Flood update: Whither summer school?

All is still okay here. The dams seem to be holding up in our areas, but the water is unbelievably high. I can’t actually get into town to see it for myself, but I spoke with someone in Jefferson today who has been helping sandbag the Sanitation Plant, so she knows what she’s talking about.

The town is ripped apart. The water got up to the bottoms of the bridges and engineers had to drill holes through them to release the pressure that was building up. There are three main bridges in town and all of them are closed, so it takes half an hour to get from one side to the other when it used to take ten seconds.

My source described downtown Jefferson as a ghost town. Everything’s closed or flooded out. There’s a little burger place on a corner where it flash floods in a hard rain, and she described the water as being past the level of the drive-up window. At first I thought she meant, that far away from the road. No, she meant that far up from the ground. No burgers today.

I was calling her to find out if summer school for the incoming kindergarteners was being delayed as I had hard; it was supposed to start this Tuesday. She said they can’t decide what to do with it yet. They have over 1,000 children enrolled for this — and no way to get them to the now-flooding building where the program was going to be held. The earliest day they might start is this Friday. Maybe. I will have to check the school district website day by day for updates.

We did go out to Milwaukee today to see my FIL, and though the rivers and lakes were up quite a bit, we weren’t in any actual flooded roadways. The trip east wasn’t a problem; west was another matter, as they closed the freeway miles before truly necessary in order to divert big trucks and major traffic to the best detours. So we crawled along, watching drivers try to whip past on the left, think about whipping past on the right, swing into the left lane to try to keep people from whipping around them to the left, and so on. I don’t know what it was about the signs “FREEWAY CLOSED AHEAD” that made people think that risking their lives to be one car length closer to the detour that everyone was taking, was worth it. After we got off the freeway all our local roads were fine.

Knitwise? I’m not getting much done. I have been doing some test knitting for a Ravelry friend, doing a row or two of the heelflap scarf every once in a while, and generally not being very enthused about my other projects. But tonight, in honor of father’s day and the father/dad of my children, I think I’ll start the heel flaps of his Panda Cotton socks.

I didn’t get any spinning done this weekend, and I’m bummed about that, too. I spun three weekends in a row and started little file cards to document each fiber. I did finish some Actual Yarn and will blog about that on Spinning Wheels when I get a chance.

Stay dry — pray for us — help whoever you can, wherever you are.

Flood update: The Cocoa Conundrum

Sorry its taken me so long to get a new post up. Terrible storms, the end of school, and a husband who was out of town for a week have contributed to a slight lack of time.

However. Though today is (so far) a sunny day and we’re not particularly close to any river, we’re on the verge of being trapped where we are. I had planned hoped wished I could go to Worldwide Knit in Public Day celebrations in Lake Mills, but various road closures due to flooding have made that impossible.

If you’ve been following along on the Weather Channel, look at the Interstates of southern Wisconsin next time they put up a map. You’ll see an inverted triangle connecting Madison, Milwaukee, and Janesville/Beloit. All you need to know for this exercise is that I live somewhere in the middle of this triangle.

Recently, parts of I-94 (connecting Milwaukee and Madison) were closed because of high water and/or bridge concerns. The official route for traveling between Milwaukee and Madison is to take the other two legs of the triangle, I-43 to Janesville/Beloit, and then I-39 north to Madison. I don’t know where you think you can go after you get to Madison, certainly not to Minneapolis, but that’s beyond my jurisdiction. Got it? Can’t go past us, go around the whole area.

Within this triangle are Jefferson, which has closed two of its three bridges and cut the city in half. The river is up three feet from where it was flooding everything in April, and hasn’t crested yet. The city has asked for voluntary evacuations. Fort Atkinson has even worse problems, as it’s where the Bark River meets the Rock River. They’ve been filling sandbags for a couple of days. They sent out a map of potentially flooded areas, and at this point, the only entrance to the city is from the west. Which, sitting where we are, we’d have to go through Jefferson to get to. And we can’t. Unless we went way south to Whitewater, west to Fort, and came in from the south. Maybe.

To our east is Rome Pond. Last summer they built a new bridge over it and reconstructed the roadway. I don’t know what the old road and bridge were like, but I can tell you this bridge isn’t high over the water by any means. If the dams let go upstream (Lake Nagawicki in Delafield) we are going to be in a world of hurt for getting anywhere.

This brings to mind the horse I had when I was a teenager. She was a 16 year old Quarter Horse. We weren’t planning on showing her or traveling with her, so we didn’t have a trailer. And we bought her from a farm only a few miles away. When she saw the chance to take of and go back “home,” she did, and I frequently had to go out on the county roads to get her and bring her back.

This turned out to be pretty easy because Cocoa had a fear of going over bridges. Even a culvert bridge was too much for her. This truncated her “free” range so much that whenever a neighbor called to tell me she was in their yard, all I had to do was grab a couple of carrots and a halter, and walk over for her. She was a fat and greedy girl, and even when she later had a partner in crime, Cricket, they were always easy to bring home with carrots and oats. They never went any more than a mile away.

But feeling stuck in what’s likely to be a three-mile radius isn’t pleasant. So I’ll be knitting at home today, and looking at the maps. I may have to move the basement contents to the living room, but I have food, electricity, water, and health. (And yarn and fiber, don’t forget that.) But when you watch the weather, think about those of us in the Wisconsin Bermuda Triangle. We can’t get there from here.

Podding along

First of all, my immense gratitude goes out to everyone who sent me knitting podcast suggestions. I just (really, JUST) finished listening to ‘casts 2 and 3 of Sticks and String, and am about to transfer ‘casts 2 and 3 of Cast On to the iPod. I thought they were there, but they weren’t. Still figuring out this iTunes business. Maybe it’s just too uncomplicated.

But anyway, I love both these ‘casts, and after some false starts with Doctor Who podcast selection (i.e., if I’m not ready to watch series 3, I probably shouldn’t be listening to current news about current episodes, here at the end of series 4) I found some Doctor Who audio tales that might be just right for those long nights when The Husband is busy making a magazine, or in Canada, or traveling for business, or wherever. My only half-complaint is that the headphone we now have make my ears hurt. That shouldn’t be hard to fix.

The podcasts were a real bit of cheer in a rough night. Because Mr. Beth is out of the country and I have to actually Be The Mom to four kids, I couldn’t go to Late Night Knitting at the Sow. Can’t go to the next one, either, or to a Saturday meeting of the local spinning guild. Darn schedule conflicts. So I can now use these barren nights to listen to podcasts. I learn about knitting, I hear new music I otherwise wouldn’t, and I am entertained.

I need some entertaining — while I was trying to get my Ravelry fix this evening, my kids were in the process of breaking my ball winder. The handle was snapped off flush at the base, and the tension wire (for lack of a better term) was bent out of shape. The wire arm I could have fixed, but I’ve used enough cyanoacrylate to know I wouldn’t be able to fix the handle.

The little tube that you wind the yarn onto didn’t get broken, because it was elsewhere holding the ball of my first handspun on it. So now, when I buy a replacement winder, I will have extra yarn storage. Kind of like having an extra mixing bowl for your stand mixer. But it does mean I’ll need to buy the same style of ball winder so this tube will fit.

Knitting updates:

I went to Open Knitting at Gosh Yarn It (Lake Mills) on Wednesday evening, and spent a lovely time with the store owner, Patty Dehnert. I was the only one there! To give you an idea of how much we chatted, Open Knitting was from 6 to 8 and the first time I looked at the clock, it was 8:10. I showed Patty my handspun, bought another skein of yarn so I can start my second Hufflepuff mitten, did one repeat of the test knitting I’m doing for Mazzmatazz, and exactly one row of a four-row repeat of the lace. Honest to God, I thought I would have to rip it all out. I counted that row at least three times to make sure I hadn’t screwed anything up. Now I know that what I will screw up is starting it again and managing to forget that I knitted one row of the pattern already.

She seemed impressed with the ridiculous number of projects I brought, and she didn’t even charge me the Open Knitting fee. Kudos to Patty! I would link to her store site, but I don’t think she has one yet. She is still getting her feet wet with Ravelry ventures and commenting on blogs, so say hey if you come across her. She’s very nice and a little shy.

I meant to spin tonight, but instead I picked up Bamboo Sock Two and have gotten it almost to the heel flap portion of our show. I’ll do those few more rows after I get done uploading this. (I would go to Ravelry, but the Software Update icon is bouncing like a hyperactive beach ball on the Dock [I SEE you!], and it’s getting very distracting. Besides, perhaps I ought to allow time for sleep.)

I did get through three wonderful episodes of Torchwood last night: Ghost Machine, Cyberwoman, and Small World. Can’t wait for more. But I can’t do anything but plain vanilla sock while I watch, since there’s so much going on.

Quote of the Day from Jack (my Jack, not Captain Jack Harkness): “If you’re on the wrong way, go out. If you’re on the right way, go in!”

 

Dear Robert Redford,

I just wanted to thank you for the part you played in my wonderful dream last night.

Wait — it’s not the part you think it is! While I’m sure that women dream about you all the time, this dream was different. Trust me.

Last night I dreamed I was attending my high school reunion. For the record, the place in the dream was not my high school, nor were the people in my dream anyone I knew from high school. It was just one of those dream situations. (I haven’t been to any reunion since 1990, either, but as we’ve already established, that seems to be beside the point.)

At any rate, through an elaborate sequence of events I can no longer remember, your mother presented me with box after box of… sweaters.

They were her own hand knitting, these piles of fine-gauge pullovers and cardigans. There were solid colors, intarsia, everything under the rainbow. I was amazed and delighted as I lifted one sweater after another out of the boxes, and honored by her gift. She seemed very happy to give them to me, too. (Had she and I met before, in a previous and unremembered dream?) Oh, and her short golden hair was just gorgeous.

I moved a few of the boxes of sweaters to my car, vowing to come back for the rest of them later. The rest of the dream has now vanished from memory.

Alas, by the light of day my van is sadly empty. But please give my best regards to your lovely mother and my deepest appreciation of her handiwork. Even if they were only the stuff of dreams, it was wonderful to see them and to have been able to run those smooth, even stitches through my hands.

Give her a hug for me, Mr. Redford.

Love, Beth

P.S. I think my mother would like to say hi to you, too — though I suspect that if she dreams about you, it doesn’t involve your mother’s knitting.