Nature and Netting

We had more rain Wednesday night. I took the camera in the morning when I went down to see how the drainage ditch handled it.When the rain filled the ditch the last time, we had gotten about 2.72 inches of rain in just over 24 hours. This time we only had 0.65 inches. I could see where the water had risen and made the mud shiny, but it was already down by 10 am.

Camera in hand, I went walking around to see what I could see.

A while ago I spotted this indigo bunting nest while picking black raspberries. There was one bunting egg in the nest and two cowbird eggs. I identified which was which after a little Googling and removed the cowbird eggs. This morning the parents were feeding their fledgling outside the nest already.

These hot pink flowers are Deptford pinks, Dianthus armeria. They are tiny little things that grow wild in the grass.

I try to mow around moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria) rosettes when I notice them in the grass, and eventually I am rewarded with a spike of flowers. I have both white and yellow ones, but the white made the prettiest picture.I'm always a little bemused to find some of my favorite wild flowers are alien species.

In fibery news, I've been bashing my brains against the netting wall again, trying to figure out a 17th century netting pattern from text directions.

The first four rows are straightforward, and from there it's downhill. I've tried several possibilities for the vague fifth row, and unpicked the knots a number of times..

The directions for the sixth and seventh rows are very plain, and put some constraints on what can have happened in the fifth row, so I drew many diagrams and made some assumptions, and got as far as this.

It's good work for hot humid summer days. Our dew point hasn't dropped below 60 F for days, and I wouldn't be touching thread at all if not for the air conditioner wringing the water out of the air.

Lazy Summer Post

Now that it's high summer here (and I haven't drowned in the night in yet another pouring thunderstorm), here are some pictures I took Sunday.

The grass by the path south into the little maples is getting long. (I went out and mowed after I took pictures.)

Inside the little maples it's cool and shady and absolutely zinging with mosquitoes. I could barely stand still long enough to take two pictures, and then I swatted five in two slaps.This is the kind of deep shade (and mosquito activity) I grew up in. All summer I used to wear jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and Deep Woods Off mosquito repellent. I never came back to school with a tan.

Just past the little maples you pop back out into the bright sun. But there are so many mosquitoes, they don't care. They just keep chasing and biting you.

This picture is looking south, before I get to the loop path.

I can't believe the goldenrod on the loop is this tall already. If you click on the picture to see the large version, the spiky grass bits are reed canarygrass, Phalaris arundinacea. Canarygrass (all one word) likes wet soil and will grow over seven feet tall.I don't really like it when the grass gets that high. I guess I fear lions in the bush or something.

A lot of the loop either has standing water on it, or else is brown squooshy mud covered with deer tracks. Can't stop to take photos! Mosquitoes will eat me! This shot is at the end of the loop looking north towards the third photo.

After I took all these pictures, I went out and mowed the whole path again twice around, as well as the yard around the house. Then I had a shower, drank about nine gallons of lemonade, and complained about my wrists hurting on Twitter.

Now I need to go fling my things into a heap and get ready for Origins.

Sunday in Photos

11 am

1 pm

6 pm

6 pm closeup
(Zoom in for raindrops dripping off the grill.)

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.

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!

Lazy Summer Blogging

Aside from getting owls' dinners dropped on me, I've been doing and seeing and thinking about things I mean to blog about, and then thinking, "Oh, but I should do X post first."

Good old perfectionism. And if I wait to post about X first, I'll never get to Y or Z or back to A again, so I figured I better do a random, jumbled-up post and clear some of this stuff out of my brain.

Yesterday I went to the Lake Michigan beach with my husband and our son. There was no wind! This is very unusual. We almost always (I would have said always, but not yesterday!) have a lake breeze, generally onshore most of the day, then offshore at night.

With no wind, the water was flat and calm. The child waded in the freezing-cold stream, then when he went into the lake, it felt warm, so he immersed himself. I walked up and down on the sand and picked up stones.These days I try to limit myself to small coin-size stones, otherwise my house would be avalanched. The ones in the dish are mainly crinoid fossils.

When I pick them up, I think how different Michigan is now compared to the Paleozoic Era when the crinoids lived in the Michigan basin. It's strange to think about Michigan being tropical and growing corals. But the rocks say they were here. And there were lots and lots of them, because even with the centuries of waves grinding their fossils down, here their remains still are in my dish.

While we were at Origins, I finally braided the second drawstring for the first Valdani bag. That meant I was allowed to start a second one.

The thread is Valdani size 8 pearl cotton in M60 "Mountain Hike", described as "plums, grays, khaki, tan". I would say deep purple, gold, and a steely blue-gray. I started knitting the bottom on Dritz 1.1mm doll needles, and now I'm needling-up to Inox 4-0 1.25mm needles.

On our way home from Origins, we visited a friend in Ohio and dropped off various of my husband's meads, including a 15-year-old orange melomel (mead made with orange juice). My husband was told, "This is good. You need to make more 15-year-old mead. Start now."

So this is a photo of 15-year-old orange melomel, at T-minus 14 years and 364 days and counting:
This is also a good example of why he doesn't put the airlock on the top in the first enthusiastic days of fermentation. The plastic baggie keeps the fruit flies out, lets the carbon dioxide out, and keeps the sticky spewing orange juice and honey spray under control.

You can't really see it in this photo, but the carboy is sitting on a big deep cookie sheet to catch what's dribbling down the side. Within a week or so, things will settle down and it will be safe to put the bubbler on the top without worrying about it clogging and blowing off.

He has both of the bubbler/airlock types to the left. They serve the same purpose as the plastic bag, keeping fruit flies and other airborne contaminants out, while letting out the carbon dioxide that the yeast is blowing off.

Summer birds
Brown thrasher, Toxostoma rufum and male ruby-throated hummingbird, Archilochus colubris.

The thrasher was sitting on a branch in the early-morning sunshine, calling and preening himself. Thrashers are mockingbirds, so he was doing local birdcalls, each one repeated twice. I found it very funny to hear him doing a chickadee's call, since he's a great big reddish-brown bird and the chickadees are so little.

I might be doing some netting. I've been reading through and trying to learn some of the decorative netting patterns from things like The Ladies' Work-Table Book and The Young Ladies' Journal Complete Guide to the Work-Table.

Anyway, I started filling my steel netting needle with gray pearl cotton. I have no idea where this is going. But when I find out, the netting needle will be ready.

If You Don't Like the Weather Here

"If you don't like the weather here, wait five minutes."

I think people say this everywhere. They certainly say it here in Michigan, and yes! It's true.

Last week, steamily hot and rainy. In Grand Rapids they recorded something called a "record high low temperature" of 74 degrees, which made my brain do a loop-the-loop for a second there. They meant to say 74 was the warmest overnight low recorded on that date. I find "high low" just confusing!

This week, a jump back to late spring/early summer weather, with highs in the low 60's (a whole 18 C yesterday) and overnight lows in the high 40's (around 8 C).

Knitting

As if I didn't have enough partly-done projects whimpering for my attention, I cast on another. At least this one is almost finished -- I'm grafting the edge in the photo.

This is a no-pattern wristwarmer knitted using some of the tussah silk yarn I dyed with Easter egg coloring back in 2007. (In those photos, this is the skein on the bottom of each photo.)

These (when, if, I knit a second one) will go by the computer for those chilly winter mornings when I've just built up the fire in the soapstone stove. Between the half-circle Pi shawl and wristwarmers I expect to be warm except for my cold nose.

Birdwatching

Summer is a great birdwatching season. This morning I saw two brown thrashers checking out the rose tangle where they nested last year, and got to hear and watch the male singing right outside my window.

I've been trying to get a good photo of hummingbirds, but that's hard! They move so fast, and I have two layers of glass and one of window screen between the camera and the feeder. I have at least two different female hummingbirds chasing each other away from the nectar.

Gardening

Much easier to get pictures of things that don't move around, like plants.The slender green stems on the left are volunteer four o'clock seedlings, and the more robust reddish shoot on the right is coming up from one of the four o'clock roots I replanted.
I'm finally hardening off my tomato seedlings, and hope to put them in the ground today if it ever warms up. I have a Black Krim, a couple of Siberians, a Roma, and two Yellow Pear tomato plants in there.

Afterwards I'll have to sit out there with a stick to beat off the chipmunks and groundhogs. Chipmunks usually just dig newly-planted plants up, you know, to see what you buried there, in case it was something tasty. Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, will eat the whole plant, or just bite it off to see if it might be tasty.

Hell hath no fury like a gardener who finds her carefully nurtured and tenderly planted seedling gnawed to stubs!

PS: Holy cats! I use Bloglines to keep up with my blogroll, and I just logged in to find 937 unread posts! Dating back to early June. Looks like Bloglines burped, and I have some catching up to do.

We Have the Power

Several years ago our electric company changed its name from "Consumers Power" to "Consumers Energy".

I thought the change was dumb.

If I say to someone, "We don't have power," usually they understand that to mean electric power. But if I say, "We don't have energy," they are more likely to start suggesting vitamin supplements or commenting on our advancing ages.

Anyway, our power is finally back on, and our telephone is working again.

We were pretty lucky. Although our property has a lot of large old trees, mostly maples, this is the only significant branch that came down. I ratchet-lopped the side branches off and rolled the thick part off the fence. I don't know if we are going to be able to get the smaller second branch down from where it is hanging up in the tree.

When I was a kid, my parents did a lot of primitive camping, coincidentally up in Luce County in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the site of this summer's forest fire. And when we were first married, my husband and I did quite a bit of primitive camping. That means in a tent, in campgrounds with maybe a fire ring, pit latrines, and a hand-pump for water.

So while the power was out, it was like camping in our house. We got out the Coleman stove and had hot water and hot meals. We lit the house, especially the windowless bathroom, with tea-light candles and oil candles.

Thursday night's storm also brought rain, so we put the big, heavy-duty plastic calf-watering tub under the downspout and caught enough rain for flushing the toilet and (after filtering and boiling) cleaning dishes or washing hair.

Since my husband had to work Friday, he brought home a huge cooler full of ice from the National Guard armory where he works, as well as drinking water. I put the perishable refrigerator stuff in our cooler, and put bags of ice in the freezer.

We have a habit of making "pop ice" in our small chest freezer, using clean, empty soda-pop bottles: you nearly fill the bottle with water, squeeze the air out, put the top on tight, and let it freeze. (After a while you figure out how much to squeeze out so the expanding ice doesn't rupture the bottle.) This makes a big block of ice that doesn't (unless it ruptures) melt all over your cooler, plus as it does melt you have drinkable water.

We had a good amount of these frozen ice blocks in the freezer, so the meat at the very bottom never thawed. We did lose the ice cream I just bought (except for what we drank for breakfast Saturday morning), and I think we'll be eating those thawed and re-frozen pizzas this week, but at least it wasn't hundreds of dollars worth of anything. And everything at least stayed at refrigerator temperatures, so it didn't spoil.

This is about all I knitted on. I finished the snowflake graph from the Orenburg class, knitted an "X" for a spacer, and started on a graph called "bowtie".

In the photos, the first thing I noticed about Orenburg gossamer shawls was how geometric the patterns were, all lines and angles. In real life the first thing I noticed was how light and shimmery they were, and how hard it was to notice the relatively stiff lines of the patterns.

(Then there was the shawl where the basic Orenburg lace knitting elements were used to create flowing stems, leaves, and flowers: that was the one with the $1500.00 price tag. Usually I can tell which item is the most expensive in a vendor's booth: that would be the one I notice from a distance and instantly love.)

Unravelling Socks, Off to the Beach

Instead of knitting yesterday, I spent part of it unravelling and analyzing these socks.

I bought them at a garage sale early last summer, thinking I might either recover the yarn and knit socks to fit, or unravel them partway and re-knit them shorter. I think they were ski socks. The tops are about 20 inches (50 cm) long. But when I examined the yarn, it was very thin, much thinner than my thinnest sock yarn, so I put them aside and forgot about them.

But now that I have a use for laceweight yarn, I'm unravelling them. Each sock turns into about 35 grams of purple and 4 grams of white lace weight wool (from the burn test, the chlorine bleach test, and the smell when wet).

I don't know what the knitting technique is called. I can see how it would be knitted on a double-ring knitting frame, or an offset double rake, and I can probably eventually write out directions for needles. It doesn't seem to be the technique called "two-end knitting", although it uses two strands of yarn, and it's not regular double knitting with a hollow space between color layers. It's not even Alasdair's different-on-either-side double knitting technique, because the yarn is never stranded.

It probably has a machine-knitting name. It's sort of a slip-stitch pattern, because there are two rows inside for each row outside. Another way of saying this is that a dark row and a light row is knitted for each pattern row, which you can see in the top photo where one sock is inside out.

I love puzzles like this.

The temperature got into the 90's F. yesterday, so in the evening we went to the beach. This is what we see from the end of our driveway: corn (maize) tasselling out, so tall you can hardly see the dwarf fruit trees behind it.

Some local areas got nothing, but we had about a quarter-inch of rain one week, and about four-tenths the next week, just enough to make the grass start growing again (which means mowing in the heat, bleh).

The common crops around here are soybeans and corn, soybeans and corn. This field is something else again, asparagus after it has developed into the fluffy, ferny stage.

Michigan has something like 12,000 acres of asparagus plantings. Sounds like a lot, but that's down from over 16,000 five years ago. Apparently Michigan is getting hurt by Peruvian imports and difficulty in hiring asparagus pickers.

The southwest part of Michigan is also a grape-growing area. This vineyard was just planted last year. Welch's (of grape juice fame) buys grapes for juice, plus there is a growing wine industry.

Our property has feral remnants of a vineyard, so in the fall I sometimes get Concord grapes, unsprayed except for whatever Roundup (glyphosate) has drifted from corn or soybean fields all around.

And finally, here we are at the Lake Michigan beach, looking down from the parking by the road. Nice and calm, water about 70 deg. F., lots of floaty green seaweed-y stuff pushed up all along the shore, so we had to wade through green soup to clear water.

We got there after 6pm, so the sun was not too hot, and the child played in the water for nearly two hours. I guess that was long enough, because when I said it was time to go home, he came. And he slept really well!