these upset me, because although it wasn’t specifically stated. From the sounds of the injuries, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. How many more people will have to die because Indiana does not force riders of motorcycles to wear helmets?

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So, I finally got a website built for Market Motors. It took me about 2.5 months to build, with me working on it almost every evening after work. I’m pretty happy with it, and it feels like I have accomplished a great feat. Although, I did have to put other projects on hold while doing it, like the house. I wanted to get it done for Christmas so that I could give it to Mark. I’m hoping getting on the web will help with business. We aren’t doing bad by any means, but with todays average age of surfing the internet being 44, I figured it would be worth it. So for anyone shopping for a used car in the South Bend / Elkhart area in Indiana check out our website.

Just ran across this post and found it interesting since there are many people who use torrents. It seems that Comcast isn’t playing nice and is blocking people from seeding torrents. There are a few workarounds however, one of which is changing your ISP completely. If I had Comcast I would definitely be switching, and not recommending them to others. And I will switch from Verizon, if they decide to pull this shit on us, or decided to filter any traffic at all that is wanted. But what happens when all ISP’s decide to filter traffic? Maybe it would be time to get out of the internet realm altogether and say fuck it, I will do my banking over the telephone, and pay my bills via snail mail. Naahh, I don’t think that could ever happen. Or could it?