Land of the soggy ...
I'm back home.
Not a lot happened while I was away, except that Sauk County was declared a disaster area.
We had a bad storm while I was in Evanston zooming around with Chris taking in the storm damage in the Chicago area.
The power was out in the house for a while, and the phones were out of service about three days. Apparently all of the phone boxes along Berry Road were taken out by lightning in one night. Jerry tells me that his electrical fences were knocked out completely. I've got another four or five trees down -- none of them particularly large -- around the house. My rain gauge bucket was full when I got back, so we had at least 11 inches of rain while I was gone. The ground is saturated to the point where I squished when I mowed the grass Tuesday.
We didn't get it too bad in the eastern part of the county. We may be a cultural disaster in this part of the county -- after all, we are the "Water Park Capital of the World", culturally akin to being "Home of the Liberace Museum" -- but the storm disaster is ten miles west.
The storms really did a number on western Sauk County. A number of local bridges and roads are washed out or endangered by water and debris, and the local papers report that Ironton, a dot on the map in northwestern Sauk County, essentially blew away in 90 mph winds. The damage estimates for the county are over $2 million and counting.
Somehow or other, 2,000 pigs got dead on a large pork operation during the storm. It isn't clear yet whether the pigs were electrocuted by lightning or downed power, or whether they died of asphyxiation from a methane buildup after power went out and stopped ventilation in the sheds -- talk about a miserable way to die, asphyxiated by your own farts -- but the end result is that 2,000 carcasses were sent to the rendering plant, and a prominent farmer took a serious hit. But it all does sound like it belongs in News of the Weird.
I'm going to see what I can do about cleaning up the downed trees tomorrow, weather permitting. My chainsaw is electric -- the gas chainsaws make me crazy because they are always out of tune -- so I have to make sure that the ground is dry when I work. It won't take too long once I get set up.
So much for the lazy, hazy days of summer.
But better times are coming. Michaelangelo is coming up from Chicago for the Labor Day weekend, and we'll either take in the Wisconsin Cow Chip Throw in Sauk Prairie, or head up to Black River Falls for a Pow Wow. Or maybe do both, the Cow Chips on Saturday and the Pow Wow on Sunday.
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The Fall List
Summer is coming to a close -- Labor Day, with one last shot swimming in the river, is the traditional marker around this area -- and Fall is coming.
Fall comes at its own pace, though. Jerry says he got the first whiff of fall the other night, but I haven't got mine -- the way the poplars smell right at the cusp of Fall -- yet, but I suspect I'll get it in a week or two.
The kids are headed back to school, and I realize that I'm still locked into the annual schedule of childhood. Fall is a time to buckle down and get serious.
So I'm making The Fall List.
The first list item is already checked off.
I made my eye examination appointment for next Wednesday, September 5. I need my reading prescription upped a notch, I think, and my doctor will want to check on the cataract in my right eye. My eyes are funny. My left eye, except for the need for a close-vision correction, is normal, but my right eye is a disaster -- blind-as-a-bat nearsightedness, a cataract, and lord knows what else. My eye doctor says that I have monocular vision.
My ears are a flip of my eyes. My right ear is more or less normal, adjusting for the damage I did to it in the days when I listened to rock at volumes I'd run from today, but my left ear is essentially useless -- deaf as a post.
Asymmetry is fine with me, but I do wonder how supposedly identical body components, all of five or six inches apart, could develop so differently. I guess that's not my business to figure out, but I do wonder.
Next on the list is to order a rug for under the dining room table. Michael and I decided to get one last fall, but we didn't find what we were looking for -- a good-looking indoor/outdoor rug that could be easily cleaned -- during a year of lackadaisical looking, so I'm going to head over to Home Depot and order an 8x10 version of the 8x8 rug we have between the couch and the TV. It is attractive, reasonably cheap, and will serve its intended purpose well enough, although it won't be as indestructible as an indoor/outdoor carpet.
I'm thinking about all the other things I need to put on the list -- get John's stuff from the garage to the basement, clean the garage and the basement (yuk, but I'll feel better when its done), check out the snowblower, cut and weed the new wildflower gardens so that they have a fighting chance in the Spring, move the summer clothes to the basement and get the winter clothes up, finish up leveling the gravel in the drive, clean the bird feeders, clear up and extend the paths through the woods, put the Christmas stuff out on the deck so that I can turn it on after Thanksgiving, and so on. The list is -- or will be, when I get around to making it -- long, but I've got all Fall to get it done.
The Fall List is, in its own way, comforting -- it gives me a sense that time is changing, but that things are more or less the same, year to year. Most of what will go on the list was probably on my grandfather's list. Living in a new house, though, I do miss, as I think about it, the more dramatic indicators of getting ready for Winter, such as getting the wood pile built up and taking down the screen windows and putting on the storm windows. Modern life, at least in this house, marks the real change with the first frost and the first snowfall.
Be that as it may, Fall is a busy, but good time of year.
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