Rain, rain, go away..
Several days later, city administrators and home owners affected (effected? I never remember when to use which..) by the flooding in southeastern MN are exhausted. For as quickly as the damage was done, the clean up and recovery is slow, tedious work, made all the worse by the seemingly ceaseless rain that’s still falling daily.
The grey is simply draining; one could wish the water itself would drain so well.
Root River, Hokah, MN
Twin Creeks Golf Course, Hokah, MN
Hill s(l)ide, first house in Hokah heading east on Highway 44
Bottom of the hill in Hokah, near the Junction Inn
A flooded field outside Hokah, MN
Flooded farmland outside Hokah, MN
Flooded pasture between Hokah & La Crescent, MN
More fields and pastures..
.. and still more..
Approaching the Highway 26 bridge over the Root River & marshlands
Highway 26 bridge over the Root River & marshlands
Wednesday morning clean up continues in La Crescent, MN
Train tracks in La Crescent, MN, Wednesday morning
A small train bridge in La Crescent, MN, Wednesday morning; the flooding left the bridge intact, but sluiced away the ground supporting the tracks on either side leading up to and away from the bridge
As a woman in Rushford said this morning on Minnesota Public Radio, this isn’t the worst tragedy the nation has seen, but it’s still pretty bad. Many families are homeless and, due to the loss of many small businesses, without a means of income to support their families. Most of these homes are not in a flood plain and therefore weren’t covered by flood insurance. It’s unclear yet what, if anything, FEMA will be able to do to assist. If you want to help, you can donate money or time to the Red Cross. If you’re in the area, you can donate any of the following items to Nicole Wilkes at Houston County Women’s Resources (114 Main Street, Hokah, MN) for distribution to families in need:
- Cleaning Products
- Blankets/Bedding
- Personal Care Items
- Non-perishable Food Items (With Minimal Preparation)
- Gift Cards for grocery, department, and hardware stores
Neither snow nor rain … stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
And I’m much obliged to them for that!
(Clickable thumbnails; click the pictures to load larger versions)
Yea! Yarn for two pairs of socks for co-workers (promised at least a year ago), a skein of CotLin, which I suspect will become either another washcloth for the upstairs bathroom or a hand towel for same, and three skeins of black yarn to swatch for the DNA scarf, which I’m doing in trade for a friend who’s made some really very nifty garb for my sweetie. All of which would have been enough on their own, but also in the box were these lovely goodies:
Knitting Workshop is one of those books everyone tells you you should have in your knitting library. I’m not sure I agree just on the face of it, but it does contain a pattern that I’ve been intrigued by for some time - none other than the Baby Surprise Jacket. (And I needed another $10 or so to get the free shipping.. Shh! My logic makes perfect sense!) The needles, however, have been long awaited and meant that I could finally start…
Catalina!
“I’m just floating around over the ground, wondering where I’ll drip”
It’s been a bit soggy here in southeastern Minnesota this weekend:
(As usual, all photos are clickable thumbnails; click them to get a larger version.)
That’s our backyard and side yard as of about 9 a.m. this morning. At the far back corner, it’s about 4 inches deep. The water goes under the side fence out into the side yard. The apple tree is at the corner of what used to be a raspberry patch, which is on slightly higher ground and therefore not flooded. The garage and the car are also on similarly higher ground (and the tent is up off the floor).
This is a sort of impromptu rain gauge that I set out last night off the front porch. At that time, we had already gotten about 4 inches of rain according to the NWS, and about that much again by the time I took this picture. The Root River, which runs the length of the county about 10 miles north of us, is 3 feet above flood stage in Houston and not expected to recede fully until sometime Wednesday. According to the La Crosse Tribune:
County Road 16 between Hokah and Houston is closed due to mudslides. Highway 26 from Brownsville to the Iowa border is also closed. The Highway 76 bridge which crosses the Root River at Highway 16 is closed.
No word yet on the Highway 44 bridge across the Root River in Hokah, but if the bridge in Houston is closed, the Hwy 26 from Brownsville is closed, it’s a good bet that the bridge in Hokah will be as well.
Our basement is a bit flooded - it happens whenever we get a lot of heavy rain, so I knew to expect it - but sweeping the water toward the drain is working to keep the lake that keeps threatening to form at the bottom of the stairs at bay. Last night during the heaviest rain, I was going down about every half hour to sweep the water toward the drain and since I was up and down the stairs anyway, I decided to tend to some brewing. I bottled the apple wine/cider that I put up last fall - ended up with 10 22-ounce bottles out of two gallons of cider - and racked the Concord grape wine I started around the same time. The apple is extraordinarily sweet, so much so that it’s more like a cordial than a wine (and it’s technically not hard cider as it’s not carbonated - I just couldn’t bring myself to add *more* sugar to try to get it to carbonate!), but it will be tasty all the same this fall and winter warmed with maybe a dollop of rum and a splash of cream. The wine suffers the opposite problem and is so tart as to be near undrinkable. I added sugar at the last racking, and did so again last night. It’ll sit for awhile longer and then we’ll try it again. It tastes rather strongly of grape juice - which is a common occurrence with Concord wines - and may never be great, but I’d like it at least to be palatable.
All in all, though, it was a good weekend for my Ravelry invite to show up. *smile* I’m not entirely sure how much I’ll use Ravelry - it’s one of those things that I’m not quite sure I understand fully - but it has been fun to go through and post pictures of past projects and see who’s working on what. Like Facebook, I’m not sure yet of the standard for who I should “friend” - is this like adding a feed to my Bloglines list, or does it imply a somewhat more personal connection? - but if you feel so inclined, my username is verymelm.
Ravelry uses Flickr as the photo hosting service, which is well and good, and the interface is very easy, but I don’t think I’ll switch my main hosting over from Photobucket. I loaded the photos for this post into Flickr this morning, but couldn’t figure out how to get to the code that would let me embed them into a post. I could create individual posts for each photo, but couldn’t seem to get to the code that would let me drop several photos into a single post. *shrug* I did, however, update the photo for the Easy Lace Jacket in Ravelry since I completed the back last weekend and have about a third of the two front pieces completed now:
I decided to work both front pieces at the same time so that I could be sure to get the shaping matched. I might have misread the directions for the front at the seam edge, but if I did, I think I prefer how I choose to do it anyway. Decreasing over the lace pattern is tricky because there are paired decreases and increases and I wanted to maintain some integrity along the edge where the seam will run. The way I did it - knit the first/last 6 stitches at the seam edges - allows me to do all 5 decreases in stockinette and still have a selvedge stitch for the seam. Because the solid columns are 5 stitches wide, it doesn’t look like the column is wider, either.
I’ll also admit that I’m a bit surprised that there aren’t ways to track spinning projects in Ravelry (or if there is, I haven’t found them). There are certainly spinners on the site - and many of them do seem to post their spinning stash in addition to their yarn stash - but it doesn’t appear that you can create a “spinning” project to show progress pictures of how certain fleeces were blended and spun up. Maybe that’s something they’ll expand in the future; I hope so because I really enjoy seeing how people work with fleece to create custom rolags and rovings.
Speaking of spinning, my love brought me booty back from war:
8 ounces of Honey Tussah silk; it’s delightfully soft and absolutely gorgeous. It will match the silk and camel that I’ve been working on, and there should be quite enough of it to make something a bit larger than your typical shawl or scarf.
Red letter day!
Whee! Look what I got today!
Hee hee.. they’re *monkeys*! *GRIN*
And they were born in Oklahoma and Duluth, MN.
And they brought friends - a very fun little retractable sheep tape measure, a nifty little pin cushion thing (is it knit? it’s very kuhl..), and an Oklahoma Sooners t-shirt.
All complements of my most awesome upstream Sockapalooza pal, Rhonda! She and her husband, who is in the Marine Corp, are stationed at Fort Sill, but spent their summer vacation in her home town (gotta love a fellow Minnesotan) of Duluth, where her dad worked at US Steel. I hope she’s not having too warm of a summer back down in Oklahoma and I can’t wait to wear my Monkeys!
And since today is already a red letter day, I figured I’d post a picture of the progress I’ve made this week on my White Lies Designs Easy Lace Jacket:
This is the back, about half finished.
The yarn is Cascade 220 in color 9404. It’s a bit darker than the picture shows, but not a lot. This is a very quick little knit and it’s fairly mindless - I’ve been knitting it mostly while watching movies this week. I might make it through the rest of the back by the end of the weekend.. I have a couple more movies to watch before Jack gets home from his trip!
Impatience.
A few weeks ago when I was out on the left coast, Cat, my friend who so graciously provided me with a place to sleep and played tour guide for much of my wandering, said she couldn’t let me leave empty-handed. Being a spinner herself, she gifted me with two lovely skeins of handspun silk singles in a deep aqua. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with them.
Several months ago I acquired six skeins of Morehouse Merino Lace weight in an assortment of colors - white, light turquoise, aqua, purple, red and heather grey - from the DeStash blog (sadly now defunct, but there’s a new one here). They won’t all work in a single garment (at least not to my color sensibilities), so I knew I’d need to match them with others to make something. As soon as I saw Cat’s handspun silk, I *knew* it would work beautifully with the white, turquoise, and aqua as a shawl or scarf.
The trick was finding a pattern that would work with the yardage I have (each of the skeins of Morehouse is about 220 yards, but there is likely about 360 yards of the silk going by weight and the yardage on the Morehouse as they’re very close in grist) - about 1020 yards - and look okay with the color gradations going from light to dark and back again (or vice versa).
Apparently, it’s Catalina! (Apologies for the blurry picture.. seems to be a trend lately.)
I love the scrollwork look of this shawl and since Cat is also a scribe, and the confluence of names is just too much to resist, this yarn can be none other. I haven’t decided yet if the silk will be the center (and therefore the “back”) or the ends, yet (though I’m leaning toward the ends because there’s more of if and I don’t want there to be a *huge* block of it in the center so that the other colors look like afterthoughts), and it would seem I have a few weeks to make the decision as I also don’t have the right needles for the pattern (US 2 24-inch circular) and KnitPicks is showing that they won’t have them available to ship until the 15th. (I’m also ordering US 1’s because I tend to knit loosely and might need to go down a needle size.)
All the same, now that I’ve picked out the pattern, I’m impatient to get started, especially as Jack will be traveling all next week so I’ll have lots of time to sit and knit. Yes, yes, I’ll likely finish the Sprung socks and possibly even work on the sweater I started a year ago, or start one of the other two that I have yarn for, but I’m excited *now* to knit Catalina. *pout*
A little help from my friends..?
Okay.. so I am thinking about writing the next issue (August) of the little newsletter that I do for my office - which in the past has focused on things like how the US News rankings are computed, how “competitive” our admissions really are, and what a graduation rate is (and isn’t) - on Facebook. Specifically on why our faculty and administrators need to get over their fear of it and start using it to connect to our students. This is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch for a newsletter from an institutional research office, but I’m thinking that if I start by talking about how many of our students use Facebook already and talk about the tools Facebook offers for reaching said students (flyers and surveys immediately come to mind, but there are also the events and groups), it might be close enough. Might being the key word there.
This is where you come in, especially those of you in academia yourselves - is this something you’d expect not be all “WTF?!” about if your institutional research office did? (Holy bad grammar, Batman! *sigh* Yeah.. I’m a numbers person; the words.. sometimes they abandon me in protest.)
