Here is a nice brief pictorial overview of the 2008 floods in Iowa City.
The parts you saw on CNN were probably Cedar Rapids, which is located nearby but is on the Cedar River, not the Iowa River like we are. The flooding involved several different waterways.
Blechh! Our hot water heater has thoroughly destroyed itself — we wandered downstairs this evening to find the basement pervaded with a smell that was, um, alarming, and after hunting around for quite some time (at first I thought it smelled like an electrical fire for some reason) we figured out that the cold water input valve had a fine leak, spraying water all over the place.
The spray was recent, but I’m guessing it had been dripping for some time — there was rusty sludge dripping down the side and puddled on the floor. Ewwww. I hadn’t looked in there since I last replaced the furnace filter, probably two months ago.
So, we’re hot-waterless until tomorrow, and will be sleeping elsewhere to escape the yucky smell and to allay my vague sense of disquiet. My family’s house burned down when I was 4, and unless my memory for family lore is off, it had something to do with the water heater.
Thankfully, it was easy enough to find somebody who can replace it tomorrow.
I keep forgetting to do this. But, in response to popular outcry, here is the recipe for Three Dolla Pie:
>In a medium bowl, beat together
>> 1 tbsp lemon zest (1 lemon’s worth)
>> 1/2 C lemon juice (2 lemons’ worth)
>> 1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
>> 2 or 3 drops yellow food coloring
>…until it is consistent, and thickens just a touch.
>first fold, then beat in
>> 1 8-oz tub Cool Whip, thawed
>…and mound the results in the center of
>> 1 12-in. graham cracker pie crust
>…and freeze at least 1 hour, preferably more.
>Remove from the freezer, cut with a wet knife and serve immediately.
If you wanted to be all fancy or something, you could, like, garnish with strips of lemon peel and a sprig of mint. But you’re just going to eat it immediately anyway, so what’s the point.
I really wanted to have some pictures to go along with this, but I haven’t had occasion to make a Three Dolla Pie since I was asked to post this. Perhaps I will visually document an expirimental pie construction; I have in mind Three Dolla Pie Lite and also Three Dolla Chocolate Pie.
Mmmm. Pie.
Our fence, this morning:
Our willow tree: screwed. The tree guy says fixing it is possibly maybe possible, but prohibitively expensive due the the utility lines being right where we would need to bury anchors and such, and it would likely end up just as screwed later on, anyway. Also, it was buried too deep in the first place, which may be part of why it broke in the wind. ::sigh::
So here’s me, wishing I had a chainsaw.
Fences, though, are much more repairable. Here’s the same fence as of this evening:
Aahhh, quickcrete. Thanks to Bryon and Mauria, without whom I would not really have known where to start.
So we were trying to get Daphne down for sleep when the tornado sirens went off (for those not living in tornado country: these are exactly like air raid sirens, and you hear them for miles and miles).
We followed the standard procedures, moving downstairs, to a central location, away from windows. We turned on the TV to check in with one of the local weather outfits. Midwesterners take weather seriously — sometimes much too seriously (we spent our first Iowa winter scoffing at what one of the local channels called the Blizzard of ‘98, which looked to us like a typical medium snowstorm of the type Utahns are used to seeing 4 or 5 times per year).
But when it counts, it’s kind of nice having fanatical weather geeks on local stations talking about what’s happening to you.
Anyway, we quickly learned that all of southeastern Iowa was under a Tornado Watch (which means: heightened risk of tornado activity). Furthermore, our county was under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning and, most ominously, a Tornado Warning (which means: an actual tornado has been spotted nearby, either by a human or by radar).
We spent a few minutes gathering up the requisite flashlights, candles, etc. and settled in to watch the weather reports. We learned that both the tornado warning and the severe thunderstorm warning were based on activity that was more than a county away from us. I popped my head outside long enough to verify that there was no weather at all — it had rained earlier and it was pretty muggy, but there was barely even a perceptible breeze.
Ok, so time for some precautionary measures.
We gathered in Holly’s potted plants, from the front porch, back patio, and the deck; there are a lot of them, so they ended up stowed in the garage, kitchen, living room, and upstairs bathroom. We dragged the deck chairs into the garage, and the grill into the kitchen. We didn’t leave anything at all on the deck… in fact, the only things left outside at all were the windchimes (staying right where they were, thank you very much), Daphne’s lady-bug sandbox (no way to move it with hundreds of pounds of sand inside, and anyway it has a cover), and the swing on the back patio.
The swing is a metal-and-cloth standing A-frame, and pretty solid, with a nice, low center of gravity. There was nothing to be done with it except to bungie-cord the swing seat to the frame, to prevent it swinging wildly and maybe stripping a bolt or damaging a spring or something silly like that.
I grabbed a couple of bungie cords from the garage and proceeded to lash the seat to one of the “A”s, getting a pretty good grip in place, and sort of halfheartedly lashed the other side as well, more for symmetry than for any practical purpose.
At this point, I noticed a few drops of rain, and the breeze was definitely getting more perceptible. I strolled back inside and locked the door behind me, then went to check that Holly was inside the house. She was; she’d been gathering batteries.
Fair enough. Back downstairs we went, and Holly took a peek outside. Boy, was that wind blowing now!
Yes, it was. The swing was just fine, though. The cover of Daphne’s sand box had blown off, but it was tethered, so no biggie; the sand would get wet, but so what?
Then Holly noticed the fence. Or, say, she spotted a certain unforseen lack of fence, an unexpected absence of fence, where fence would normally be found.
Yeah, we lost about 15 feet of wood fence. Damn.
Back inside, a bit sobered, we wondered whether our home insurance covered any kind of weather-related damage at all (it didn’t cover floods. Boy, did they drill into us the fact that it didn’t cover floods! They were very concerned that we might misapprehend that the homeowner’s insurance was meant to cover floods, when that was most assuredly not their intention at all. The house is on a friggin’ hill.)
Wondered Holly, “Did anybody else lose any fence?”
I doubted it, what with the neighborhood mostly chain-link or fence-free, but took a look out the front door to check (”Ok, fences: check, no problem. Cars on the street or in driveways: check, no problems visible. Trees: check, all present and accounted for.”) I did think it was funny how far our front-yard tree as bending over. Truly, it was the gymnast of trees. So nimble! So flexible!
So staying at a 45 degree angle even after the winds died down!
Oops!
So, no tornado, and a thunderstorm that really blew through town and was gone. And all we’ve got to show for it is Absence where our fence used to be Present, and the leaning tower of Tree-sa.
Silver linings: the power never went off at all - not so much as a blink or momentary browning. I never even turned the computer off, as a matter of fact.
And: Daphne stayed asleep. Thank heaven for small favors.
I’m off to sleep now — it’s only midnight, but I feel like I’ve stayed up ’til the wee hours. Time enough to peruse our policies in the morning.
play ball
Originally uploaded by flwombat.
I know I keep blathering about Flickr, but I forgot to mention - go here:
http://flickr.com/photos/jackpinette/
…to see all of the pictures I have uploaded. This is also the page from which you can subscribe to the (RSS 2.0 or Atom) feed of all of my photos, if you’re enough of a with-it internet hep-cat to be using a newsreader.
hmm biere de pinette
Originally uploaded by doreyme.
This is the kind of crazy-cool stuff you can find by poking around on Flickr - I did a search for photos tagged with “pinette” and this popped up.
I have never heard of bière d’épinette before, but apparently it is “spruce beer” (think “root beer”). It’s supposed to taste sort of pine-y, like pine-sol soda or something.
Chrys and/or Adam, have you ever heard of this stuff? It sounds like it’s local to Montreal, so maybe not. I’d love to get my hands on some.
