Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Lots of rain

We're in one of those areas of the country that got 12" of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday. In fact, school dismissed early on Tuesday, and was cancelled Wednesday and today. This has been a weird year of weather and cancelled school. One of our neighboring towns, in fact, made national news -- Piedmont, MO is just about 30-40 minutes away. This is very hilly country, criss-crossed by creeks of all sizes. The one down the hill behind our house got way out of its banks, but it's mostly back in now. The sun is shining and there isn't a cloud in the sky. I think the reason school was cancelled is that there are several of our county highways (read: "paved roads" -- 2 lanes, very curvy & hilly, mostly marked with double yellow lines, because there aren't any safe places to pass someone) that are still closed due to flooding.

This is the creek behind the house:
The tree in the foreground (above) is about 9 or 10 yards off the corner of the front porch. The grass is the edge of the yard, and then there's a fairly steep hill going down to the creek. You can see the neighbor's fields & fences at the top of the picture. The picture below was taken from the edge of the hill (about the middle of the picture above), but at the other end of the house.
I think the picture below is roughly the same view, with the creek back where it's supposed to be. The creek is barely visible, in the top left corner, the darker area passing behind the tilted tree and extending up and to the right, about 3/4 of the way across the top of the picture. The lighter area in the top left corner is the gravel bar on the other side of the creek.

Sock Madness started a week ago. The pattern was emailed to participants on Thursday. I printed it out (at school) and started the sock when I got home. Even took it to school the next day and laid it on my desk to work on in odd moments. I only got half a round done, and that was because one of my students wanted to watch me knit. When I got home, I decided I didn't like the way the whole thing looked, so I found some different yarn & started over. Already over 24 hours behind. But I finished sock #1 on Saturday and started sock #2, which I finished on Sunday night around 11:00 p.m. Not too bad. I quickly posted the required finished pic, emailed the moderators with a link to the picture, and went to bed hoping I'd made the cut to go on to round 2. No need to worry. Forty people from each of the 4 divisions are advancing. I thought there were 40 people in each division at the start, until I counted & found 57 in my division. We're still waiting on 46 more people to finish. Only 6 slots left in my division, though (UConn Cast Ons). I do need to catch up on things that didn't get done during those 48 or so hours of concentrated sock knitting, so I'm trying not to knit at all. (HA!)