Yesterday, Amtrak’s board of directors fired Amtrak president David Gunn.

Here’s something unusual about this firing. David Gunn actually was the best thing to happen to Amtrak in years. He improved the physical condition of the railroad’s equipment, raised ridership, cut costs, and even ended this year with a net surplus despite a crippling brake problem on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela equipment that took the entire fleet out of commision for most of the summer.

The Amtrak board knew this too, and even testified to that fact before Congress a few months ago.

The board, though, is made up of Bush appointees. You might remember that Bush’s budget proposal contained a plan to bankrupt Amtrak as a way of “reforming” it. That failed to pass Congress, and David Gunn failed to be incompetant.

So you have the odd case of firing David Gunn for improving things on the railroad.

Yikes. I will be so glad when this administration is gone.

I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so.

On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can’t be read anymore.

But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere.

And YES — stumbled across it tonight.

I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days.

But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read — so I get the correct story behind each photo.

The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive.

(And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn’t.)

So I am on the Tabor Mennonite Church centennial committee (coming right up in 2008!).

We’ve been going through the church archives, and I’ve been scanning in interesting photos. Here’s one, taken about 1950.

This is a photo of the original 1908 Tabor Church building, as remodeled in the 1930s.

You’ll notice the front door, the many windows.

And the two well-worn paths out back.

They are leading to the two outhouses. If I understand correctly, they continued to be used up until the mid-1960s when the “new” (present) church building was constructed.

The building in the middle housed a Delco Light Plant (generator), which was used until rural electrification provided power to the church.

So yes, this church had its own on-site generator, decades before it got indoor plumbing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere but it’s late and somehow I can’t come up with a good one. Feel free to post your own ;-)