| Your Place: Garage door balky? Some WD-40 won't hurt
Question: When the temperature is very cold, my garage door opens about a foot and then stops. If I disconnect the automatic opener, I can open the door manually without a problem. If I reconnect the opener, the door opens normally. Do you have any ideas about the cause of the problem and any possible solutions? Answer: The cold is probably to blame. When this happened a few years ago with my garage door, I lubricated the drive in the middle - where the emergency release is attached - and it fixed the problem. I think the original lubricant on the screw drive either wore off or got thicker because of the colder temperatures. I sprayed WD-40 on the screw drive, and the door opened just fine. Your problem may not be exactly like mine, but my solution is worth a try. Q: Within six months of moving into my home, I was diagnosed with asthma and eventually developed a sinus infection that recurred for 10 months.
Where are our ambassadors?
Oh, but hang on, he did know one thing about us. "I hear Australia has a very good cricket team," the bloke piped up, "but people tell me they are very bad sports!" Are you with me? You can argue that the Herald's Peter Roebuck is right in saying that Matthew Hayden should hang his head in shame for calling Harbhajan Singh an obnoxious weed. And I might have a sneaking sympathy for those who reckon that Jeff Thomson and Tommy Raudonikis are right on the money when they say that Hayden and company should be encouraged to say whatever they like to prevent cricketers from coming across as anaemic blobs. But in the mean time, surely, neither of us can dispute the fact that our international reputation has been sullied. Year after year, season after season, Australian cricketers are making damaging headlines around the world because of the things they say on the field and, lately, to a lesser extent, off it as well.
My View: Preserving Rockport's Main Street streetscape
Preserving Rockport's Main Street streetscape By Barbara Sparks Special to the Times As you pass Rockport's Dock Square and wander up Main Street to the corner of Beach Street, on the water side you pass several decades of commercial buildings hugging the sidewalk, inviting observation in a friendly interaction with the pedestrian. Most were constructed in the 1840s to 1880s, with the more recent Toad Hall Bookstore building inserted in 1926. The Haskins Building at 37 Main, anticipated site of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival's Shalin Liu Performance Center, dates from the 1870s. It's an eclectic collection, and that is its charm. It is the ensemble of architectural styles that gives this historic district its distinctive character. How many people realize that if our beloved collection of storefronts were to adhere to current zoning codes, the buildings would no longer cozy up to their neighbors.
Don’t write off this story yet
Only later, after searching the archives, do I discover why my colleagues fixed me with such vacant stares: I wrote that story back in 1996. Even our most loyal readers, the ones who keep piles of old HCNs in their garages and bathrooms alongside boxes of National Geographics, have likely forgotten my majestic prose and would appreciate a fresh take on the subject. I went through a similar process when Terry Greene Sterling first pitched this issue's cover story on the Salton Sea. Contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis did a fine piece on Southern California's accidental inland sea back in 2000. What more was there to say? Plenty, it turns out. Seven years ago, Salton Sea boosters were cautiously optimistic that federal and state money would pump new life into the drying, irrigation-fed body of water and the struggling tourism and retirement economy it supports.
Stagflation and the Fed
Jobs are one of the last things to fall in a recession, as employers are reluctant to cut back but then begin to do so more rapidly as it becomes clear we are in a recession and not just a temporary slowdown. The index of Leading Economic Indicators continues to plunge, and is not far away from levels last seen in 2001. Such a drop by the LEI has always been accompanied by a recession. And finally, let's read a quick note from über-bull and friend Louis Navellier that just hit my inbox: "At the beginning of the week we hoped the market would stage a fundamentally-led, broad-based rally after the monoline insurance companies, namely Ambac and MBIA, were able to keep their triple-A ratings. Unfortunately, a healthy rally did not unfold. Instead, the markets rallied briefly, but with junk leading the way.
As gentrification spreads, rich, poor seek a balance
A block from the Pine Street Inn, near the 3-month-old yoga studio, the year-old Asian furniture boutique, and all the recently finished condo complexes, Ali R. Yagcioglu has jazzed up his taqueria with arty splashes of paint and has raised prices - not to squeeze the yuppies flooding the neighborhood, but to keep out those who stay at the homeless shelter. Across town, developers of a new boutique hotel have encouraged the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans next door to rebrand itself a "center," even offering to pay for a new sign. Near the old Combat Zone, where condos now sell for seven figures, the homeless at St. Francis House watch television in a new waiting area built with money from their neighbor, the Ritz-Carlton; the addition helps keep them from loitering outside.
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