HOME GROWN: One task facing any racetrack:...
HOME GROWN: One task facing any racetrack: What to do with its horse manure. In a joint venture with Home Depot, the Los Alamitos Race Course in Cypress has started converting its horse manure into commercial fertilizer. The result has been a steep reduction in city trips to local landfills, where tons of such waste was going weekly. . . . City Council members this week praised the new operation. Councilwoman Gail H. Kerry suggested residents who buy the fertilizer can take pride in “purchasing something made in Cypress.”
PRINCE ALBERT: Students sometimes overlook that their university libraries have valuable special collections (E1). At Chapman University in Orange, its sizable Albert Schweitzer collection is hard to miss. Part of it is on display at the Student Union. Campus spokeswoman Ruth Wardwell says that’s so students will notice: “When you find someone who has accomplished all the things that he did, you want to emulate that person.” The famed medical missionary, his bronze bust prominently featured on campus, is considered the university’s patron saint.
WHO NEEDS IT? It’s what she’s throwing out of the house that helped Santa Ana interior designer Carole Eichen recently win a major award at a national design conference in Houston. Eichen’s latest: No living room, no dining room--and only half a master bedroom. Instead, she’ll have a gathering room, the reflections room and matinee room. . . . “You have much more room if you take away unused space,” Eichen says. “We’re creating a better, less stressful way to live.”
NUCLEAR HERO: You won’t find this in anybody’s Hall of Fame, but they’re ecstatic over Unit 2 at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, just south of San Clemente. The Unit 2 reactor has just set a world’s record for continuous nuclear service--552 days. That amounts to 14 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, says majority owner Southern California Edison. But even the great ones need time off: It was shut down Saturday for refueling.