The difference between miserable and exhilarated

Well, I wasn't singing in the rain... but it sort of felt like that when I rode home today.

I think that during the 20 minutes it took for me to get home tonight nearly an inch of rain fell. It had been raining on and off during the day, but when I left my office it was not raining. By the time I got to the outside door the drops were beginning to fall, big, fat rain drops - the ones that make splotches nearly an inch in diameter on the sidewalk. I was wishing I'd left my work clothing on instead of changing into my biking gear.

It was miserable and cold, and I was drenched before I even got to the bike path (less than 100 yards from the door). I worried that I'd hydroplane and go down or that cars and trucks wouldn't be expecting me to be there in a downpour (so I turned on my flashing taillight and was very mindful of traffic). The wind was blowing hard enough at times to turn the rain drops into stinging needle-like projectiles.  I couldn't tell if it was worse to wear my glasses that were so streaked with rain that I couldn't really see, or to go without them and try to squint enough to keep the above-mentioned stinging-needle rain out of my eyes while hoping that I could see enough to avoid any mishaps.

Oh, yeah, I really didn't appreciate the driver of the beat up pickup truck deciding to hit the gigantic puddle at full speed just as I rode by going the other way... luckily it was during the worst of the rain, so the debris got washed off pretty quickly.

Even with all that I have to say it was the most exhilarating ride - the most exhilarating thing - I've done in a while... totally worth being really cold, wet and scared. Strange how something so simple makes us feel so alive.

arriving home

Best of all - my new Timbuk2 backpack kept all my stuff mostly dry!

Recent Work

I've been creating a new studio for the last couple weeks. I cleared out an unused bedroom (next to the glass/mosaic studio), covered the floor with 1/4" plywood for protection, and built a workbench.

 And started working on the medusa sculpture.

And dreadlocked my hair.

And shoveled A LOT of snow.

Thank goodness for generous neighbors with snow blowers!

22 Below Zero

On this past Thursday it reached 22 below zero just before dawn. Our high that day was 4 below zero. While not quite a record, it was pretty damn cold. We spent the day doing two of Minnesota's favorite things - remarking on how cold it gets and congratulating ourselves on how well we do when it gets that cold.

Friday was when it all hit the fan, though...
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Friday evening after work Abelisto & I stopped by the shoe store where I purchased a pair of Timberline hiking boots since my Asolo boots don't fit since the foot surgery - well, it's not so much that they don't fit, but rather that the tongue of the boot presses right on the scar on the top of my foot, making it really uncomfortable to wear them. I am saving them to see if someday the scar will be less tender and I can wear them again. The Asolos are a really heavy pair of hiking boots and I would love to wear them again in the future. Anyway, after shoe shopping (always a taxing event since I have a hard time finding shoes that fit) we went out to dinner stopping on the way home at a new recycled clothing store here in Winona.

When we got home we discovered that the washer was not working. We have one of those computerized front loading LG washers that control water and wash time based on how much you put in the washer. It has a LED display that tells you what the problem is if there is something keeping the washer from working. The panel was flashing a code I had never seen before and instead of looking it up on the handy guide (which is conveniently magnetically attached to the side of the washer) I simply popped the door open. Out poured around 20 gallons of soapy water - right onto my new boots.

This was how I discovered that waterproof Timberlines are, in fact, waterproof.

I quickly shut the washer door, but actually at this point the water was below the door level and wasn't going to pour out any more. We found the shop vac and cleaned up the water mess and decided that since it had been warmer that day we would let it go until morning and see if it would thaw out. We also discovered that the waterline to the dishwasher was frozen too.

During the night Abelisto woke up smelling smoke. He got up and went over the house from top to bottom, and not finding any reason to be smelling smoke, tried to get some more sleep - but never managed to fully get back to sleep.

When we got up Saturday morning there was still some strange water issue in the kitchen and laundry room. Before I had much time to think about it the telephone in the front room rang. It was the land line phone - all our friends usually call us on our cell phones, so I figured that it was the usual telemarketer and didn't make a serious attempt to get to it before the voicemail answered it.

As I got to the phone I heard the head of the maintenance department at work leaving a message telling me that a waterline in my building had burst overnight and the office was affected. He also mentioned two other people whose areas are in the part of our offices that are across a rather wide hallway. I thought he probably was just calling everyone in the office, but that the damage was really in the offices across the hall. Besides that, I had water issues at home to deal with.

We went to Menards and picked up two ceramic space heaters. We put the insulation that one of the cats had torn down back up in the basement window, plugged the pipe heater back in (neither of us remembered unplugging it), and placed a space heater in the basement room with the pipes and in the laundry room.

All of a sudden we smelled smoke again. I was fairly certain it wasn't the space heaters, but we went on a search of the first floor of the house and the basement.

We found a gruesome sight. Sometime during the bitter cold of the week, a starling had come down in the chimney vent for the water heater. It must have been drawn to the warmth. It found itself in a bad situation, though, when the water heater turned on and hot gas fire exhaust came rushing up the chimney. The bird's struggles had lifted the chimney duct pipe off of the water heater - it almost escaped death, but not quite.

It actually was good that we found this - having the chimney vent almost knocked off could have given us carbon monoxide poisoning.

A bit later it seemed that the water lines were thawed. I had tried turning on the washer and it immediately started pouring water into the washing compartment. This washer has water saving controls and it never just pours water in. Even when I turned it off the water still came in. Abelisto and I pushed the washer sideways a bit so that we could reach the water valves and turned them off. By the time we got that done, water was pouring out onto the floor again so I got the shop vac and sucked it all up as well as sucking out as much of the water in the washer as I could.

At this point I figured that the washer's inlet valves had been frozen and were likely toasted. So I packed up all the wet soggy clothing and towels, and all the rest of the unwashed laundry and headed off to a Laundromat. Since I was out and about I drove by the university to check out the burst pipe scenario and discovered that my desk was part of the flooded area, but my coworkers were taking care of it, which was a good thing since it only took a few minutes of being in the room to trigger an asthma episode. The dissolving ceiling tile, or the debris or something was off-gassing some chemical that had my airways tight in no time. The water had splashed all over my laptop and new, 22" auxiliary monitor, but they both seemed to work alright.

I left my coworkers cleaning things up and went to do the laundry.

When I got home Abelisto mentioned that the furnace did not kick on during the entire time I was gone. We usually have our thermostat set around 60 degrees to save energy, but we had turned it all the way up earlier in hopes of helping to thaw out the frozen lines. At this point the temperature in the house was around 45 degrees so I went down and tested the fuses. None were blown so we called a service company.

Three and a half hours later we had heat. We also had $600.00 less in our checking account. It turned out it was mostly our own fault - if you don't change your furnace filters regularly it causes the blower motor to run harder which overheats the circuit board which will, in time, fry the furnace's computer.

While waiting for the service man to get the furnace fixed we decided to run the dishwasher and do some cleaning up. I was filling the sink and washing counter tops. Abelisto loaded and ran the dishwasher. I noticed that the sink drain bubbled up when the dishwasher kicked into rinse, but did not think much about it.

We stopped to make supper and I worked on the mosaic and finished cutting the tile order into sample-sized sheets of tile. Abelisto worked on his lecture for Monday and did some grading while I played with cutting glass tiles and building a jig for cutting better triangles from the 3/4 inch glass tiles.

At some point I went back in the kitchen and discovered that there was water pouring out of the washer AGAIN. Once more we got the shop vac and sucked it all up. I could not figure it out. We had turned off the water valves. I thought perhaps they weren't closing all the way, but that did not seem right since we didn't hear water coming in. I thought perhaps it was just trickling in.

I decided to open up the drain trap on the washer to completely drain any water that was in it. This, of course, made another mess which we sucked up again. This time, I was lazy and poured it down the sink instead of taking it outside and dumping it out.

I was sucking up the water on the kitchen floor (I did not do the best job lifting up the shop vac and some of the water missed the sink) when I realized that water was coming out of the washer drain trap again. Suddenly I knew what our problem was. Frozen drain.

I went downstairs to trace the drain pipe. I found a place where one of the cats (it was Finn) had pulled down the insulation from a window in the basement. This window was missing a pane and last summer when Finn decided he simply must be an outside cat we had half-heartedly covered it up with a board and leaned an old door over it to keep Finn from pulling down the board (the basement walls are old sandstone and mortar, no way to nail anything up to hold in the board). I had meant to fix it, really, but it slipped my mind. I don't go in the basement much - it makes me have to use my inhaler too much.

Anyway, the door leaning against this botched repair job was channeling frigid air right down the wall and onto the drain pipe. It took ten minutes to insulate the window, secure it with several layers of cardboard pressed into the window framing (another half-assed repair, I know, but I need some concrete anchors and a masonry bit to fix it right and I don't have any right now), and move the space heaters to where they would blow right on the pipe.

Three hours later the pipe thawed and the sink drained.

On the Edge of Anger

Thought I would change the colors on the blog and see if it increased my motivation to blog. How strange it is to feel guilty over not blogging. Add one more thing to fret over. Messy house, bad eating habits, forgetting/avoiding exercise, browsing the net while at work (okay, this one is not a problem, I am supposed to look at websites now and then...), forgetting to check my bank balance before deciding to buy something, Now I can add not blogging to the list.

I am finding myself on the edge of anger more often nowadays. Mostly an unspecific anger which makes it hard to combat. I think it is a number of things:

the kids are being particularly aggravating these days;
the website redesign (at work) seems to be ending up as one giant hurry-up-and-wait project where things are becoming a jumbled mass of other people's agendas and not the team's;
and the fucking housing market fell apart just when we were reaching a point where we might sell this huge house.

I really do feel like it is nearly a sin (and I do not actually believe in sin, per se) to have 3 people living in a 3000 sq. ft. house. This house could house a community of 6 - 8 like-minded adults, or a family of 8, if there were families that big. I guess there are still families that size, but I do not know of any who would buy the house.

Having this much room has given me more studio room, and it is great for gatherings - last fall we had a party with 30 or so people attending and no one said it was too crowded.

Today Abelisto and I did our shopping on the bicycles (first time out on the bikes this spring - that's another thing, this winter seems to be hanging on tooth-and-nail up here in Minnesota, I am so sick of winter), and we saw a man working on the roof of a house near ours. I circled back around and asked him if he did roofs or if he was the homeowner. He said he did roofs on the side and we asked him to come look at ours. We told him about the bees, and the fact that we would only be doing sections of the roof, and he was fine with that. He said he would contact us in about a week to take a look at the roof and give us an estimate. I hope we can afford him, otherwise I will be doing the roof myself. I know I can do it, I just do not know if I want to tackle a job that big.

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Been a while

The last two weeks have been tough in many ways.

Over Thanksgiving we went to Indiana. My brothers and I went through my father's garage and parceled out the items that each of us wanted, sorted and organized the things we felt my mother needed to keep around, and bagged/boxed/stacked the things that should be given away or hauled away to be recycled or trashed.

Abelisto and I made the 600 mile drive home on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We were in the middle of Illinois when we got a phone call from daughter #2. She was crashing emotionally and the end result was that at 5 am on Wednesday (just 36 hours after we got back from Indiana) I flew out to Las Vegas. Once there I helped her pack some things up and we flew back to Minnesota yesterday. She is here at least for the month, and perhaps for the spring semester so that she can finish her BA. She needs 7 credits or an internship to finish it up.

The temperature difference between Nevada and Minnesota was amazing - we both spent the evening shivering. Today she begins making some concrete plans for what's next in her interesting life.

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Floods

We have been dealing with excessive rain and flooding here in Winona. Our lovely bluffs and coulees (ravines) tend to cause flash floods if we get more than 2 inches of rain in a six hour period (according to the state hydrologist). I think they are saying that we got around 17 inches of rain in a 36 hour period.

Our house has not flooded, but many others have not been so fortunate. Entire houses have washed away - some with the owners sitting on the roof. There is a 40 foot hole across one highway. I heard somewhere that more than one car went over the edge of the abyss while the water was raging. One nearby town is totally surrounded by water, partially submerged by water. The Red Cross is boating supplies into the residents. Everywhere you look there are downed trees, flotsam and jetsam, and mud, mud, mud. And gawking onlookers - I have resisted the temptation to go look-see.

Tonight there have been a number of ambulances going down the street in front of our house.

The university where I work is being used by the American Red Cross as a shelter for evacuees from all over the county. Dignitaries have been to town, made speeches and promises and left - no mud on their shoes.

We keep walking down into the basement - just to check. It is still raining, on and off. I really should pick the important stuff off of the floor, but I dwell in denial.

Mount Trempealeau

One more river fog photo

This one is the Mississippi River with Mt. Trempealeau (the largest sandbar on the river) taken from the Minnesota side, a few miles downriver from Winona Minn.

We get a considerable amount of fog throughout the bluffs that border the river here. I believe this is Radiation fog (fog formed by the cooling of land after sunset by thermal radiation in calm conditions with clear sky. The cool ground produces condensation in the nearby air by heat conduction. Radiation fogs occur at night, and usually do not last long after sunrise).

In the early spring we get Advection fog (fog caused by moist air flowing over snowpack). It happens when it gets warm one day and the air fills with moisture from the melting snow. The next morning all the bluff tops will be covered in hoarfrost, every tree, every dried weed stalk, every blade of grass. It is amazingly beautiful and haunting. I have a photo of a spruce tree covered in hoarfrost, I will have to try to find it and post it here...

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