Odds & Ends

I've been trying to organize this into a theme post, and it just isn't coming together. So here it is in bits and pieces.

Weather Stuff:

We have a set of two-way radios that receive the National Weather Service broadcasts. But the charger was unplugged when we moved the shelf they sit on, and hadn't been plugged back in. One radio would only flash its low battery signal, and the other would weakly pick up the local forecast if I walked around in the yard and found the right spot.

One of my brothers just gave me an emergency weather radio that receives only the NOAA weather bands.

Something that I found interesting was that although most of our tree damage happened Thursday night/Friday morning, the tornado that was reported occurred Friday night from 9:38 pm to 9:47 pm. That was while we were driving up into the flood zone, fortunately away from the tornado.

Another point about this tornado is that no tornado warning was issued for it, so it would not have triggered the alert function even if I had had the weather radio that night.

And it's got me really wondering about becoming a spotter, because it doesn't seem like any of the local earlier damage ever got reported.

Vacation Stuff:

Mackinac is pronounced "mack in awe" wherever you find it, except by tourists going by the spelling. Michigan place names are full of the "aw" sound (Saginaw, Leelanau, Keweenaw) and most of them don't have a confusing -ac ending.

Personal motor vehicles have been banned on Mackinac Island since July 6, 1898. The one exception is for police: we saw a Suburban driving very slowly down one street, and our son was both shocked and indignant, since we had told him no cars were allowed there.

Origins has a number of LARP (live action roleplaying) events and people who come in costumes. My favorites are probably the men in kilts.

And the most memorable to me was the young woman several years ago in a duct-tape bikini, stuck right to her skin. All I could think of when I saw her was I'll bet that's going to hurt when it comes off, but since then people have told me that she probably (well, I hope, anyway!) coated certain areas of her anatomy with petroleum jelly so the duct tape didn't rip them right off.

I usually take my camera and then suffer camnesia and totally forget it exists until we get home.

Knitting Stuff:

The Ravelry group I'm in is WIPs WrestleMania 2009. I'm wrestling as Madame Diamond Rose Python for Team Team. Go Team Team!

The only two WIPs I entered were Christel and the dragon skin bag, because I was tired of having them hanging over my head all this time.

Christel is (hooray!) done.

I started in on the dragon skin bag, knitted along, and promptly discovered that I'd made a mistake back on the first new row. But I tinked back and persisted and am still creeping along on it.

Lousy Internet Connection Stuff:

We've been suffering along with an intermittent and unpredictable wireless connection for about a month now. Sometimes we get no connection at all, sometimes it's all I can do to download email, and sometimes the thing opens up bandwidth-hoggy sites like Facebook in a finger snap.

Our provider used to be great and very responsive. On this issue they've been slow enough that my husband is starting to look for a different provider.