Scott Schrantz's Blog

It’s the 10th of November, so you know what that means. Yes, boys and girls, it’s time for another Ormsby House update!

There’s always exciting stuff in these little monthly outings, and the October update is no different. A street reopens! Painting is drawing to a close! There’s a mysterious hole for us to peek into! Plus, more little details are showing up on the outside. Just one page this time, so your poor brains won’t be overloaded from too much excitement. Go check it out.

The brand-new hospital at the north end of Carson City doesn’t open until December 3rd, but they’re having an Open House this coming Saturday, November 12th. From 10am to 4pm the doors will be swung open for a red carpet public preview of the new medical facility. Visitors will be given maps and have free run of the place. You can poke your nose in the operating room, the maternity ward, the cardiac unit, and any of the private patient rooms. There will also be a ribbon cutting ceremony at 10:30, and a raffle drawing at 2:00 giving away a Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster. The cafeteria will even be open, giving out samples of the hospital food patients can expect to enjoy.

To get to the hospital, head north on Carson Street and turn left at the new stoplight by the Arco station. It’s the last turn before you get on the new freeway entrance and head up the hill out of town. For more info, check out the hospital’s website and the Nevada Appeal.

It only took me a week to sort through the Halloween pictures I took and put together an article. I’m impressed!

For two years now we’ve gone to the west side of Carson for Halloween to do trick-or-treating around the Governor’s Mansion. Everything is so lively there, and most of the houses are decorated, and there’s such an atmosphere of fun that I don’t think we’ll ever spend Halloween anywhere else. So I’ve posted three pages of pictures and stories about Halloween on the west side.

Halloween 2004 - a reprint of my report from last year on trick-or-treating with the governor.

Halloween 2005 - Two pages (1, 2) focusing less on the governor and more on the rest of the neighborhood.

Okay, it seems like I’ve been working on this forever. But in reality I just don’t have a lot of free time on the computer these days. So when I go after something this ambitious, it can take a while.

I’ve put together an entire page on the 2005 Carson City Ghost Walk. I have a bunch of pictures up there, of all the houses the tour stopped at, as well as audio clips of our tour guide describing each house. Maybe one day soon I’ll also add some video, but I’m launching the page without it. If I wait for the video to be ready, the page will end up getting published in March.

I took my iRiver audio recorder along on the Ghost Walk, and recorded the whole thing. It’s over two hours long. But most of that is sounds of me walking and talking with my wife, and I think if I forced you to listen to that, my audience would suddenly drop by half. And I wouldn’t want to see what half of three people looks like. So I edited out the walking sections and only included the parts where the tour guide is actually talking, or there’s a performance going on. I split up the audio into multiple files, so there are 12 files for a total of 28 minutes. I might get around to stitching them all into one big file that you can drop on your iPod. (Or iRiver, or whatever. Don’t write me.) But, again, we don’t want to wait for that to happen. So I’m publishing the page as is.

So, go check it out!

Anybody have any pictures or stories from Nevada Day they want to share? We’ll publish anything you want here. For photos you can use the Photo Submission page, and for stories that you want to go on the front page, just e-mail me at scotts@computer-vet.com

I want to see some good stuff from all of you!

Nevada Day weekend is almost here again. It starts on Friday with a day off for all state workers, and lucky employees of patriotic businesses. It lasts until Sunday, although most of the fun stuff is going to be happening on Saturday in the capital.

See pictures from last year’s Nevada Day parade

Nevada Day is the celebration of Nevada statehood, which happened on October 31, 1864. For the longest time Nevada Day was actually celebrated on the 31st each year, with the parade and everything happening then no matter what day of the week it was. But a few years ago the legislature noticed the nation-wide trend towards three day weekends, so they decided to do the same to Nevada Day. And that’s why Nevada Day is now observed on the last Saturday in October, and the Friday before is always a state holiday. Three day weekend! Here’s a partial list of the offices that will be closed on Friday:

• State offices
• Carson City offices
• Carson City Sanitary Landfill
• All Carson City, Storey, Lyon and Douglas County Schools
• Western Nevada Community College, all campuses
• Carson City Sheriff’s Department (front desk)
• Carson City Senior Center
• Carson City and Douglas County Libraries

The post office will be open, since it’s a federal agency, not state. And you’ll still be able to get married; the Marriage Bureau will be one office that stays open through the weekend. The Nevada State Museum will also be open, with free admission on Saturday.

But the centerpiece of Nevada Day, of course, is the parade. At 10am on Saturday the parade travels down Carson Street, starting at William Street and heading south to Stewart and the Carson Mall. This year there are 200 entries, so the parade will probably run a couple of hours, at least. Make sure to get to Carson Street early; the good spots fill up early, and we’ve been having a warm autumn so it might get hot out there if you get stuck standing in the wrong place. Or it might rain, like some of the forecasts are saying. Either way, bring an umbrella, or find a nice shady spot.

There are plenty of other events happening on Saturday, both before and after the parade. Here’s a rundown of the big ones:

• Nevada Day Carnival: The carnival will come to town all weekend, starting Thursday and running through Sunday. It will be at Mills Park, with food, midway games, and carnival rides.
• Pancake Breakfast: 7:30 am, at the Governor’s Mansion. Pancakes, ham, scrambled eggs, and orange juice. Hosted by the Republican Women’s Club.
• Hot Air Balloons: Launch at 8:00 am over Carson Street.
• Nevada Day Classic Run/Walk: A 2-mile walk, a 2-mile run, and an 8K run. Begins between 8:15 and 8:35 at the corner of Curry and Telegraph Streets.
• Nevada Day Parade: 10:00 am, on Carson Street.
• Nevada Day Beard Contest: On the steps of the State Capitol, immediately after the parade.
• Rock Drilling Contest: In the days of the Comstock, miners had to drill holes for dynamite. Now they drill for cash prizes. The contest begins at 11:05 am at the Carson Nugget’s west parking lot, at the corner of Carson and Robinson Streets.
• Nevada Day Chili Feed: Free chili on the second floor ballroom of the Carson Nugget, from noon to 2:00 pm.
• Governor’s Mansion Tour: Open house at the Governor’s Mansion from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. The mansion is at the corner of Mountain and Robinson Streets.
• Fireworks: Fireworks will be launched at 7:30pm on Saturday night, at the Silver Oak Golf Course in northwest Carson City. To get there, drive north on Carson Street to College Parkway and turn left. The golf course will also be hosting a Basque feast all afternoon.
• 1864 Grand Ball: You have to put on a good tuxedo (or, better yet, a Civil War costume) and drive up to Virginia City for this one. The Grand Ball will be held at Piper’s Opera House from 7:30 to 11:30 pm. Tickets are $50 and go towards the Piper’s restoration fund.

And that’s not all that’s happening this weekend! There will also be a steam-up at the railroad museum on Sunday, among other activities. Check out www.nevadaday.com for a more complete list.

And then, after all this has died down, Halloween will be celebrated on Monday, October 31st. The governor will be personally handing out candy at the Governor’s Mansion, but get there early because the line is long!

The Carson City Ghost Walk is coming up this Saturday. Every year, around Halloween, the most haunted houses in Carson City open their doors for a guided tour, and let the public in to hear spooky tales of former residents that never quite left. There are actually two separate ghost walks, each one visiting a number of different houses, so you get to pick which walk you want to go on. This year the two walks are:

The Superstition Walk - You’ll visit the Bliss Mansion and Bliss Bungalow, the former St. Teresa’s Church, and the Stewart-Nye and Edwards homes. You’ll also hear stories about the Yerington, Jones, Rickey, Crowell, Curry, Chartz and Smail homes.

The Spells Walk - You’ll visit the Brougher Bath mansion, Brewery Arts Center, and the Esser, Rinckle and Ferris mansions. You’ll also see the Orion Clemens home, Methodist Church, Ormsby-Rosser house, St. Charles Hotel, and the Hyman-Olcovich House.

The Ghost Walk is one day only, Saturday, October 22nd. It starts at 9:30am, and tours leave from the Nevada State Museum every half hour until 2:30pm. Each tour spends about an hour and a half walking around Carson City’s historic west side, strolling the streets and visiting the open houses. Tickets are $15 per adult, and it’s recommended that you reserve a spot by calling 687-7410. I think everything before noon is already sold out.

I’ve been slacking off on adding restaurants to the Dining Guide lately. Well, I made up for that today, with a dozen new entries for Gardnerville. Go check them out.

I really do intend to have every restaurant in Carson, Minden and Gardnerville listed one day. But, as I’m finding out, there’s a lot of them! One day at a time, I guess.

And yes, I still have to develop a rating and review system for the restaurants. It’ll happen eventually. You can always talk about the restaurants in the forums until then, as well as anything else going on around the area.

Last Saturday there was a meeting in Douglas County to discuss traffic safety on Highway 395, and the residents who attended were overwhelmingly in favor of putting a stoplight at Stephanie Way. The Record Courier has the story. Apparently a lot of options were discussed, but in the end NDOT says they will “most likely” be putting a stoplight at the intersection. This is really the only option, short of building an overpass and turning 395 into a full freeway through the valley. Which might happen anyway, some 20 or 30 years down the line. But don’t expect NDOT to look that far into the future. Just look how long it took Carson City to get a freeway.

And the agency still remains opposed to the idea of installing a stoplight, even though it looks like they’re going to give in to the will of the people. They’re still trying to make the case that stoplights cause more accidents than they prevent. Yeah, sure, if you’re just looking strictly at the numbers. But what kinds of accidents are they? Stoplight-related accidents are usually rear-enders, mild fender benders that you drive away from and can be fixed for under two grand. But the accidents that are happening at Stephanie now are almost invariably side-impact crashes, which usually total the car and send someone to the hospital (or the morgue). You have to call out the ambulance, bring a couple of tow trucks, take hours to clean it up, and it causes the traffic to back up for miles as it’s being cleared. So would I gladly invite more fender-benders at Stephanie if it would stop those side-impact crashes. We’d still be ahead in the long run.

One thing I found curious was that most of the folks at the meeting preferred having a full stoplight installed at Stephanie, instead of just a half light like Johnson Lane has. Now, I can’t see the benefit in putting in a full light. Johnson Lane has a half light because it’s only a three-way intersection. Nobody ever crosses all four lanes of 395, they only cross the two northound lanes while making a left turn, then ease into an acceleration lane and merge into the southbound lanes. The southbound traffic never needs to stop, so there’s no point in giving them a red light. They do have warning lights letting drivers know that there will be cars merging in from the left, and that’s about all they need. I’d say the only problem with the Johnson Lane intersection is that the acceleration lane is too short, and it doesn’t give anybody, especially the big trucks coming from the industrial park, time to reach highway speeds. They need to lengthen that acceleration lane so everyone has time to get up to 65MPH before they have to merge. Hey, why not just extend it all the way down to Airport Road, a mile away? That would effectively make the highway three lanes along that stretch, and would give drivers plenty of acceleration space. Then the third lane would become the left-turn lane onto Airport. And they could do the same at Stephanie, with an extra-long acceleration lane that stretches all the way down to the Johnson Lane intersection. That would solve almost all of the merging problems, and we wouldn’t need to have a full stoplight at either intersection.

Well, it’s not like NDOT is going to listen to me. My advice costs nothing, and it’s worth the price. I wasn’t even at the meeting, since I was home with a sick two-year-old. But the agency is setting up a website devoted to traffic safety on Hwy 395 as it passes through the Carson Valley. The site is due to be located at www.douglascounty395.com, but they haven’t launched it yet. Keep hammering it until they do.

On Monday morning they picked up right where they left off. The claw-handed excavators roared to life, and the work crews continued their task of demolishing Fire Station #1 at the corner of Musser and Curry. I’m not sure what their rationale was in starting the job on Friday only to take the whole weekend off, but it did give residents a full two days to gawk at the half-destroyed building. But you can’t leave it like that, so they spent another full day reducing the structure to a jagged mess and hauling it away. I finally made a visit to the site after sunset, when the crews had already gone home. It looks like they only have one more day of work left. By sunset Tuesday, the building will be completely knocked down. Then all they’ll have left is a pile of rubble that might take another day or two to get rid of. And then? An empty hole in the sky and a few dozen parking spaces.

You can see some of the pictures I took on Monday. I’ve added them to the fire station’s page in the Buildings Database. Come back again tomorrow for even more pictures!