Sandland Update - and for some reason a product review of a generator.

My friend Gabe is a Man for all Seasons.  This is a longish video but does show what has been going on at Sandland, the Playground for the next Thousand Years.   

If that's a bit long for your tastes, here' just a few seconds of video from my recent work session underground.   The maze is getting complex enough that I sometimes get turned around.  And when that happens you can encounter strange lights and sounds in the darkness...

FIRST Robotics 2026 - Week 5 Report

With the primary build nearly complete it has gone well.  Eerily well.  Perhaps I should not be surprised, as the core of the team are all in their fourth or fifth season and are a very smart bunch. We are not repeating past "learning experiences".  Some of the newbies are also showing considerable promise.  Anyway, here's the robot one week before we take it to a pre season scrimmage:

FIRST robotics Old Hands will notice that it does not have full bumpers.  Just a temporary front bumper needed for intake.  And here's the critter in action.......

That's actually quite good when you realize that it takes five mechanisms to get the ball from the floor to an airborne status.  I was expected a bottleneck somewhere.  Oh, and although we want it to be in good shape for this Saturday's scrimmage we actually have almost a month before it's real Show Time.  Should be time to get software fully to work and to add a secondary system - a climber that will lift the robot up off the floor.  We have four weeks and about ten pounds of available weight allowance to do this.

Impressive work by the team.

Frisky Business

From time to time a word and its relatives dances across my consciousness for just long enough for me to jot down a note.  Then...gone.  Today's word "Frisky" is one such.  I can't remember what was on my mind.....

Frisk, is Middle English derived from the Old French frisque, meaning "lively, brisk", or alternatively "fresh, new, animated".  It comes from an earlier Germanic word that also gives us Fresh.

Brisk, although sounding much the same, is of Scottish origin, and means rude.  It is perhaps derived from "brusque", meaning "lively, fierce".  Brusque comes from French - and the French spent a lot of time helping the Scots mess with the British - but ultimately from Latin brucus, meaning "heather".  Hmm, I always thought heather was nice soft stuff?  It might also give us "brush".  I guess the sense of "Brushing someone off" is rather brusque, and could be done briskly. Bristle seems to be a pure Germanic word and unrelated. 

Some things done in a Frisky fashion are also Risky, but there does not seem to be any connection other than the sound.  Risk comes from the Italian riscare, meaning to "run into danger".  Unsurprisingly when this word migrated into French it took on the meaning of "expose to chance of injury or loss".

Say, it appears to be Friday the 13th.  Don't do anything too risky.

Soda Bottling in Chippewa Falls - Part Three, and Some Mysteries

I actually got started on doing the story of the later Soda bottlers of Chippewa Falls when my brother gave me this:

At first glance its nothing special.  Just a wooden box with the company name painted on.  But taking a closer look we see......

There are some painted over letters.  Hard to bring out in a photo, they can more easily be felt.  I think they were originally branded on with a hot stencil as was the usual practice with wooden beer and soda boxes.  That accounts for the slight depression of the lettering, which reads:

ST. PAUL BOTTLING COMPANY

BEVERAGES

ST. PAUL, MINN.

This one lead me on a bit of a chase.  Before I had fully deciphered it I was wondering if it might have come from THIS company.  The time period would fit.  But on closer reading I figured out that this St. Paul Bottling Company was from St. Paul, Virginia!  Nobody would ship a batch of cheap wooden boxes that far.

There was another St. Paul Bottling Company in the far more plausible St. Paul, Minnesota, but my first source put it in the 1880s.  It was probably the bottling branch of one of the big St. Paul breweries back in the day when the law required a bit of corporate separation.  But that's a bit far back for a soda box that presumably was in use in the 1950's give or take a few years.  So it was time for a bit more digging.  And that lead me to this 1898 bit:

This tells a story.  I tend to think of the beer brewing industry as being a place of massive closures and consolidations.  And it was.  From a peak in the 1870s where every town of any consequence had one or more breweries the industry had whittled down to a few dozen survivors during my thirsty college years.  The soda industry had something similar happening, although the same Prohibition in the 1920's and 30's that wiped out any borderline breweries proved a short term life saver to small bottlers.  But eventually, Coke, Pepsi and a few others just took over the soft drink world.  And still dominate it today if you exclude weird new creations like Energy Drinks.

The new St. Paul Bottling Company was going at least into the mid 1920's, but don't know exactly when they went under.  Wooden cases can and do sit piled up in warehouses for decades, so I assume H & H bought these sometime soon after their founding in 1946.  Unless in fact C.E. Kleis had stockpiled them earlier.

With a story like this there will always be things we can't know.  So I'll conclude with another small mystery. 

I'm still wondering why C.E. Kleis would have moved all the way to Chippewa Falls to engage in the soda business.  His dad had been running a very successful one right in Dubuque since the early 1860's.   

Was there some connection between Dubuque Iowa and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin?

Sometimes you find unlikely clues.

Back in the 1980's I was new to town.  There was a development project going on along the river front.  This was one of the earliest parts of Chippewa Falls, and I was pleased to get permission to do a bit of salvage archaeology on the site before the bulldozers made a hash of it.

One of the many early artifacts we came up with was an 1850's bottle from Dubuque Iowa.  It was from Belcher & Company, one of the earliest soda bottlers in the state of Iowa.  

It seems such an odd coincidence, although coincidence is of course quite likely.  But you don't suppose that maybe, a young C.E. Kleis the senior was working for Belcher in the years before starting his own company?  And maybe came up river to the wilderness of Chippewa Falls circa 1860?  (For reasons even my imagination can't conjure up!).  Chippewa Falls is a pretty town now and was likely even nicer back then.  Nice enough for for Kleis the Elder to recommend that his son C.E. Junior pursue an opportunity to buy out Albert Nunke some forty years later?

(Incidentally, the bottle shown here is quite likely the very example my brother and I dug up.  They are super rare, and we made sure it ended up in the collection of one of our Iowa friends).

FIRST Robotics 2026- Week Four Report

Visible Progress during a FIRST robotics build season is not linear.  Sometimes you have students working very hard over keyboards and complex wiring.  It does not photograph well.  Then, you power up the robot and magic happens.  I call the first full function successful test the "Von Frankenstein Moment" for obvious reasons.

We were really close at the end of our long Saturday session.  But the robot just decided to be stubborn.  Better now than later.  But still, a steady week's work with no major setbacks.  (fingers crossed there).  There should be more to show in a day or two.

In the meantime....

We have a swell new "pit cart".  It is designed to hold everything we could potentially use for robot repairs.  Ideally nothing much more than the official Pit Crew card deck in the top drawer.  But if necessary there will be all manner of tools, spare parts, etc.

You actually have to take a lot of things to a robotics tournament.  We'll have one side of the cart with a white board for cartoons and messages.  Maybe the required fire extinguisher can be mounted on one side.  A fun little side project made entirely from scratch.  Some of the lumber we got for free.

We have the "hopper" attached.  The red tool box (the pit cart was designed to carry these) is where the launcher will be.  The polycarbonate hopper extends out over the intake system.  We were hoping to be able to carry 40 of these little "lemons".  Looks like we might hit 50!

Lots more coming soon.  In addition to the new pit cart we have a new robot transport cart.  It's off being powder coated.  Now, when I saw this thing I told the students that it was about the size of the car I was driving back in college.  So where are we going to park all this?  That is actually the question I spent six hours working on.

There's a back closet in the tech ed area.  It is full of stuff that has been jammed in there for a very, very long time.  Pet projects of teachers long retired.  Ham radio stuff.  CO2 powered cars.  Elaborate wind up airplanes and model rockets.  Boomerangs.  As our high school team works out of the middle school shop area I can but marvel at the prospect of 6th through 8th graders being allowed any access to boomerangs.   Also, text books.  

These are old.  That's not per se bad, some of them that deal with manual milling and machining of wood and metal are first rate.  But in the 21st century students are mostly not working from these archaic things called "books".  Most of the copyright dates are from the 1990's.  But a few went further back.  How far back?

Oh my.   And yes that is the date of this edition.  The first edition was listed as 1938.

For reference I was born one year earlier.

And there were other things to be found.  A whole batch of heavy, high quality mirrors.  Maybe for astronomy?  Dozens of cool wooden model kits where you can peg together little round balls and make models of atoms.  I had found mousetraps on the floor and assumed there had been an attempt to trap critters.  then I found a big box labeled "Mousetrap cars".  All this stuff is of debatable use.  The various car, rocket and airplane stuff has been reorganized and put on shelves appropriate for the priority.  The textbooks and such have been piled up for the tech ed teachers to rule on.  Of course any they deem still useful will be put back on the shelves.

There were other things in there too.  Robotics team stuff had also been haphazardly jammed in various places.  This makes it difficult to find, which is a problem independent of the "parking space" issue of the carts.  Sometimes you find mysteries.  I'll conclude with this item.  Let your imagination run wild....

Pensive

When I write things move along pretty quickly.  I am after all approaching 3000 of these casual essays, so they clearly don't take all that much effort.  So I'm seldom if ever pensive when at the keyboard.

Pensive.  An interesting word.  It can mean "sad, sorrowful" or alternatively, "meditative, contemplative".  I guess there is some linkage, although I prefer to contemplate and to meditate on, happy thoughts.   

Over the years pensive meandered through various French words such as pensif, but ultimately it comes from the Latin.  Pensare, "to weigh or consider."  Or also "to hang or cause to hang".

This makes perfect sense archaologically.

A few years back I was excavating down in the layers of perfect preservation and came up with parts of a Roman weighing device.  

This was your basic scale, where there would be pans on either chain.  You'd put a known weight on one side - I've found a couple of those over the years too - and the object to be weighed on the other.  These chain and pan gadgets hung down, or were "dependent".  In fact anything that hangs down could be called a pendent.  

The other meaning for Pensare has also made it to the modern world.  When something is left hanging it could be said to be pending.  To get back to the darker sense of pensive, something that is both hanging and unpleasant could be impending.  Something attached to something else is said to be appended.  Let's hope if you ever have a vague achy sensation in your lower abdomen it is not appendicitis!

Ah, hard to think anything but happy thoughts on a cold winter day....but with spring and warm sunshine in the trenches not too many weeks off.....

Soda Bottling in Chippewa Falls - Part Two, Times More Recent....

Here's Part One of the Story

Between Albert Nunke and his father in law, soda pop production in our community was "all in the family" from the 1860's to the dawn of the 20th century.  But then, in 1904, Nunke sold the business to a man named C.E. Kleis out of Dubuque Iowa.

Kleis puzzles me a little.  His father had been bottling soda in Dubuque since the 1860's, and had a seemingly very successful business.  So why didn't the son take over?  One of those little mysteries without answers.

Although Kleis bought the business, and would have been laboring in the bottling plant out back, it seems likely that the Nunkes continued to live in the house.  An old patient of mine remembers Mrs. Nunke - probably from the 1930's - as being a very stern and crabby woman!  History is interesting...someone I knew had known the daughter of a man who was bottling pop during the Civil War!

Kleis in some ways kept things much the same.  His first bottles were of the soon to be outmoded "Hutchinson" style, just as Nunke had used.

But change was on the horizon in the soda pop business.  

Crown top bottles, the ones you had to pry off the bottle cap with an opener, became the norm by about 1910.  The Great War pulled America in, and we became part of the wider world.  And then in 1919 the ill considered experiment of Prohibition was launched.

This was in general a boon to soda manufacturers.  I mean, people gotta drink something!

The location next to Irvine Park was a lucky accident.  Soon a fellow named Leidhold stepped up.  In a 1909 article in the paper it is noted:

TO PARK VISITORS

"C.M. Leidhold has filled a long-felt want for visitors and picnic parties at the park.  He has erected a building 12x16 feet just west of the Kleis pop factory and will serve lunch, ice cream, soft drinks and candy.  Tables to sit down at and eat lunch or ice cream.  Parties who do not care to build a fire to cook coffee can have it cooked in the good old way at the stand.  Don't fail to visit the stand.  The down town sausage shop will be closed at 7 o'clock evenings except Saturday."

(I assume that last part was some other stand that Leidhold ran?)

Business seems to have been good.  Kleis ads from the 1920's list an array of products for sale.  Most were generic names, suggesting they were made by Kleis:  Orange, Lemon and Lime Crush.  Cherry, Raspberry, Birch Beer.  Cream Soda, Ginger Ale.

Hires Root Beer makes the list, presumably an early example of bottling under license.  Oddly, Iron Brew was also offered for sale.  I only know this as the vile concoction that is the unofficial soft drink of Scotland.  But it actually was originally an American product!

The Kleis family seems to have been fairly prominent socially as well.  The paper has lots of references to Mrs. C.E. Kleis having ladies in for tea, or going off to make social calls here and there.

Kleis had a good run.  But it was not without a few difficulties.  At some point the original Nunke bottling works burned down.  Kleis moved the operation, apparently to this spot:

The building on the end, 19 East Central Street.  A location that no longer exists.  The building had an interesting history.  It was the original City Library, then became arguably the first dedicated movie theater in Chippewa Falls.  

In January 1946 the Kleis bottling works was sold to a partnership of Sylvan Hurt and Clarence Holtz, who continued the business as H & H Beverage.  Holtz, who ran a candy company, dropped out a few years later and his "H" was taken over by Walmar Hurt, Sylvan's younger brother.  I actually knew this guy, as he lived until 2010!  As you'd expect from a more recent company, there are lots of examples of H & H products out there.  Many are "painted label" sodas, and most were bottled under license.  Here's a few ads and artifacts from H & H.

This ad is from 1967....99 years of soda pop in Chippewa Falls.  Vess was a brand out of St. Louis that H & H made under contract.

A few years later, in 1973, came the news that H & H was being purchased by J D Distributing Company.  There was mention of a move to a new plant under construction on the East Hill, but that location is empty and looks to have been that way for a good while.  The notice of purchase lists a price $15,000, which seems pretty low.  The new owners were planning on phasing out the H & H brands and "distributing the Grafs label".

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The Leidhold food stand might still be standing!  Here's a curious structure of about the right dimensions.  It is on the back side of the block from the Soda plant, in a westerly direction.  It "looks" like a common woodshed, but has an atypical location fronting right onto the street.  There could have been steps going down to the park below.  It's hard to say since this area does not appear on plat maps of the city in this era.

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To be complete I should mention that the Chippewa Spring Water Company was also active in this era, and did sell an assortment of flavored things you could call soda pop.  Another story, and one that also needs to be updated.  Another day.