The song isn't really all that true

Today is my birthday. It's been my experience that it is not, as the Beatles song (Renee--you are right--it is the Rolling Stones) says, a drag getting old--at least not all the time. I have had two glorious days of celebrating with tomorrow to go yet!

Yesterday Paulette and I went to Iris Fine Yarns where she bought me this:

It's Sublime soya cotton, and it's yummy soft.I am going to make a tank top out the the 7 skeins of it.

Then we went to Summerfest and saw John Mellencamp:

Today we went to the antique mall, because I figured there was a lot of stuff there that was older than me.

I found some Blue Ridge pottery there (we have a large collection on the dining room walls):

And some postcards:

This one is of the old Woolen Mill in Sheboygan Falls.

Paulette also bought me this for my birthday:

A 32" HDTV. I love it!

Can't wait for tomorrow!

Getting back to normal--sort of

The lawn finally got mowed last night. It was really long. Paulette took the new lawnmower on it's maiden voyage:

Here's a closeup of her new friend:

I do the trimming, but I did try out the new lawnmower. It's pretty nice. The Weedeater had been covered in water--but only the spindle part on the bottom. Well, I plugged it in and pushed the button. It worked--but first it shot a bunch of water out in all directions.

I think it deserves a bath this weekend.

Our neighbor Scott next door made us this:

It felt really good to cut the grass like normal people. Jeffy even got to go outside. He, of course, didn't want to go in. The mosquitos were getting really bad out there.

Here's a shot of the front garden in all of it's glory:

Like it never even happened

The campus at UW Oshkosh had water damage as well in several buildings. The most hard hit was River Center, which had 10 feet of water in it. These are guests you really don't want to see on campus:

I guess I am happy to be back at work. Not surprisingly, it's much less work than cleaning up after a flood.

Last night I put my car in the garage for the first time since last Wednesday night. This is what I had cleaned out of my interior fan for my car heater a week ago on Sunday:

Apparently the little critters are at it again because when I turned on my heater (it was a little chilly this morning here), it was making noises again. Sigh. Now I get to be a contortionist once again to remove the fan housing from underneath the passenger dash and clean it out again. The fun never ends.

Moderate recovery

We have most of the basement cleaned up now.

We still need to go to the Christmas stuff, which we partially did on Friday. There's not that much left to do, so we are being lazy today.

Here's the big pile o'garbage in front of our house, that runs almost 50 feet, the width of our property (it hurts my heart to call it garbage--there is good stuff we had to throw away):

And a view of the neighborhood:

Doesn't look like much, but that's way more stuff on the curb than on garbage day.

We're getting tired of living in plastic box land--this is our front porch.

Speaking of plastic boxes, we here at Chez Paulette and Sara recommend Sterilite plastic boxes should you need to protect your stuff in the basement. They're on sale at Target right now. The stuff we had in them suffered the least amount of damage--in a lot of cases, no damage. Rubbermaid, not so much.

Look at the icky silt left on stuff in the yard:

Here's the new water heater in all it's glory:

I should have taken a picture of Phil the plumber while he was installing it. Silly me.

Look what I found in one of my untouched Sterilite boxes:

It's from 1984. I put this in there with the intention that Paulette make me this. I will be knitting it for myself now. It's sport weight yarn. There are a couple of other good patterns in the booklet as well. Apparently it's a gift from the knitting gods to me.

The garden is celebrating--it's really looking pretty now!

Well, better go now. The basement is calling me.....

The Lord told Noah there's gonna be a floody, floody....

We had an entire evening of terrible storms on Thursday from 4:30PM until about 1AM Friday. Well, we ended up with about 6 inches of rain in Oshkosh, triggering some of the worst flooding Oshkosh has seen in years. Our street flooded:

I don't understand why people feel the need to joyride up and down a person's street while it is terribly flooded going a high rate of speed. I felt like we needed no wake signs to keep the water from washing up against our foundations. Our fence and our retaining wall held. Our gardens are all good, including the vegetable garden, where the beans and zucchini are sprouting. I was sure the seeds were washed away.

Our cars were in danger as well. We didn't put them in the garage because the water started flowing down our driveway like a river. We moved them to the neighbor's lawn. They made it!

The basement flooded:

Yes, that registers about 15 inches. This is what it did to the basement:

When I saw the water starting to come up, first I felt extremely ill and then I got Paulette to come down and get anything she really wanted to take upstairs, like Christmas ornaments, luggage, my fall clothing, snowshoes, the tools (we used them), the vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner, etc. I had to make myself eat something. Paulette was on the phone to our insurance carrier at 1AM. Our check is in the mail now. We were up until 1:30 AM, along with the neighbors all down the block. We had the gas and electricity turned off because I was afraid the water would not stop coming up. I set my alarm to wake me every two hours so that I could check the water level. We also packed bags in case we had to leave suddenly.

At the 3:30AM check, the water had fallen a couple of inches. I felt a lot better. By the time I got up at 8:30, it was all gone, both inside and out. Then the fun began. We have been working since Friday throwing stuff out (more pictures of that soon) and cleaning. The laundry room is all bleachy clean now and we finished another room today. All that's left to clean out tomorrow is the room where we keep the Christmas stuff. Phil the plumber (he's a real character) rplaced our water heater Friday afternoon. A hot shower was blissful! We also got our electricity turned on without the requisite inspection (they'll be by later in the week) because we told WPS that someone has diabetes in the house who needs their insulin cold. It's true--Churchill did need his insulin kept cold--it had been in the cooler for over 12 hours, but it seems okay.

I got a little knitting done yesterday, but none today. Maybe some before bed.

Our friend Kyle just left our house. He doesn't have hot water yet, so he has been taking a shower here until his gets fixed. His house got even more damage now. He said he thinks it shifted on it's foundation a little. We are trying to talk him into turning one of his bedrooms into a laundry and furnace room. He is also talking about getting a tankless water heater.

Today after church we went to Sears and bought a new washer and dryer. They will be delivered on Tuesday. Our lawnmower also got flooded out in the garage, so we also got a new one at Sears (on sale!). We didn't try it out yet. The furnace man is coming to inspect the furnace on Tuesday to tell us whether we need a new one.

More soon--I'm tired now.

It was a busy weekend

It's been a busy few days....

On Friday, we had our annual Classified Staff Development and Appreciation Day at the University. We get to take all sorts of classes, some fun, some work related. You get to pick whatever you want. Mine were fun. I helped Paulette's sister, Cheryl, with her "Fearless Knitting" class. I personally taught a fellow co-worker how to purl. It was very rewarding! Here's our class:

I also took a class on the history of the "Little House on the Prairie" books told through quilting. I think Paulette and I freaked the presenter out for a while because we were knitting during her presentation.

Our friend Kenny finished the end tables:

We're looking for baskets to store the mess under each table in. Haven't found anything suitable yet.

Here are pictures of the flowers in the yard, pre-storm on Saturday:

It started to rain Saturday afternoon. It rained and stormed fiercely. It let up long enough on Saturday evening so that Paulette and I could take the old endtables up to her niece, Alison in Neenah. Then it started to storm again--into Sunday morning. There was a little break on Sunday, in which our friend Kyle called and asked if we had flooding. His street was terribly flooded, as were many streets in Oshkosh. Just getting to church, Target and Starbucks was a major chore with all the flooding. Then the rain started again--and Kyle's basement flooded. Ours just got a couple of small (by comparison) puddles which are drying up and our garage got flooded so that we couldn't park our cars in there. (Our garage still has a puddle, but we can now park in there). Jeffy was beside himself all weekend. He hates storms. We had him hiding in the bathroom for a lot of Sunday. I hear we got almost 5 inches of rain by this morning. Yikes. Steins, where a lot of our plants are from, had 2 feet of water in their outside plant area with 2 inches in the store. Guess we won't be going there for a little while.

Here are some random pictures of Jeffy and Churchill:

Holy Cow!

I am typing this on my new gigantic Mac I just got at work today. It's as big as my TV in my bedroom at home! Yikes. I see by the clock, I have one minute to leaving, so I'll say bye for now!

Froggyland

Well, the good news is my shawl is going well-now. The bad news is that I couldn't knit the last section of the shawl mistake-free, no matter how hard I tried. So, it got frogged back to the lifeline yarn I inserted. I started that section over using a pattern from the next shawl in the book, A gathering of lace, that has a 14 stitch repeat.

I had a really nice weekend. Got a lot of knitting done and all of the planting done in the yard I wanted to. Of course, it didn't hurt that I decided the day before, on a whim, to take Friday afternoon off. My friend, Kyle, brought over some orange daylily plants he was dividing. I found a place for them. Then, when Paulette and I were getting ready to go to see the Sex and the City movie yesterday, I looked in the backyard and there was Kyle, abandoning more of them. I think I'll put them along the driveway side of the house.

Wendy on Wendy Knits! is having a summer haiku contest on her blog. Sadly, I thought of one after the contest was closed. So, now you guys are going to have to read it!

Here goes:

Summer, hot outside.
I knit filmy lace inside
airconditioning.

Huh, and when I was going to school I just hated making this stuff up.