June Vacations

June was our vacation month this year. Earlier in June, we went up to the straits of Mackinac and took our son to Mackinac Island for the first time.

We were there just after the lilac festival, and the lilacs were still in full bloom.

We visited Fort Mackinac and I took these photos from up there.The lilac trees on the island are beautiful. And yes, they grow into trees up there! I saw some that were eight inches in diameter and larger. I've never seen them that thick down here.

The next day we visited Colonial Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City.

(Yes, Mackinaw City ends with a "W". All the other Mackinacs - island, bridge, straits - end with a "C". And they are all pronounced "mack-in-awe". I take no responsibility for 17th century French spelling.)

After climbing the hills on Mackinac Island, we were moving a little slower. My husband loved the earth oven. I know he wants one.

Then we were home for about a week, in the middle of which we had that burst of stormy weather.I took this picture on my way to work Monday, the day we got our power back.

I'm going to have to take my camera down this road again. They cut the three trees on the left that went down and righted the roots, so they have their yard back. Tree after tree along the road went down.

We had power for about a day and a half, and last Wednesday we woke up at 4:30 am as the power went off again. Truffles woke me up, and seconds later I heard the fan go off. I called the outage in immediately by flashlight.

The bad thing was, we were all set to leave again for Origins, the big game fair down in Columbus, Ohio, and so we wouldn't be around to run the generator if the electricity stayed off.

This put a damper in my morning, but then the power came back on at 7:30 am. Whew. Morning coffee and electric light in the bathroom! Yay!

We drove down to Ohio on a hot, hot day. My husband had reserved a room at the Defense Supply Center, one of the perks of being in the military. We had a bedroom and a kitchenette/living room area, and a reasonable drive to the convention center.

Yes, Origins is held in the Greater Columbus Convention Center, the place where TNNA held its summer show June 13-15, and where Knitters Connection was June 17-20.

One of these days I'll just go down for one or the other and leave Origins to my husband and son!

They had fun, and I brought knitting, hoping my dormant knitting mojo would sprout up again. And it did! I finally finished the miniature miser purse I started lo these many years ago, and I am down to the very last round and a half of Christel.

It was hot in Columbus while we were there, around 90 F (around 32 C), and nearly that hot at home every day.But I don't think this vending machine made many sales.

When we got home, I checked on the wrens and found the babies had died. I have no doubt it was from the heat. *sigh* I wish I had been home to help them escape. I think after the ants clear out of there I will block the opening with expanding foam so mama house wren can't try again.

Yesterday the weather changed over from highs of 88 F (31 C) to highs around 68 F (20 C). I guess even my cold-resistant northern blood has thinned out a little in the heat - I was cold. 68 degrees is even colder than the air conditioning in the convention center.

I covered the couch while we were gone with this big piece of scrap fabric from my days of working at an office furniture company. Between the stress and the heat, Ajax blew off undercoat like crazy!

Tomorrow I'll answer some questions & respond to some comments - that is, if my flaky wireless connection cooperates.

Copy Cat

So much happened in the last couple of days, I keep realizing I left things out.

For example, fizzy ice cream doesn't really have a different taste. It's fizzy like a carbonated beverage. It tastes like fizzy mint chocolate chip!

Sunday I went out and mowed the grass despite having no power. It hadn't been mowed for nearly two weeks, what with rain and all, and it was shaggy everywhere. (Thus the importance of knowing how to wash mower exhaust and grass bits off without a shower.)

So I know for a fact that this tree was not down Sunday evening.

Apparently, yes, if this tree's friends jumped off a bridge, it would, too!

It fell over some time in the night Sunday after we went to bed. We had no wind in the night, but there it was, down in the freshly-mowed grass, Monday morning.

This was an old sweet yellow cherry tree from back in the days when our property was planted with sweet cherries, mostly red, and peach trees. It had the one little live branch on the side.
Mr. and Mrs. They sometimes say that if you grow yellow cherries, the birds won't get them, because they don't perceive that the cherries are ripe. But I guess the cedar waxwings never got the word, because they would always feast on them.

sigh One more tree to cut up for firewood.

The other thing we did was decide we were old/soft/rich enough to finally cave in and buy a generator to run the fridge, the freezer, and fill up the pressure tank with water every so often.

I have a big black rubber calf-watering tub I put under the eaves and catch lots of rainwater to flush the toilet with during times of no electricity, but rainwater off my roof is not drinking-quality water.

With the means to keep food cold and run the well pump, we can go without power for days, days I tell you.

And I have to go off on a minor rant here about the whole driving-into-the-storm thing . . . Friday while Mr. Amazing and Son were off at the movies, I sat with the battery-powered radio and tried to find anything, anything about the local weather.

With nothing else to do, I went up and down the dial listening for weather reports or local news, and thoroughly missing my online weather reports and radar.

I found a great big zero. The closest local station was playing the baseball game until it got rained out. Then the local announcer opened the phone lines so people could call in and talk about the baseball game.

It would have been really nice (she said sarcastically) if some station somewhere had mentioned that oh, by the way, severe thunderstorms are expected north of us, so we would have known not to go driving into flood conditions. But noooo, it was more important to play lame music, commercials for products which I will not buy on principle after listening to the annoying and intelligence-insulting commercials, or canned programming from goodness knows where while totally ignoring that anything local exists.

By which I mean to say we didn't know that storm was coming and drive into it anyhow - we drove north not knowing it was there and did the best we could once we were in the thick of it.

How to Carbonate Ice Cream

But first, a sponge bath. (You'll just have to eat your ice cream neatly!)

You would think that living in a Boy Scout camp, complete with log cabins built in the 1930s by the CCC, tall trees, a well house to tend, and a very good trout stream, my parents would have enough of the great outdoors when they decided to take a vacation. And you would be wrong.

While we did take some edu-ma-caysh-con-al vacations to museums and things, we took a lot of camping vacations. We went up to Lake Superior and camped. We camped beside tiny little lakes full of enormous tasty fish. We canoed, we picked lowbush blueberries, we flopped on our stomachs on air mattresses and read.

That's where I learned useful skills like making morning coffee when the power is out.

And because even in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, August can be hot and humid, at least once a day my mom handed us a washcloth and some hot water, pointed to the tent, and said, "Go wash up."

It's amazing how much cleaner you feel after washing all over with just a little hot water. It's easier in your own candlelit bathroom in the bathtub, because you don't have to keep the floor of the tent dry.

In order to keep the clean hot water clean as long as possible, I like to use two basins and two cups. The clean-water cup stays in the clean hot water and is used to dip out fresh cupfuls. The second cup stays in the used-water basin, for pre-washing and rinsing the grungier parts of the body.

If you're in a hurry or only have cold water, wash in the bends of the elbows, behind the knees, and the neck and face. If you have the luxury of hot water, get wet with the wash cloth, soap your wet self up, then rinse by re-wetting the washcloth with clean water and wringing it out between times.

This was really useful with a husband who had been chainsawing in humid weather and came in smelling of chainsaw exhaust and sweat. I heated about a gallon of water on the Coleman stove and handed him the washcloth. A sponge bath really makes you feel human again. Also you can go out in public and not scare people.

If you have long hair (I have thick waist-length hair), first dilute your shampoo and keep that handy. Get your hair wet by bending forward and pouring the same couple of cups full of water over it repeatedly (you're catching it in the used-water basin) until it's wet all over. Then pour the diluted shampoo water over it slowly, bit by bit, working it in so it's all soapy.

Last, rinse in stages: pour the same cup of water over it, catching that water (I know, normally, yuck: but in the case of one gallon of hot water, welllll) and re-rinsing until you've hit equilibrium, then dumping that batch of water and starting over with the clean. Repeat until squeaky and soapless.

And now, as promised:

How to carbonate ice cream

• Buy a gallon of ice cream at the store just before the big storm.
  
• Put ice cream in freezer. Yum, yum.
  
• Have big storm and nearby tornado.
  
• Lose electric power.
  
• Let ice cream warm up a little in closed freezer for about 20 hours.
  
• Drive through a second major storm and buy dry ice.
  
• Put dry ice in freezer with slightly-melted ice cream.
  
• Close freezer and leave closed until sublimating carbon dioxide suffuses and re-freezes melting ice cream.
  
• Open freezer much later to find this:

Fizzy Ice Cream

Aftermath

Hi! We have electricity back on as of 11 am Monday! Running water, electric lights, internet! And the ability to check email and upload pictures.

This is the main tree we lost close to the house, a fair-sized maple that had three or four large upper branches snapped off and flung all over.
Several of these branches are hung up in the Scotch pine and the juniper bush next to the tree. It's going to be a giant-sized game of jackstraws getting those branches down.

The second picture is outside the fence, looking back towards the tree. The branch that landed on the fence hit between two fence posts and crushed the top rail.

And this is what's left of the tree. A lot thinner than we are used to! My husband had been talking out pruning some branches out of this tree. Now he just has to cut up all the branches that were broken out of it.

Now I get to talk about storms.
Our first storm was the Thursday night/Friday morning one, with all the lightning. Locally we had a lot of trees down.

Friday morning my husband drove into town for hot coffee and wireless WiFi. We went around a couple of trees in the road before I woke up enough to remember I had the camera.

When we got home, I put on rubber boots and took pictures of other tree damage.

This big maple tree was by the old barn foundation. *crunch*
And this catalpa tree next to the driveway used to be vertical.

I didn't get pictures yet of the wild cherry trees that snapped off, one across my walking path, and another near our fire pit.

We didn't notice this until Saturday, on the way home from using the library's wireless internet:The electric pole right down the street from our house was down. Hmm, that could be why we had no power!

But I've skipped ahead a bit.

Friday afternoon my husband decided to take our son to the movies. They got back in the evening, and I told my husband that I had called the power company's automated call center for a power restoration estimate. The first time we called, it was Saturday at 4 pm. The new estimate was Sunday at 4:30 pm.

I said if we were going to have to wait two more days for electricity, we should probably go buy some dry ice in the morning, in order not to lose the contents of the refrigerator and freezer.

My husband said, "It's not that late - we could go now and be back in an hour!" (Listen closely, boys and girls - this is called foreshadowing.)

In normal weather conditions, or even a normal rainstorm, it's about half an hour's drive up to Holland, Michigan. And it was not raining when we left the house.

We drove into a heavy rainstorm. As we neared Holland, the semi ahead of us turned its hazard lights on. I said, "You know, it's awfully rainy, and we're getting close to the spot on the highway that floods when it's really wet."

My husband and the semi got off the highway at the next exit.

Whereupon we spent several hours driving - or rafting - through the flooded low spots of Holland, attempting to get to the store that sold dry ice. I saw some things I've never seen before in real life: water spurting up through the holes in a manhole cover. A manhole cover actually floating on a stream of water forcing its way up through the manhole. Cars stuck in water that turned out to be up to their windows. More emergency vehicles than I've ever seen in my life.

If I had been driving by myself I'm not sure I would have made it back home, let alone to the store. But my husband has an amazing sense of direction, and he is one of the best adverse-conditions drivers I know. (Learning to drive 5 ton dump trucks on the obstacle course for the National Guard might have something to do with this.)

Anyway, number one, he never got lost in the dark, despite having to turn around and go back on multiple roads deep in storm water. And number two, he never flooded out our little Honda, with six inches of ground clearance, in water that we could feel splashing the underneath of the car, and even in the waves made by the people who tried to speed through it.

I don't know how long these stories stay available, but here are a couple about the flooding in Holland. Link 1, link 2

Number three? We got our dry ice, and then Mr. Amazing drove through the dark away from the lowlands of Holland, off to the east and south, and got us home.

About three hours and something later, we got home, stuffed dry ice into the freezer and a chunk in the fridge, and went to bed.

Tomorrow: the lost art of the sponge bath. And how to carbonate ice cream!

The Sound of Chainsaws was Heard in the Land

Thursday night, or technically Friday morning, we woke to the most intense lightning storm I have ever experienced. We had non-stop flashes of lightning for a good fifteen minutes, with corresponding thunder like a continuous avalanche of boulders.

Of course, when we got up, the power was out. The maple tree next to our yard had about two-thirds of the limbs twisted off and tossed into the fenced yard. (But not onto the house, thank goodness.)

So we are in the dark, flushing with rainwater and taking sponge baths in the candle-lit bathroom.

I'm posting from the library's WiFi point. Our power restoration estimate is Sunday around 4pm. I have some pictures of broken tree limbs I'll upload then.

Meanwhile, if your lights are on and your refrigerator is running, enjoy them for me!

Ghost Stories

I don't consider myself a particularly psychically sensitive person. Most of the time a ghost would have to hit me with a brick to get me to notice it. But Antonia is off telling ghost stories, so here is mine, even more rubbishy than hers.

When we bought this house back in 1991, the original farmhouse and barn were still standing. Okay, mostly standing.

The old house had had a huge tree limb fall on the roof ridge, which was cracked in twain, and the windows had been boarded up with interior panelling, which weathered into attractive peeling strips that fluttered in the breeze.

The first time my husband's grandmother ever came to see the place, she came up the driveway with his aunt and got out of the car saying, "Oh, my God." She thought we were trying to live in that house. (The narrow end of our house faces the driveway, so I guess she mistook it for a shed or something.)

I had brought with me from the house in Grand Rapids about a thousand pounds (weight) in perennials, and since we moved in January, I arranged to go back and dig them in March. I stored them in boxes and buckets and plastic bags inside the old decrepit farmhouse until the soil thawed enough to transplant them..

The farmhouse: it had been nested in by raccoons. It had the SAME wallpaper in one room as my old bedroom at my parents' house. It had lots of odds and ends of rubbish in it, stirred around and crapped in by the raccoons.

It was the coldest empty house I have ever managed to go into. I used to dive in there, drag out a bag of plants, and feel like I would never get warm again. It wasn't precisely haunted, it was just creepy. It was a great relief when I had every last bulb and root and rhizome safely in the ground and didn't have to go in there any more.

Then the insurance company declared it an attractive nuisance, and said if it wasn't torn down, they would cancel our house insurance. So with the help of our families, we tore the old house down and filled the hugest dumpster we could get, the kind that goes on the back of the big truck, three times.

When we were done, all that was left of the house was a big flat floor: the floor of the porches, the concrete steps, and the floor over the sand-walled Michigan basement.

And a green-vinyl-upholstered chair, one of the least rubbish-y things that had been inside the house. I thought I had heard my husband say he wanted this chair to sit in while he burned odds and ends of trash. Maybe I imagined this.

I could never sit in the chair myself. It always felt too cold to me, no matter how warm it was in the summer. Cold and creepy. I really got to hate that chair, sitting there on that big flat floor. It felt like someone, something, was sitting in it. Sitting in it, watching. Gack. But I put up with the thing because my husband had wanted it.

Then one day he said, "Can we get rid of that chair? It always feels like something is sitting in it, watching."

Yes! Yes, we could, and we did.

But there was still a creepiness about the rest of the old house, which clung on until we pulled all the flooring off and filled the cinder block spaces that had been the crawl spaces with mushroom compost, and made them into gardens.

And there was one last clinging cold spot in the very corner, which finally gave way to lots of sunshine and columbines in bloom.

Like I said, a completely rubbish ghost story. I never saw anything. I never heard anything. Nothing ever moved around. But it was still creepy.

Trunk Show at My LYS

I haven't had a LYS, a local yarn store, for very long. Needle in a Haystack just opened in South Haven, Michigan, last summer.

The other day I got an email from the store that said:

Needle In A Haystack Party
Put June 5th on your calendar! Joe Raffino, Vice President of South West Trading Company, is coming through South Haven on his way to The National Needlework Association trade fair. He is bringing his 50 item trunk show to Needle in a Haystack and we are throwing a party! June 5th - 5pm to 8pm at Needle in a Haystack.

Oh! That sounded like fun!

South West Trading Company offers yarns like Pure soysilk and Bamboo yarn, and patterns like the Mariposa shawl (if you are on Ravelry, Mariposa) and the Karoke Mitered Jacket (Ravelry link).

Mariposa interested me because it is all lacy prettiness on the back:
And see how it goes together in the front?
There's a section of double knitting in one end that makes an opening to pass the other end through. No button or shawl pin required! Pretty slick!

Joe brought some cute baby and kid things like this pink and white baby dress. I think it was knitted out of the AMAIZing corn yarn, but I'm not finding it right now. AMAIZing is pretty heavy in weight, but cool to the touch. I thought it would make a great knitted thermal blanket, like the cotton thermal blankets we had when I was a kid: heavy-feeling, but not hot. (Yes, I am one of those people who likes to feel a little weight on me when I'm trying to sleep.)

We got a look at the Mitered Jacket (links above) in two different color combinations.

And this turquoise sweater, which is another I can't find. That looks a lot like the dragon skin pattern on the body.

I got to try on China Doll (Ravelry link), which was a really cute little knit, and the splits at the bottom meant it didn't have to stretch over my waist pack!

I think my favorite of the night was the Peacock Vest (The Peacock's Best Vest). It is just as dramatic in real life as it looks in the photos.

If you are visiting South Haven and want the address to look up maps, it's 319 Center St. Stop in and say hi!

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