Monday, December 24. 2007
It seems like Christmas started on Saturday this year. We had a nice snowfall, with a not-so-nice 40MPH wind accompanying it. We got drifts, and had whiteout conditions outdoors for a little while.
Sunday morning came and I went out early to see if we'd be able to get the car down our driveway. At about 1/4 mile long, shoveling the whole thing is not a practical option. Fortunately, I got most of the way down the driveway before the car got stuck, so I only had to shovel a little bit.
Sunday was our big Christmas choir day in church. We started off with Star of the East, and old Christmas tune. Research into the church archives revealed that it was first performed by the adult choir in the 1930s -- and it was sung in English. Mrs. H. F. Voth was quoted as saying "they sang from the heart and meant it sincerely." It was fun to sing this old song.
Later on, the whole church sang Oh, beautiful star of Bethlehem, another old tune that isn't heard so often anymore. One of the older people in church told me later that song was special to her because she remembered carolers singing it at her house years ago.
The service ended with Nun Ist Sie Erschienen ( score, mp3, story), a tune sung in our community for many years. I fondly remember my grandpa playing this song on his harmonica. Maybe it's just stuck in my head for some reason, but it seems it was one of his favorites. This particular day, the pianist -- who was my band teacher when I was in school and is now retired -- improvised a beautiful accompaniment to the song. We sang it four times: twice in German, and twice in English. One of the older women in the congregation, whom I normally can't hear because she sits in front of me and down the row in choir, was singing with such strength that I could hear her clearly from my seat.
Moments like that bring home the timeless nature of Christmas to me.
Monday, December 17. 2007
For those of you wanting to see some pictures from the recent ice storm, here you go.
The morning:
This bush sorta got short and flat:
A tree branch:
And another:
Then, at noon:
Then the snow came:
If you have trouble finding the driveway... well, good thing we've got reflectors.
The rental generator that kept us warmish:
More snow:
You can also see the whole set on flickr.
Sunday, December 16. 2007
It's been an interesting week. For those of you that haven't been following along: we lost power Tuesday and have been without ever since.
Yesterday was the annual Christmas party at work. About an hour away, supposed to be there at 6. So at 2:30 I went outside to see if I could get the car out past all the snow. At first, YES! But then, halfway down the driveway... well, no. Our driveway needs help. It's actually lower than the fields around it. Thankfully it's on a hill so it doesn't flood, but it does drift shut when there's snow. So the car got stuck. I dug it out, and it got stuck again. And a third time.
I eventually called my dad to see if he'd be willing to come over with his tractor and open up our driveway. He said yes, and drove the 5 miles in his tractor -- which has no cab, and it was below freezing -- and got the driveway open, and helped me get the car unstuck. We had planned to leave at 4, to give us time to get Jacob to the babysitter. We didn't think a babysitter would enjoy spending the evening at a cold house with only a generator providing power, so we were taking him to their place. Well, we left about 4:30.
We got down our driveway, onto the road, and hey -- more drifts. Yay. Got out onto the highway, over to the road to their place. Which someone, ahem, had assured me was a paved road. But instead we got 5 miles on a very drifty east-west country road. That's the deepest snow I've ever put a car through, and I am still surprised that we didn't get stuck anywhere.
So then we dropped off Jacob, and off to the party, and squeaked in just a few minutes late. Phew. It was nice to be out of the house, too.
When we picked up Jacob later -- taking the non-drifty route -- he was sleeping, of course. I carried him out to the car and put him in his seat. There's nothing quite like carrying a sleeping boy snuggled into you to make you forget the lack of electricity outside.
Today we went to church. Church was canceled last Sunday, and the Wednesday evening activities were too. So I think everybody made an effort to be there today. All sorts of electricity stories were heard. Generators moved around the countryside as those that owned them got power and loaned them out to those that didn't have power. The president of a nearby college called the church and offered two rooms at his personal residence to anyone that needed them. One woman announced during sharing time that her husband was taken to the hospital on Friday. They determined that he needed heart surgery, and that will happen tomorrow... and she added that she'd be with him for a couple of days, so if anyone needed a warm house for a family, theirs was available and had a couple of bedrooms, fridge, and garage that people were welcome to use.
At noon there was a free lunch offered to anyone still without power. We went and enjoyed some warm soup and bread with about 30 others.
After that, we went to my parents' place to do some laundry, then came home.
We ate supper. As Terah got up to give Jacob some more chili, I suggested that she look out the window and see if any yard lights were on yet. I had flipped our master breaker off, just to be extra cautious due to having wired our furnace into the generator temporarily. So this is how we would tell that power was back on somewhere (though we did check it periodically during the day). Terah looked out the window, and said, "I DO see yard lights out there... Do you think?" I got up, went downstairs, flipped the breaker, and light came on! We turned on the lights -- Jacob had missed them -- and plugged in the Christmas tree. The power had come on for people miles in either direction from us at the same time. Dad came over to get our electrical box back to normal state and to help me load up the generator to return tomorrow.
There's nothing quite like this to make us feel fortunate to be a part of such a caring community of friends and family -- people who don't think twice about helping out someone in need, even in the midst of having a husband hospitalized.
Jacob didn't seem to mind the power outage. Except for one thing. He is very excited about lights these days. I can spend 15 to 30 minutes exploring lights with him, especially in the kitchen. He will point at a light and say "da?" ("that"). "Da? Da?" means he wants it turned on or off. We'll go to the light switch, and he'll get to flip it, or watch while I do. "Dooooo!" is his excited response.
Well, when he wants something and it's not happening fast enough for him, "Da? Da?" changes to "Da!... Da!..." and then to "DA!! DA!!" and finally some fussing. That happened several times as we couldn't turn on lights.
Then we got to church this morning and boy was he excited. Lights everywhere! He'd point to one bright light and say "Da!" -- look at the light over there, dad! Point to another place and "Da!" Another one over here! And ceiling fans! Lights everywhere! He was so excited he was trying to jump up and down.
Jacob's favorite new word is "hi." He has just barely figured out how to say it, and it takes effort, and comes out very breathy -- but it's there. He can spend several minutes saying hi to someone over and over if he's in the right mood. He wouldn't say hi to the greeters at church, or anyone that said hi to him. But we were sitting in the back row, and halfway through the sermon, he started saying hi to the ushers that were behind us. I couldn't see them very well, but I imagine they were trying to keep from cracking up.
Thursday, December 13. 2007
You may remember my post Monday in which I told Mother Nature to "bring it on".
I would like to clarify that remark at this time. I would have preferred Mother Nature to interpret this in the President Bush sense of "please don't hurt us", rather than the "let's just knock out power to the entire plains region". A nice little romantic power outage Tuesday evening would have been nice.
We lost power at 3:10 on Tuesday according to my workstation's logs. It's still out, and our rural electric cooperative is estimating it will be another week until it's back, though that's better than the Dec. 22 date the state's much larger for-profit utility is giving people. We were lucky enough to be able to find a generator to rent on Wednesday morning. $35 a day isn't cheap. But on the other hand, we don't have a flooded basement due to not pumping out the sump pump, our food isn't spoiled, and our pipes aren't frozen.
At work, our Internet connection went down Tuesday morning. We use a fixed wireless connection, and this was the first time our ISP's radios have been tested in ice. Some antenna designs performed flawlessly. Then there were the antennas we had. 80% packet loss or worse. It wasn't safe to get up on the roof to deice them until Wednesday afternoon, and even then we couldn't get all the ice off. Finally today the connection was back to normal.
That two weeks after someone -- yes -- dug through Sprint/Embarq's apparent only fiber-optic link into town. Took down all long-distance calling into or out of the town, most cell towers, as well as all access to 911 (since dispatch is in another town) for about 8 hours. If we had still be using wired T1s, we would have been out of service with Internet as well.
All told, 200,000 households or business customers of the state's largest utility have been without power. Dozens of other utilities have also had significant outages. Ours alone lost 700 power poles and there are substations in need of repair all over the eastern part of the state. And we weren't even the hardest hit.
On the generator, we can generally pick any three of refrigerator, server, workstation, or furnace to run. So sometime warm, I'll upload the pictures I've taken so far. We have one nice CFL-powered electric lamp we're using, flashlights, and a kerosene lamp. It's amazing how after just a few days of this, we're starting to want to go to bed earlier. Or perhaps that was because I haven't had the chance to get a lot of sleep lately...
When we look out the house to the east, we see pitch black. Normally we can see some yard lights in the distance. Not this week. Nothing at all to the east. To the west, we can see yard lights tantalizingly close -- only 2 miles away, fed from a different location. Ah, the joys of being at the very end of a utility's network.
All this despite the fact that this storm wasn't really all that bad. The roads were never really terrible, and there weren't as many trees down as there were in the ice storm of 2005.
I heard a comment on the news today from an Iowa Republican who had followed the GOP debate yesterday. She mentioned that Romney made a comment like "Well, guess there's no global warming in Iowa with an ice storm like this, huh?" She pointed out that if Iowa was still as chilly as it used to, it would have been a snow storm instead of an ice storm. I agree.
Monday, December 10. 2007
Cliff has an absolutely wonderful post about "egg and daughter night" in his hometown in Nebraska. A great read.
Saturday evenings used to be quite the occasion around here too, from what I'm told. But nobody can tell the story like Cliff.
Monday, December 10. 2007
A day or two ago, I got the feeling that winter has set in. Maybe you know the feeling.
I looked outside the bedroom window. The trees had a bit of white all over. The tall grass in the distance had a sheen of gray on it. The sky was a uniform gray. Small ice pellets hit at our window. As far as the eye could see, not a sign of anything that wasn't frozen.
As I stood in our warm 68-degree house, I was reminded of how little separates us from the frozen outdoors. A few inches of wood and insulation is all. How easy it is to fret about the rapidly rising cost of propane these days, the cost of heating a house. But still, how easy we have it compared to the people that came before in this house.
They had to keep a fire going for warmth, keep a ready supply of firewood for the winter, figure a way to get the warmth throughout the house. All with insulation that wasn't as good as we have, windows that didn't shut as tight as ours, doors that were draftier. As is typical today, our furnace has safety systems designed to detect problems and shut itself down if something weird happens. Back then, indoor heat was a dangerous thing. There's been at least one chimney fire in this house, an event which often claimed the entire house and sometimes the lives of its inhabitants. Ten feet from my desk, there's a rounded out black spot on the floor where, perhaps 70 years ago, someone opened the door to a wood stove, only to be surprised by a burning log falling out to the wood floor.
Today, we can't use wood heat due to Terah's asthma. We had the chimney removed to boost the energy efficiency of the house with modern heat. Out back in the trees north of the house, there is a pile of bricks, saved from our chimney for future use. Each brick has a scorched side, darkened from the chimney fire and decades of use.
As we experienced firsthand in the ice storm of 2005 (see also more stories and pictures), it doesn't take much to be thrown back a hundred years from a convenient modern heat to our non-automated, non-mechized, past. All it takes is a tree to snap too close to the right power line anywhere between our house and the generating station -- which I think is 80 miles away -- to make our house mighty cold. Even though I still have a stack of firewood, it wouldn't do us much good these days.
With that in mind, today I was listening to the radio while driving in to work. How lovely to hear this quote:
"The National Weather Service will issue a Winter Storm Warning effective at noon today, lasting through 6AM tomorrow." We are to expect rain, freezing rain, ice pellets, and ice. A "wintry mix" is the technical term for it, I believe.
Temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than expected this afternoon, so we got mainly rain. What we will get tonight is an open question yet. I'm sure that schoolchildren all over the state are hoping for ice and lots of it. Personally, I feel that it's only been three years since I spent a week carrying a saw in my trunk in order to be able to clear my driveway every time I left home or got back home. I think I'm owed another year or two off. I also wouldn't mind avoiding the giant branch sitting on the ground right in front of the front door, or the 40-degree indoor temperatures, or the lack of running water due to lack of electricity.
But these crisp, cold winter days are a rare thing to enjoy these days. We get a month or two of stifling heat each summer, but only a week or two to enjoy this really cold part of winter. I miss the snowdrifts when we don't get them.
So, mother nature, bring it on. I'll be waiting with my camera and a glass of hot chocolate. Because even without electricity, I can still light a burner on our oven with a match.
Saturday, December 1. 2007
We love to hear from you. I'm sure that's what you're thinking, anyway, as you prepare volumes of paper to send to our mailbox.
But just so you know, let me explain just how much we love the material you send us.
When we get one of your catalogs, it will get added to the junk mail pile. Every so often, I will go through this pile. I will contact the company behind each and every mailing, asking them to remove me from their list and not rent my name further. If I have extra time, I will probably also write that note on your postage-paid envelope and pop it in the mailbox. I will also add your name to my list of companies that send me junk mail, so I can avoid doing business with you in the future. If you have sent me junk mail in the past, rest assured that I will find some creatively enjoyable way of dealing with your refusal to honor my removal request.
After I have processed your piece of artfully-crafted handiwork, possibly trying to sell me pink laptops or a shirt with the word "femail" on it -- whatever that means -- I will deposit your catalog, along with dozens of other similar catalogs, on the kitchen floor.
This is when the real fun begins, because now it's Jacob's turn to process them.
He will usually start by ripping out every page from the catalog. He'll start slowly and carefully, ripping out pages one at a time, savoring the wonderful rrrrriiiiippppp noise as he goes. But then he'll get faster, going for two pages at a time, then more, until finally he just will lunge for paper by the handful to crush, tear, or otherwise mutilate.
After that, there are many things he might do to your fine piece of unsolicited advertising. Perhaps he will enjoy drooling on it -- a satisfying fate for your 4-color catalog, don't you think? Or perhaps he will grab some of your pages, carefully emblazoned with your logo, and tear them into as many tiny bits as he can. Or maybe he will simply gather your work together on the floor, then spin himself around on top of it, scattering the remnants as far and wide as possible, cackling all the while. He may also smear bits of food on them if he ate recently, or perhaps he will simply resume tearing pages apart.
But whatever he does, rest assured that he will treat your catalog with the care and attention it deserves. No catalog will survive intact, and as many pages as possible will be ripped apart and left in bits. He does, after all, have a great attention to detail.
After Jacob is done, we will gather up what remains and put it all in our recycling container.
Oh, and under no circumstances will we actually make a purchase from your catalog.
Here are two pictures of the scene.
Notice the careful concentration in this photo. Obviously he knows that Dell has been ignoring my removal requests for some time, and is taking note to tear their pages into the smallest possible bits.
But it's not all hard work -- processing your catalogs is fun, too.
Saturday, December 1. 2007
It was two weeks ago now that we hopped on an Amtrak train in the middle of Kansas at the bright and early hour of 3AM, bound for Indiana.
This has been our third trip with Jacob. He's 14 months old now. We never really enjoyed long car or airplane trips before we had a baby, and haven't really had the desire to try a long car trip since. So we try to take the train, or if time is short, fly.
Jacob enjoys the train. There's lots to see and do. The one thing he doesn't like doing is waiting for food to arrive in any situation, so when we have sit-down meals in the diner, things can get challenging.
We arrived in Indiana the same evening and spent a few days with Terah's dad out at the farm.
Jacob enjoyed grandpa and grandma:
Jacob got his first ever ice cream there. Despite the concerned "unknown food alert" look, he opened up quick for another bite.
The big hit of the visit there were chickens. I've never seen Jacob so thrilled about watching something before. He was so excited he was just moving his arms all around, almost jumping up and down. Here he is watching them:
Terah wants us to get chickens now. Just because we still have a chicken house left...
On Tuesday, we went north to spend a few days with Terah's mom. On the way up, it became overcast. Terah's mom calls it the winter "permacloud", which is the best description of it I've heard yet. I didn't believe Terah at first when she said that they don't see the sun for 3 months in winter up there, but I believe her now.
Jacob found a rocking chair just his size there, and was able to make it rock. But the big hit of this stop were refrigerator magnets, at Jacob height.
He spent a long time with them, and got pretty good at working with them, too.
He also thought he ought to check out the camera in great detail. So of course, the camera checked him out.
Terah's mom wanted to spend some time with Jacob, so on Wednesday, Terah and I headed up to Niles, MI to visit some antique shops. We found some postcards from small towns in Kansas dating back to the 1930s, an old metal fan (still works), a wooden "apothecary box" with pull-out drawers, and some furniture we might have purchased if we were closer to home.
For the first time ever, Terah was the first one to say "aren't you done shopping yet?" She was getting tired, so we started heading back. Magically her energy returned as we approached the road leading to the South Bend Chocolate Co. factory and retail store, so we headed in that direction. The next tours didn't start for almost an hour, so we bought some chocolate, looked around a bit, and then left.
Terah's mom had a good time with Jacob while we were gone.
Thursday was the O'Connor Thanksgiving. Terah's grandma and some other relatives were there. Here's Jacob with his great grandma:
Jacob enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner, and managed to keep finding things to munch on all afternoon.
That evening, we went over to Terah's Yoder grandparents and spent a few days there. Not long after we arrived, Terah's uncle showed up and brought his adopted greyhound with him. Jacob was very excited about this, though the dog wasn't so sure about Jacob.
Eventually the greyhound calmed down and Jacob got to see him up close and pet him. Jacob didn't even mind getting his whole face licked.
The next morning at breakfast, Terah's grandma had set out the high chair that she used as a girl for Jacob to eat in. I got some pictures, but Jacob was far more interested in asking to have food ready to eat.
Here's Jacob with his Yoder great grandparents:
Later Friday, it was the Yoder Thanksgiving. Jacob got plenty of attention. He also was looking VERY CAREFULLY for Waldo.
Jacob wasn't feeling the best all week, but despite having a busy week and feeling not so good, he did really well. He has been walking with help now, holding on to one adult finger with each hand. He really enjoys that, but is short enough that adults have to bend over a bit to help him. I imagine several people had sore backs after the week was over, including us.
On the train trip home, I took him to the lounge car to go walking. Usually he likes to walk as fast as he can for as long as he can, but there he would only go a little bit at a time. He'd stop at each group of chairs to look at the people, and most of them were really happy to see him, too. After he was done with the lounge car, we walked back through the coaches to our seat. As long as he kept walking, he again would stop at each row of seats to make friends with anybody that wanted to.
We tried to find a nice place to go for lunch during our layover in Chicago. But let me tell you, downtown Chicago -- at least the part near Union Station -- is dead on Sunday and the fact that it was just after Thanksgiving probably didn't help. We wound up finding a place in Union Station to eat. Jacob fussed for awhile, then went to sleep on my lap (he rarely manages to go to sleep while being held). Then on our connecting train back to Kansas.
It was a fun and busy week, but it's nice to be home too. Our train arrived in Kansas at 3:15AM Monday morning. So we went home to catch a few more hours sleep before going to work. As I went outside that morning, we had a gorgeous Kansas sunrise. As the sun was coming up, it was lighting the underside of the clouds with a vibrant deep red and orange color. The whole sky to the east was lit up like that, and felt so warm and inviting on a bitterly cold morning.
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Comments
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