Idaho News Update

Sunday morning I tried to go to the Linen Building that has an art market every Sunday. It has been listed in the Boise Weekly for weeks, but it must not have started yet. The farmer's market doesn't reopen until a week from this Saturday. Then I tried to go to some native plants show and couldn't find it. Is Mercury in retrograde? I finally stopped at one end of the walking paths that extend for 10 miles along the river through Boise,


Still pretty brown. It was a beautiful sunny day, with a gentle breeze that was ice cold. It was a breeze, not wind, Boise doesn't really get wind, but I was still freezing. The Idaho Statesman says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began flood-control releases from Lucky Peak Reservoir on March 21, and they plan to increase releases this week. Officials urge the public to be cautious of the fast-moving, cold water. The temperature of the water is estimated to be about 45 degrees.

45 degrees! Don't walk too close to the river for a while.

I took some pictures of the early Spring flowers, had coffee with some friends and went home to warm up.




Also in the Idaho Statesman,

About 110 years ago, the six sons of Vicente and Josepha Echevarria travelled between the Basque Country and Boise. Five of the sons settled in Idaho and about 140 descendants of the five Echevarria brothers gathered for a family reunion at the Basque Center last Saturday. This included one of the cutest kids ever and you have to love the hat.


Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/04/02/1590324_a1590358/echevarria-family-reunion.html#ixzz1Ib7yLHYE

The state audited the Health and Welfare Department and the department had a few issues with their switchover to a new claims system last year. There was no Medicaid provider name or number for 70,000 transactions out of 74,762 in the new system and there was no process in place to verify the data. Oops! I’ve seen job posts for several jobs to work with the new system, now I know why.

Fox News posted something about high radiation levels in Boise and Fox News has reported bogus news about Boise before, so I tried to investigate. This is an excerpt from the Idaho Statesman April 2, 2011,

… Boise’s levels were higher than any other U.S. city in the report; most U.S. cities in the study had levels of cesium and iodine 131 that were not detectable. Officials had no explanation Saturday for why Idaho would have higher levels, but said the levels that were detected were far below levels that would warrant public-health concern.

The federal drinking water limit for Iodine-131 is 3 Picocuries (pCi) per liter, and Boise, Idaho rainwater on 3/22/2011 contained 242 pCi/L of I-131. My question is that if 242 pCi/L is "far below levels that would warrant public-health concern" then why is the limit set by the EPA only 3?

When trying to research I got into a quagmire of information, from how the earthquake in Japan could have been manually induced to someone that wrote a program to interpret the raw data published by the EPA. I read enough to realize I am never going to find out the truth, no one knows what safe radiation means, and oh yea, we are talking about the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, those guys still holding on to the concept of global warming, oh wait, that's called climate change now, and who want to tax exhaling.

It was another unproductive weekend, with one good interview behind me and another interview scheduled this week, I hope I just needed to rest up before I get to be a working person again.