We're back

Hey all - well, we made it through Ike with minimal damage. Lots of tree branches down, lost water for about 24 hrs, our power was waaaaaay funky (went out Friday at 9:30 pm, back on at 5:00 am Saturday (!), off at noon on Saturday, and then back on hopefully for good Monday night at 5:00), and the wind was driving rain under the doors as the worst of the storm came through. But all in all, we were very very lucky. The girls slept through the worst of it, and missed the pine trees in our neighbor's yard swaying like blades of grass in the breeze.

We don't have internet access at home yet, so posting will be sparse until that gets restored, but I just wanted to let anyone wondering know that we are ok. Stay tuned.

Incoming!

Ehem. So, as some of you may be aware, a big ass hurricane named Ike is currently barreling his way across the Gulf and has decided that Galveston Bay looks like a pretty nice place to come ashore. So posting over the next few days (except for tomorrow's previously written/scheduled spinning post) will be nil, given that 100 mph winds and consistent electrical service are pretty much "Matter, meet Antimatter - Kablooey!" Hopefully there will be much knitting, but the girls may not be so keen on Mama huddled in the corner knitting by the light of her headlamp while the roof flies off (Mom, I'm kidding!) (At least I'm kidding about the roof)

In fact, this morning on the way to daycare, I had the following conversation with Devil:

D: Mommy, is the storm going to come visit Daddy's office? (Ironman's place of employment closed down yesterday afternoon in anticipation of Big Ike, so he worked from home today)

P: Yes baby.

D: Mommy, is the storm going to blow our house down?

P: No sweetie it's not. But it is going to get really windy and rainy for a while.

D: (silence. Clearly she's not convinced about the house not blowing down.)

P: Besides, if it looks like it's going to be really bad, we'll leave.

D: (Considering the consequences of leaving, not realizing that we would not be bringing all of her books plus the Dora Princess adventure DVD) Um, OK.

And that was it. Here's to hoping she continues through the next 48 hours with as much equanimity. Keep your fingers crossed that Ike suddenly springs a leak or hits a patch of Artic air or something and that we all make it through in one piece.

(And if I could arrange to guarantee that my roof would survive in one piece too, that would be great).

See you on the other side.

Remember

The past two days have been pretty significant in terms of coincidences. Or things coming together. But I'm struck by the fact that the first African-American nominee from a major political party accepted his nomination on the anniversary of Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech the day before the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting NOLA. With two more potential hurricanes headed towards the Gulf Coast in the next week or so (not to mention two more months of campaigning), I am sobered by waiting to see what will happen and how we will respond. And whether anything will be any different.

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

The swap package is on the way...

I sent off my first swap package today, and let me tell you it was a near thing.

I love this yarn, and I want to keep it and display it on my kitchen table for the next ten years:

It's soft and squishy and the colors are To. Die. For. (you know, if you're one of us who has a thing for blues).

This is a handpainted Targhee top from Woodland Woolworks, in the colorway "Winter Sky". Spun/plied (navajo plied) at 10:1 on a ST folding Lendrum. 4 oz, ~290 yds, 13 wpi, making in approximately sport weight. I tried to overply a bit and then gave it a fulling wash (hot/cold/hot/cold/hot/cold), so it came out very springy!

I'm hoping there's enough here for my swap partner to get a pair of socks. Or maybe some mittens. Anyway, if she doesn't like it, I will pay for her to ship it back to me.

As for TS Edouard, he pulled a Rita* and all we got was a bit of a breeze and some good soaking rain, which was desperately needed. May the rest of the season go as well!

* pulling a Rita means that the hurricane/storm makes a beeline for Houston and, at almost the last possible moment, swerves and hits the poor folks on the TX-LA border. Thankfully this time, it was a much smaller storm.

A Very Harlot Tuesday

Today I am lounging at home slaving away on my laptop as I wait for the AC guys to come check out our system. It's funny, when I was growing up, the big annual home maintenance chore was getting your furnace checked out (if you were lucky enough to actually live in a real house, instead of living a deprived existence in a condo apartment) (just kidding Mom!). Well down here, nobody worries much about furnaces, but the air conditioner is a different thing. Woe betide those who do not do the annual maintenance on their AC, dooming themselves to a sudden failure at 10:30 pm on a Saturday night in August. With no repair available until Monday. Shudder. We got our compressor replaced in 2004, and haven't had it serviced since. So...

Anyway, the AC guys are coming over this morning to crawl around in my attic roasting themselves to death, and given that it's 20+ miles to work, and I wouldn't get down there until after lunch, and have you seen the price of gas these days?, I decided to take a mental health day. I've got a hot date with this

and this

and I'm not stopping until I have some nice stripey chain plied yarn to knit the lined mittens from the new Spin Off for Devil and Boo for the winter. Cause, you know, they need mittens in Houston. Of course, I may take a break when the AC guys arrive because really, do they need to think I'm any odder then they already will? Cheers!

Mama, are those cars?

There are lots of downsides to living in Houston, starting (and ending I guess) with the weather from about the end of March through November. This year we've gotten lucky weather-wise, and yesterday we ventured out in the first 100+ heat index days to partake of a Houston tradition - Art Car.

Now I'm annoyed that we never went before - it was incredible (and, as Ironman pointed out, something that would not be out of place in Brattleboro) and far outside the normal Houston scene.

There were dog cars (which the girls loved),

and all sorts of SE Texas critters. Like an alligator,

A cockroach,

A chicken,

And a redneck in an outhouse.

Then we had the political statements. First off, the M-Peach car,

And then a not-really-work-safe favorite, the Missile Dick Chicks,

complete with erect figurehead, and preceded down the road by these two fellows:

The crowning glory were the bumpstickers they were displaying "Cheney-Satan, 08".

The grand winner was The Lady of Transportation, a truly impressive contraption.

Those are VW Bug hoods up there at the top

My two favorites were The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir,

240+ singing fish and lobsters, who all moved in unison as the car went down the road

and, of course, The Yarn Car.

More photos here for anyone who is interested. Next post: some type of finished object, I promise!

5/12/08 ETA: Tom Jones, curator of the Art Car Museum here in Houston, was killed in a tragic car accident early Sunday morning following the parade and festivities. Read more here. Thank you Tom for such a wonderful event and for bringing more beauty and joy to the streets.

I got nothing

OK, that's not entirely accurate, but I don't have anything of note to show you. I have two almost finished socks, which, unfortunately, are not of the same pair. I have a Summertime Tunic that looks mostly the same as last time, only most of a hank of Premiere longer. I have a baby blanket that is trapped in intarsia hell, and probably needs a time out, but if I do that it won't be done by Devil's birthday. Oh hell, who am I kidding - it's not going to be done anyway...

It's springtime here in Houston, which makes for longer days and really nice weather for working out. I've entered a couple of races, so I've been trying to get in some consistent training in preparation. Running is going OK, swimming is fine - if I get in the pool twice a week I'm happy - but cycling has really been taking a hit. The problem is that cycling is time intensive; ideally I'd be riding at least three times a week, but that means at least an hour and a half out of the day, if not longer. Finding that time is tough with the kiddos around. Until the last few weeks, I've been bonding with my trainer, but since the time change, it's possible to ride after work. Tonight Ironman took the kids home and I went for a ride.

The only downside is that the number of clueless folk on wheels dramatically increases this time of year, not only because of the weather, but because of an impending physical challenge that a lot of people (upwards of 15,000) participate in every year. It makes for fun times out on the bike path - tonight I had the honor of being in the front row for a lovely bike-on-bike collision at a T intersection on the bike path. Thankfully everyone was going pretty slowly and no one was hurt, but harsh words were thrown and things got a bit testy (kind of like the Rav MCY thread). But I rode on home, thankful to have been paying attention, and glad that the bluebonnets are blooming and it's really spring.

Of course, the downside to that, is that summer is just around the corner...

Signs of spring

Texas redbud

What we call the Grape Bubblegum tree - please let me know if you recognize it

Azaleas

And summer sweaters resting in the Mexican Heather

The Summertime Tunic halves are joined and the body is started. Unfortunately what you see above is 2 balls of the 5 available. Hmmmm...might be an awfully short sweater, and God knows my midriff doesn't need that much baring. The good news is that I'm knitting the 37.5 size, and it looks to me like it might be quite big. First chance I get to take it off the needles (probably after ball #3), I'll try it on. I might be able to go down to the next smallest size successfully, since I don't want a whole lot of ease.

Unfortunately, this weekend has been a knitting-free zone - my right hand/wrist have been sore for a few days. I've got a bone deposit on the back of my hand that normally doesn't bother me at all, but if I'm doing a lot of hand motions that involve flexing my wrist, the tendons on the back of my hand get annoyed. I guess there's been too much rabid Firestarter knitting in the last week or so (in addition to getting back out on my tri bike which also puts my wrists in a slightly uncomfortable position). In an attempt to let the tendons chill out a bit and recover, I replaced knitting with spinning over the weekend, and now I've got this sitting on the bobbin.

Last month's (January's actually) HY Fiber Club, Verdant, 50/50 merino/mohair, in my first attempt to spin laceweight. It's a pain in the ass. The fiber is beautiful, and the actual spinning is going fine, but it's the winding on to the bobbin that ain't working so well. I'm currently adjusting the tension between the long-draw and wind-on portions of the program, and it seems to be working ok, but it's not terribly efficient. Plus it takes a really long time to spin 4 oz! No instant gratification here...I just hope I like the end product.

I'm off Wednesday to Portland, OR for a conference, so this may be the only post for the week. However, I have grand plans for finishing off multiple socks while I'm gone, so next week should bring many FOs (famous last words, right?)

Snow!

Well, theoretical snow at least. I just heard a weather report about the next cold front that's coming through southeast Texas in the next 36 hours, and they actually mentioned the dreaded "S" word.

Now I have lived in a number of places where snow was something of an anomaly, at least in any real amount, and it's been pretty entertaining to someone who did not get a snow day from sixth grade through high school graduation (and that's not because it didn't snow). Flashback to January 1996, driving from Boston back to grad school in DC one day after a blizzard dumped almost two feet of snow all the way down the eastern seaboard. Roads were dry and perfect until the Mason-Dixon line, at which point a sudden salt famine set in, and pinko commies apparently had stolen every snow plow in a 500 mile radius because Rt. 95 was glare ice and my street in Arlington, VA didn't get plowed for two weeks. Ehem.

Or the lovely afternoon I got to ride my bike to the pool at U of AZ through the wet slushy snowflakes the size of quarters. It didn't stick mind you, but it snowed in Tucson. Very exciting (the mountains around Tucson get plenty of snow in the winter, but it doesn't happen in town very often).

But Houston kind of takes the cake. It has "snowed" here once in the five years we've lived here - Christmas Eve 2004. Ironman and I went outside and danced around in the small white pellets falling from the sky. I took pictures of snow piled up in the cups of the philodendron leaves, and tried for arty shots of "snowflakes" falling. It was pretty neat, but like Tucson, not around for the duration (although Victoria, TX, southwest of Houston, got almost a foot, and the paper the next day had a front page picture of a snowman someone built on the beach in Galveston). It was pretty entertaining, but more so was the fact that the "snowstorm" was all anyone talked about for days afterwards.

And now, in March for god's sake, they're saying it might snow. All I know is that I'm going to be eagerly watching to see what kind of precautions my neighbors take. Stocking up on firewood*, clearing out the milk and bread at the grocery store^? In preparation for the imminent freeze, here is (finally) a picture of some warm, cozy, size 11.5 Trekking XXL socks to keep us from succumbing to the elements.

Dad's Christmas socks, actually on Dad

* for "firewood", read "gas" for the gas fires that most people have. Hell, even we have a gas log in our fireplace - it gives Ironman (who grew up in a house that was at least, in part, heated by firewood) a huge kick to say "Well, I guess it's time to turn off the fire" on one of the five days a year we use it.
^ because, you know, we might get snowed in! (Note: this is my pet peeve held over from living in the DC metro area for 5+ years. Every time snow was forecast, I could guarantee that the grocery stores would be a) packed to the gills and b) cleaned out of staples within four hours of the forecast.)

A Massachusetts Yankee in King George's Court

When we moved to Texas almost 5 years ago, I came with an ample truckload of assumptions about what living in Texas was going to be like. For the most part, the stereotypical ideas about everyone wearing cowboy boots, dinner-plate sized belt buckles and diamond oil derrick stick pins have been largely debunked. (Although everyone does say "Y'all". Which is not necessarily purely Texan, but that's how I thought of it). Sure, there are more Texas flags flying then American ones, and each triathlon starts off with a full fledged prayer, but by and large, my fears have not been born out.

But every so often I see something that completely explodes any assumptions I still held about Texas to bits. Like this morning, driving into work. I found myself staring at the bumper of a very large, red, pick'em up truck (an F150 maybe? I don't pay attention to silly things like make of truck). This bumper was more or less at my eye level. And I noticed the bumpersticker affixed to said bumper, which read:

"Vote Wisely: Hitler came to power in a free election"

A somewhat telling sentiment in this day and age of GWB's reign, no?