Where I've Been, Where I Am

We went to Origins in Columbus, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago.

This is what we saw when we stopped at the end of the driveway on the morning we left:It, ah, rained a bit in the night.

That brown lake of water is the little drainage ditch that goes through a drainpipe under our driveway. They used a power shovel to straighten and clear it this spring.

Question: did they clear the drainpipe itself?

My husband was impressed enough that he stopped the car so I could take a picture from the road.

Storms chased us clear from Michigan to Ohio, and there was an earthquake in Canada while we were driving that they say was felt back at home.

Ah, but we were at Origins June 23rd to 27th. Where have I been since then?

Sharing a slow dial-up connection plugged into one computer with my husband and our son.

When we got home Sunday night after Origins, we couldn't get a connection with our wireless antenna. Huh. But it was late, and we were tired, so we unloaded the car and didn't worry about it.

However, this turned out not to be a slow and laggy connection, but no connection at all. The ISP said the severe storms we had the week we left (including the one the night before) had taken out about 80 antennas and a couple of broadcast towers.

So we were on the list, but the installer/repair guy could only fix about 4 or 5 antennas a day, depending on how far he had to drive that day.

What to do in the meantime?

My Colourmart order came Tuesday.
The little pointy samples, the ones that look like upside-down houses, are: almost-white 50/50 cashmere/merino, silvery 50/50 wool/silk, light grey 10/90 cashmere/merino, and grey 20/20/60 cashmere/silk/merino.

The half-purled, half-knitted samples above and next to them are the six possible combinations of two.

I knitted the single-strand samples on US 2 needles and the double-strand ones on US 4s.

These come with the spinning oil still on them, so while knitting they look thin and stringy, but they bloom nicely after a wash and rinse. This is the white one before its bath.

Now I have to knit the Last.Two.Rows on the Stargate and block it so I can contemplate what I'm going to knit with 8000+ yards of laceweight cashmere & silk blends.

Sunday in Photos

11 am

1 pm

6 pm

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

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!

So Where Were We?

Thursday and Friday were the last days of school, with outdoor activities sandwiched in between rainstorms.

Our son and I went to the beach both days after school. The water was still mostly refrigerator-cold, but the air was in the high 80's (around 30 C), so the lake breeze and the chilly water felt good.

My Honda Fit is now a real Michigan car, since it has been irretrievably beach-sanded with our local squeaky round-grained sand.

Saturday we had tickets to the Shrine circus (thanks, Pat!), so we took the child up there, watched the juggler, the trapeze artist, and the pink and blue poodles, and then did our grocery shopping.

Saturday night we were absolutely pounded on by thunderstorms loud enough to wake the child up, so neither he nor I got much sleep. This was a real blinger of a storm, the kind where the window glass lights up white, and before you have time to think, the glass reverberates in the frame with the thunder.

So Sunday morning I woke up feeling sleepy and slow. The weather was relatively nice in the morning, and we started a batch of bread dough. Minutes after I put it in the oven for first rise, with a clear sky and calm weather, the electricity went off.

And stayed off.

Hmmm, time to wake up and think quick, or at least more quickly than bread dough! I asked my husband to start some charcoal, and I dug out the cast-iron sauce pan and soup kettle. I re-greased the kettle, as the seasoning looked a little suspect, and when the dough had risen, divided it into the cast iron. Meanwhile coals were getting hot out in our heavy-duty park-style grill.

By the second rise, we put both pots out over the coals and covered the grill with the top of our big oven roaster pan. It took longer than the oven, since it's not enclosed and it was windy, but the dough baked fairly well in there, and at least we didn't end up throwing it away.

Then we had another storm Sunday afternoon. It got pitchy-dark, so dark I couldn't see to read sitting next to the window in the daytime in June! We prowled around from window to window, flinching at the lightning and watching the rain blow sideways and backwards, until it gave that up.

The power came on here Sunday evening, but the wireless internet didn't until today.

Now I see from the wonder of the internet that another storm is headed this way. Somewhere around 100,000 people in Michigan don't have power back yet; the road I took from the beach to the library Friday washed out Saturday night north of where I turn the corner; and the highway washed out and is closed north of me, right where we drove Saturday afternoon.

Me, I'm feeling perfectly happy to have had a day with hot and cold running water and a working refrigerator so far today.

Outdoor Stuff

The sky got a little dramatic on me yesterday. Through the wonders of photo editing, I can show you this west-to-east panorama, gray and threatening on the one side and blue and cheerful on the other.

The first I knew of this, I heard what I thought was a gravel truck rumbling down the road. But the rumble went on and on and on. I turned around from where I had been weeding out seedling maple trees and saw the storm coming rapidly off the lake.

("The lake" is Lake Michigan.)

By the time I had gone into the house, gotten the camera, and walked down the driveway to take a picture unimpeded by trees, the sun was already gone. But it was still bright enough to take another wildflower picture.

These odd-looking flowers in front of the regular trilliums are the toadshade or wake-robin, Trillium sessile. Wikipedia says the red flowers are foul-smelling, but I admit I never thought to smell them.

Last I knew, they were listed as "threatened" in Michigan, and these were indeed threatened:

They were on some property where a house was being torn down and a gravel pit started!

So my mother got permission to go in and take any plants and trees she wanted. We dug these and a lot of other things out and moved them ahead of bulldozers.

Wake-robins are said to be difficult to move. My theory as a horticulture major is that they are very sensitive to changes in their soil, sunlight, and the soil microlife. Luckily, these seem to have thrived in this shady spot.

What I notice about trilliums in general is that they love shady hillsides. I don't know if it's the thick layer of leaves and moist fertile soil, or the extra shading these get from the north-facing hillside, but when I moved some of my regular T. grandiflorum trilliums here, they really took off.

And now I better get offline, because this morning's sky is starting to look just like yesterday's!

ZAP!

Or, Why I Don't Blog in a Thunderstorm

In the fifteen years we've lived here, we've had a lot of interesting experiences with lightning.

When we first moved into the house, we had a landline phone with an electronic chirp for a ring. During the first year, in a thunderstorm, that phone said "WHEEEEEEP!" and never rang again.

So we bought an old-fashioned black rotary-dial telephone with an honest-to-gosh bell inside. Sometimes during thunderstorms, lightning would flash and the bell would quietly go "ding", and we would look at each other and say, "I'm not answering that!"

Unfortunately at some point, the phone company lowered the REN on our line, and that heavy-duty bell would no longer ring. So we had to go back to a phone with an electronic chirpy ring, and once in a while buy a new one.

Several years ago, we had a middle-of-the-night thunderstorm, and a flash instantly followed by a CRASH of thunder that rattled the teeth in our heads.

In the next few days, we were taking a walk, and noticed that a smallish black cherry tree was dying. When we walked up to take a look at it, we found a stripe of peeled-off bark down the side, and at the foot of the tree, a small open sandpit where the bark on the root had peeled off and flung the sand away. Not only did that lightning-struck tree die, it also rotted and fell over faster than any tree I've ever seen.

I think it was that same summer when we woke up to a storm and a burning smell. We walked all around in the house trying to find where it came from. In the morning, we found that lightning had overwhelmed our surge protector, fried a dot matrix printer and arced between my husband's metal CPU case and the metal desk-side next to it. Each had a very small burn mark, like a cigarette burn (a cigarette hot enough to fry off powder-coated enamel paint).

The CPU still worked well enough to copy the data off of it, and the surge protector company paid for replacing both the printer and the surge protector. But that CPU was never quite right afterwards. Every so often it would just quietly turn off.

When our son was two, I was getting ready for work one early morning when there was another close lightning strike, and our power went out. The pump in the well is run by electricity, so we lose both lights and water when the power goes out.

I went to work without a shower, and my then stay-at-home-husband called the electric company to report the outage. Later in the day he called me at work, and I asked if the power was back on yet.

"No," he said, with a smile in his voice, "And I think it's going to be a while."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "The reason the power is out is that the lightning blew up the power pole just down the road. It's laying in pieces all over the road and in the corn field."

So yesterday morning's thunderstorms did not find me on the computer. Instead I went searching all over town in the rain for a circular needle longer than 29". At one yarn shop, when I asked hopefully if they had a 60" needle, the woman asked incredulously if they even made one that long.

I wanted it for this:
This is the half-circle shawl that has been simmering in my head for many months. It's already on two 29" circular needles. I didn't want to do a round Pi shawl, because I don't like the idea of knitting a big circle only to fold it in half. And I didn't like the long horseshoe shape of the "Pi Are Square" shawl. Eventually I settled on a half-circle, with rectangles extended from either end.

(By the way, if you want to draw circles, I highly recommend the Safe-T (tm) compass, a flat orange plastic thing where you hold the center, put your pencil point in a hole, and swing the pencil around. For my money, it works much better than even my expensive drafting compass. It will make circles from 1/4" to 10" in diameter. The only complaint I've had with mine was that I got something on it that caused the black lettering to start to rub off and disappear!

If you prefer to work in millimeters, the same company makes something called the "mmArc" (tm), which will draw circles in one-millimeter increments from 10mm to 120mm radius. The mmArc is made of clear plastic and so far the lettering is fine on it.

I just wish I could find the Safe-T overhead compass made out of the same clear plastic as the mmArc!)

This shawl is just over a third of the way, and I'll need at least a third 29" circular needle if I can't pick up a 60" one.

Sun and Wind and a Bit of Knitting

Last night we had a terrific thunderstorm, with lightning so close that the thunder kept waking me up. I am extremely grateful to have power this morning! The weather forecast for later today says "WINDS GUSTS AS HIGH AS 60 MPH" this afternoon, and "SCATTERED POWER OUTAGES AND TREE DAMAGE IS LIKELY." So if the blog is not updated, I might be sitting by the window knitting, or outside picking up tree branches.

How about a picture of trees?



These are the five big maple trees that were planted many years ago along the west edge of our property. Taking pictures of them is difficult, because they are SO big, and they are surrounded by a thicket of tall skinny baby maples.

This morning we are getting weak, watery-looking sunlight, with the promise of more rain later.

Although the weekend weather was very nice and sunny, and I spent a lot of time outside, I found I did a surprising amount of knitting.
I am well along towards the corner of the "knitted loofah" facecloth. It is mostly in moss stitch, with a couple of bands of double moss. (The first one to try it out, and the second one to make the first one look deliberate.)

I had been using a pair of new Boye US 1 needles, which I noticed are marked 2.25mm, and then switched to the old yellow or gold needles I got at Goodwill the other day. After a few rows, I got out my needle gauge: hmm, the older size 1's are the 2.5mm size 1's!

I'm not going to fret about it. This is going to be used and washed and used and washed until it falls to pieces, not measured and critiqued by judges. If the texture varies from corner to corner, I'll just turn it around until I have the part I like when I wash my face!