At last, a warm day, as days in May should be. The soggy ground is drying up, too. Enough that I could mow the front yard and cut down the standing dandelions. Then sit on the deck with a soft drink. Bzzz. What’s that? The first mosquito of the season. There will be more.

Another item I picked up at the water reclamation plant last weekend: a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago calendar.

Each month has a different picture from the 1890s to the 1920s, presumably from the archives of the district, since all of the images are of water-related structures or workers busy building such structures: the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, bridges across the Chicago River, and Cal-Sag Channel and the North Shore Channel.

So I was inspired to made a list of the various kinds of infrastructure that I’ve seen over the years, besides the recent visit to a water reclamation (sewage treatment) plant. It isn’t very long; I need to see more infrastructure, clearly.

The list includes a UPS distribution hub, a control room for an electric substation, an intermodal container facility, a railroad switching yard, a recently completed warehouse, an unfinished airport, a space port, a deep-space relay dish, a drinking water treatment plant, a solvent recycling facility, and a geothermal energy plant. The basement of the greenest building in the country might count, too, as well as green roofs.

I suppose bridges, tunnels and dams count as infrastructure, though if you’re getting that general any road one has been on would be so too, and that’s not particularly distinctive. Still, it’s hard to deny Hoover Dam’s place in the world of infrastructure, even if it’s also a tourist attraction.

If you count factories — and in some sense, they count as the infrastructure of the modern world — that would include seeing places where beer, wine, cars, steel, coins, paper money, chocolate, cheese, refrigerators, bread, jelly beans, and Tabasco Sauce are made.