Scott Schrantz's Blog

Just days after the last of the snow from our previous storm finally melted, we’re getting hit with another cold front and more snow. It started just after noon, and while yesterday the Weather Service was saying we should expect three to five inches of snow to fall, now they’ve changed their forecast to just one inch. So, as always, we’ll just have to keep one eye looking out the window to find out the truth.

Just a quick photo update here on the two Arby’s construction projects happening in Carson City and Minden.

The Carson City Arby’s, which is being remodeled, missed both the deadline of January 4th, mentioned on their sign and the one of January 10th, which was in the newspaper. But, looking at how much work they’re doing, I can see why it’s taking longer than two weeks. This is a massive rebuild of the building’s facade, and the work in the kitchen area is probably just as drastic. Expect this one to take a few more weeks, at least.

The new Arby’s in Minden (next door to the Arco station) is getting its roof built. It’s on track for an April opening. Once this is open the Arby’s in Gardnerville, which is about as outdated as the Carson one used to be, will close its doors for good.

The opening date for the Carson City freeway has been moved up, from mid-April to mid-February. All the work has been proceeding ahead of schedule (despite the freeway itself being a couple of decades late). Which means that if everything comes together just right, we could be driving on our little half-highway as soon as a month from now.

It’s going to be a welcome addition to Carson City, but since this is just Phase One of the project, and it only stretches halfway across town, we’re not going to get the full benefit of the freeway just yet. It will definitely help folks that live in East Carson get to Reno. It’s expected to shave a good ten minutes off that drive. But it does nothing to help anyone from South Carson, or from Douglas County, or to get all that highway traffic off of Carson Street. For that we’ll have to wait until 2010 when the whole thing is done.

A couple of days ago I said I wanted to see first-hand reports of the flooding that happened last weekend. Well, I was looking through my favorite Northern Nevada blog, The Adventures of Yukon Sully, and I found not just one but two photo essays on his experience. And since he lives in downtown Reno, right where the Truckee River flowed over its banks and started flooding streets, he’s got some pretty good first-hand stories. He was out on Saturday flinging sandbags around, but he still managed to snap a few good pictures from the street and from the balcony of his apartment. Go check it out.

The Reno Gazette Journal also had a cover story yesterday, comparing this latest flood to the one we had in 1997. The verdict? Less water, but still a flood to remember. Also be sure to check out their photo galleries of the flood, as well as a gallery of photos from 1997.

Two more casualties of last week’s storms: a fence and a speed limit sign, both on Stephanie Way in the Carson Valley, both taken down by passing cars. The fence looks like it was a pretty wild crash; about twenty feet of the fence is smashed and there are deep ruts in the mud where the vehicle came plowing through.

You’ve really got to be moving to do that much damage!

The Arby’s Restaurant at 1122 South Carson has undertaken a badly-needed $200,000 renovation. It’s being remodeled inside and out, getting rid of the 70’s decor that it’s had since, well, probably since the 70’s, and updating it to a more modern look. They’ve shut the restaurant down during the renovation, and one look at the building will tell you why. This isn’t just a paint job, this is major construction. They’re doing this one on the fast track too; it’s only been closed a week now, and they’re planning to have it done in another week. This is Carson City’s only Arby’s, so we’re all going to have to go without our roast beef and curly fries for a few more days.

Already it looks like most of the demolition is done, and now they’ve got to start putting it back together. I’ll keep track of the progress here, and it shouldn’t be long before before Carson City is waist-deep in Jamocha Shakes again.

And, in other Arby’s news, the new store in Minden is coming along quite nicely. It’s all pre-fab construction, so it literally took about eight hours to put the building together, like a giant Erector set. They still have a ton of finishing work to do, though. It should be open in April, located right next to the Arco gas station at the north end of Minden.

It looks like I missed all the excitement! I flew out of town on Christmas Day, and then last weekend from the comfort of my hotel in downtown Seattle I started hearing about flooding in Carson City, mudslides coming down from the hills, road closures, and all kinds of other things that made me glad I scheduled my vacation when I did. And then we arrived back in town Monday night to find this muddy, swampy mess, all covered with a fresh layer of ice and snow. So what really happened while I was away? He’s what I pieced together from reading the newspaper:

Late last week, a winter storm brought snow to the mountains and rain to the valley. Unlike our usual storms, which come in for a few hours and then move on, this one wasn’t going anywhere. It rained all day Friday, and by Saturday the rivers and streams were beginning to fill up. Carson City was placed under flood watch.

Saturday apparently was the worst day. The Carson River had risen above its flood stage, sending water through the golf course in Gardnerville and closing Hwy 395 at Cradlebaugh Bridge. Muller and Genoa Lanes were closed because the river was flowing over the pavement. Loose soil and dead trees from the Waterfall Fire washed down the mountains outside Carson City, bringing a flow of mud and logs that clogged the storm drains and flowed down city streets. Residents everywhere were piling up sandbags to keep the water out. Carson’s roads flooded, causing some cars to stall out and even float away. For a while it looked like we might have a repeat of the 1997 New Year’s Flood, where the waters just kept coming and most of Carson City and the Carson Valley were shut down for days. But, late on Saturday, the storm slowed down and the waters started subsiding. The worst was over.

Sunday was the dawn of a new year, and also a day of cleaning for Carson City. Snowplows were put to work clearing the streets of mud. Free sandbags were available for the taking for anyone who was still working to keep the water away. Prison inmates were put to work all over the state, filling sandbags and fixing and clearing roads. Businesses dealt with cleaning up and trying to reopen. And although the storm had subsided, rumors of a second wave of moisture were floating around. It looked like Mother Nature wasn’t done with us yet.

And indeed she wasn’t. On Monday it started snowing, covering all the mud and still-standing water all over town with a thick blanket of 4 to 6 inches of snow. Snowplows that had been pushing mud around were now back to pushing snow. And as the white stuff fell, it hid the true impact of what had happened over the weekend. Muddy roads started to become a pristine white. Areas of standing flood water became icy ponds. Carson City started to look like it did after any normal winter storm.

But even though Mother Nature is trying to hide it, we still know it’s there. Underneath all that snow is a layer of mud that needs to be cleaned up. There are flood waters that need to recede. There are damaged roads, like Hwy 342 to Gold Hill that collapsed into a sinkhole, and Six Mile Canyon between Dayton and VC which was so undermined by the storm that it will remain closed for months. The governor has declared several counties to be disaster areas, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to get back to normal.

But, it could have been a lot worse. Anyone who was here in 1997 knows that. And anyone who wasn’t in the area for that flood should ask someone who was. So we got off pretty easy this time.

But now I want to hear your stories. I want to see your pictures. Ryan Jerz has already posted a video and some Flickr photos showing what the Truckee River in downtown Reno looked like on Saturday. Now I want to hear from the rest of you, the ones who, unlike me, actually had to live through Saturday’s flooding. Post in my comments. E-mail me pictures, or post them yourself. Or put something on your own website and send it to me. I know that what I read in the newspaper is only the smallest sliver of what really happened out there. I want to hear more, and I’m sure everyone else does too. Time to share!

Okay, everyone reading this has to drive out to Johnson Lane tonight. No excuses, no shirking your duties. If you are in Northern Nevada, you need to hop in your car after sunset tonight and drive to the Carson Valley. If you are an expatriate living somewhere else, you need to hop on a plane and get here as soon as you can. If you’re in a hospital bed, get them to call an ambulance. Because out in Johnson Lane there is a Christmas light display that you’re not going to want to miss.

Last night we went out in search of awesome Christmas displays, and we spent the evening coming across display after display that were depressingly similar. Eveyone has the icicle lights, everyone has the wireframe reindeer, everyone has an inflatable Santa on the roof. After a couple of hours of this we decided to head home, and hit one last neighborhood on our way.

That’s when we had a revelation and realized what an awesome Christmas display truly could be.

Last year I wrote what I called “Radio Free Suburbia”, where I talked about how one of our neighbors was broadcasting Christmas songs over the radio with a low-wattage transmitter. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but because we didn’t actually spend a lot of time in front of their house, it wasn’t until this year that we realized we were only seeing half of the puzzle, and we were missing how cool it actually was. Last night we drove by again, and found out that this year they were once again broadcasting over the air. But this time we spent a little more time parked in the street looking at their house, and we began to notice something: the lights on their house and in their yard were blinking, like so many other houses we had seen that night. But instead of blinking in a random pattern, they seemed to be programmed, like they were putting on a show.. And as we sat there longer, with their radio station tuned in the background, our brains put all the pieces together: this light show was actually synchronized to the music! They had turned their entire yard into a stage, playing out this spectacle that must have taken weeks or months of programming.

Click to view actual video of the lights.

Well, we sat there, transfixed. Song after song came on the radio, each one of them carefully choreographed in the lights. Other cars pulled up to the house and shut their engines off. And before we knew if, maybe 20 minutes later, we had sat through the entire loop and the songs started to repeat. We drove away and looked at some other houses, but everything was a disappointment after that.

I was sitting there watching this show, and wondering how it was done, when at one point Wayne Kremer, the owner, came on the radio explaining how he had set it up. It uses a software called Light-O-Rama, which coordinates the music with several controller boxes placed around the property. There are ten boxes controlling 134 channels and over 50,000 lights! After getting home and going a little digging online, I found the same setup used at a few other houses. Carson Williams in Ohio did one, and you’ve also got the Plymouth Lights, the Lindsay Lights, and Wonderland Christmas that are all based on the same concept. But being able to see it live beats watching a grainy video any day.

Speaking of which, here’s a grainy video of the show! I uploaded one song to Ourmedia for everyone who can’t make it out to see the lights, or who wants to sample the show before they go.

If you are in the area and you do want to go visit, the lights are in the Johnson Lane area of Douglas County. Drive Hwy 395 to Stephanie Way, turn east on Stephanie and drive about a mile and a half to Saratoga Springs. Turn left into Saratoga Springs, then take the second right onto Chaparral Court. The lights are at the end of the cul-de-sac, on the left. The address is 1176 Chaparral Court (here’s a map). If you go check out the lights, post a comment letting everyone know what you think!

Update, 12/24: I just found out that the lights have their own official website, www.NevadaChristmas.com. It includes, among other things, a complete video of the entire 19-minute show. Awesome!

There’s another new “community website” on the map for the Carson Valley. This one is www.welovecarsonvalley.com. And I’m not impressed. Why? Let’s do a little digging and find out.

We Love Carson Valley is another one of those “neighborhood template” sites, where someone develops a lowest-common-denominator community website and then sells it to communities across the country. This has happened before, with www.johnson-lane.com (the site is dead now, but I wrote about it a couple of years ago). That site was brought to us by a couple of real estate agents, and it was copied verbatim from some kind of nationwide, one-size-fits-all template.

So now if you do a little digging around welovecarsonvalley.com, what do you find? Oh surprise surprise, it’s being brought to us by a real estate agent! Debra L. Garber of Garber & Garber Re/Max. And so any thought you might have had about We Love Carson Valley being some kind of helpful community resource turns out to be false. It’s really nothing more than one big advertisement for their real estate business.

And if you dig even further, it gets uglier. A copyright statement at the bottom leads us back to the originator of the site, the ones who built it and sold it to the Garbers. That would be www.myonlineneighborhood.com. My Online Neighborhood seems to be solely in the business of providing this kind of boilerplate website to real estate agents across the country. If you read through their site (or, I should say, listen through it, since the owner helpfully provides a sound file of himself reading all the copy on each page), you’ll find that the sites they set up aren’t intended to be anything more than elaborate advertisements for the real estate agency in question. The website isn’t there for the community, it’s there as a “tool REALTORS use to generate more buyer and seller leads than ever before.” You see, they don’t care about the people who contribute to the site at all. That’s not what it’s about for them. The site is just a way to raise awareness of their business, and everyone who contributes to the site (or puts a bumper sticker on their car) is falling right into their trap.

How many people do you know that would put a REALTOR’S bumper sticker on their car? Yet those same people proudly display one of their community web site.

You see? They’re tricking you into placing free advertising on your car. And not only are they poaching the labor of the community for their own personal gain, but they think they’re doing a noble thing! They say they’re “giv[ing] back to the community that had given us so much,” but all they’re really doing it taking, taking, taking. Taking people’s goodwill, taking people’s hard work, and using it to “generate more buyer and seller leads.” Screw them. I’m not donating my time to their marketing efforts.

But one thing you can say about them is that they’ve certainly made a successful business out of duping Realtors. ilovegoodyear.com. welovecapecoral.com. ilovefremont.com. ilovesantarosaca.com. ourballantyne.com. And hundreds more. These sites are spreading around the country like weeds. And you can bet that each one of them represents money flowing in to My Online Neighborhood. The good news is that most of them seem to be empty of any real content, so they’re failing in their mission to bring people together to worship at the feet of the Realtor. Maybe in a couple of years they’ll all be abandoned and the domains taken over by squatters, just like johnson-lane.com.

Jeff Jarvis said it best: Local ain’t easy. It’s tough to build a local site and attract participants, and to keep it going. I’m finding that out already with Around Carson, and I’m not even at the stage yet where I’m actively recruiting contributors. I think the best local sites are going to be built locally. And I don’t mean commissioned by some real estate agent who just wants to increase sales, I’m talking about local people who want to build a site, either from scratch or by cobbling together existing tools, and keep it running for the good of the community. Companies like My Online Neighborhood will always be around, and they’ll always be able to extract cash from guilliable Realtors, but the sites they build will die, and die fast. Because there’s no real local connection to them. The only person who cares about a site like that is the Realtor who started it, and they only see it as dancing dollar signs on a computer screen.

Of course, not all real estate agents are this clueless. There are Realtors out there who really understand the Internet, like Rain City Guide. But for every one of those, there are a dozen others who hear about My Online Neighborhood, or Connecting Neighbors, and all they see is a way to make some quick cash from this Internet thing. Eventually they’ll get bored, or it won’t generate the “buyer and seller leads” that they were promised, so they’ll kill it. And what will be left behind are the sites built by the little guys who really care about making something happen online.

In other words, it’s all about the passion. And We Love Carson Valley is about as cold a fish as you can get.

Carson City was treated to a pretty impressive snowstorm last night, and we woke up this morning to a blanket about six inches thick. That’s a lot for us; we usually don’t get that much. I bet the Xbox faithful down at Best Buy weren’t too happy about it.

But as the morning wore on, the few flurries of snow that were still coming down started to melt, and what had been a snowstorm slowly transformed into a rainstorm. And right now, in the afternoon, we’ve got a pretty good downpour going on out there. So all that pristine snow that fell last night is now being turned into a mushy pile of slush. And when the sun sets in a few hours and the temperature drops back below freezing, all that slush is going to become a crunchy mass of ice. So, should be a lot of fun driving tonight if you’re going to be on the roads.

Stay safe, kids!