Not a Tornado or Even a Thunderstorm

Earlier this morning minor storms passed through leaving more rain than fury. However, after they had vacated I noticed the freshly repaired flagpole bending in the wind which kept escalating. Nothing was on weather radar, so this caught us by surprise.

Dad went out to retrieve the flag despite my warning him, as it was not looking safe and I’d had a dream of being crushed under a falling object the night before. Moving faster than his elderly body normally does, my father successfully retrieved Old Glory while the wind continued to blow east to west which is the exact opposite of normal.

Discussing how strange all this was, I looked out the windows and as I watched, my beloved if unhealthy willow tree tore out of the ground dramatically keeling over in slow motion. A mere couple of minutes later the power went out at which I said the dead cottonwood planted by my late mother had fallen.

Sure enough, it had taking the power line with it.



Been a hard May so far. The Subaru had the power steering pump start failing Sunday and we only got the replacement part yesterday. We’ll see how long it will take to get it in and repaired. Power steering fluid boiling over its reservoir is something new for me, but so are random winds blowing over trees.

Weather reports state wind gusts from 45 mph to 54 mph in the area. This was closer to a sustained wind in my opinion that was more powerful since I’ve seen winds in that range before. Given the shape of the valleys intersecting here, it may well have been higher than 54 mph in our little corner of Yucatan Valley.

Thankfully the power utility crews did a great job very quickly in getting things rigged up again.

Which is more than I can say for Open Live Writer, which no longer can post images. Sigh.

38 Degrees Below Zero

The title says it all, we hit –38 F overnight with windchill taking it down another ten degrees below the base temperature. I thought thirty below the night before was bad enough, but this was impressive – however it still was topped by 1996 when our property crossed the forty below line.

Our new used 2006 Subaru Outback refused to start yesterday until some hours of having a space heater in the engine compartment took effect in the late afternoon. The car ran well for a short jaunt to check on a neighbor but a puddle of transmission or power steering fluid was apparent when we parked again. I’m hoping that it is simply shrunken seals due to the cold, but a mechanic will have to check it out once the thaw comes.

We’ve kept ahead of the cold and done fine with the only casualty being the plastic grill over the speaker in the driver’s side door. A tap with a booted foot instantly cracked the frozen plastic. Frustrating since we’ve only had the car for just over a week.

Final thought: Modern thermal longjohns are the best invention since sliced bread.

Okay, Enough with this Winter!

This is only a short rant/documentation about the latest winter storm to hit here in Minnesota. An entire weekend gone to freezing rain, sleet, hail, and anywhere between four inches and a foot of snow depending on location.

WAIT! And there’s more! 

The weather forecast states we’ll be getting another wave of the same for Wednesday morning. Some middle of April we are having here with Spring being AWOL.

April showers bring May flowers… So what do April blizzards bring?

May lizards? May gizzards?

For some reason, I don’t want to know.

May Brings Changes

It is said the one constant in life is change, so the events of this unfinished month are not surprising except when nature takes its course.

Storms have roiled the area and saturated the soil much to the disappointment of farmers trying to get their crops in. While we were spared the violent side of the weather, others were not including a fatality along with $10,000,000 in damages over in Barron County, Wisconsin. The same system left behind a beautiful sky that prompted me to get the camera out.

After the Rain

It hasn’t been a good year, but there have been worse ones, or so I try to remind myself. The world hasn’t been filled with much in the way of good news which make it easy to forget the better moments that happened. One needs to keep an eye open in order to catch those fleeting moments of magic that make life worth living.

A sunset drive last night in search of food to break the monotony of my diet featured an unspectacular sky leading me to leave my camera behind. So of course, I saw something I’d never seen before --  a column of rainbow light coming from the middle of a cloud on the horizon. No rainbow arch, just a nearly straight shaft of prismatic color descending from the sky like a psychedelic tornado, it caught my disbelieving eye.

Yucatan Floods 2016 Edition

Torrential rain and over saturated soil combined to cause more flooding in the SE Minnesota area with Yucatan Valley being no exception. We got off light compared to nearby parts of Iowa and Wisconsin, yet it is annoying that yet another “flood of the century” has hit our township. So far we’ve had this or worse levels of unwanted water in 2000, 2007, 2008, 2013, and now 2016.

Having gotten out and about later than I should have, I missed out on some of the event while discovering the bumper crop of densely packed corn concealed a great deal of the damage. This year saw a change in planting methods to double yields by sowing the seeds so close together that you can’t walk through a field anymore. As a consequence, there wasn’t much in the way of dramatic photographic material.

A Buggy and Stormy Start of Summer

I haven’t been posting much due to ongoing issues with Dad’s health, my health, and no excess energy to speak of. My father ending up back in the hospital for two days of observation to start June which capped off a disastrous May when his removed gastric tube opening took too long to heal. A raging fever, loss of balance, and the return of the uncontrollable hiccups led to reopening that wound along with the hospital stay.

While he was in Gundersen Hospital, I had a visitor on the kitchen screen door that spooked an aquaintance delivering some electronics for me to wipe. The frightening creature turned out to be one of the large Polyphemus moths that live in the region. There is no need to fear being bitten by these gentle giants for they don’t even eat as adults. Sadly it causes them to have a short lifespan of a week or so due to starvation.

Spring Surprise

The surprise being that this post is actually going up.

Though the fact that I’m wearing a T-shirt today is surprising after last week’s snow storm that dumped more than eight inches on the property.

Last time I posted was nearly a month ago. How time flies when you aren’t having fun. While February was tough on my health, March pushed me to my limits with no spare energy for anything constructive. That, of course, includes writing.

February Already?

“Tempus fugit,” said the Romans and indeed that observation still applies two millennia later. January turned out to be a bear of a month to get through, so next to nothing got done other than what was required. Hopefully, things will get easier as the temperatures warm and winter weather slowly departs.

That may be awhile, as I was snowed in yesterday and didn’t make it to church. Great irony could be found in the fact that I had asked to be covered for my Sunday school lesson the week before due to a forecast of snow that didn’t arrive. So of course the boy that cried wolf (NOAA) wasn’t listened to this time and I awakened to heavy drifting across our steep drive.

The Pipes are Freezing, Danny Boy

Struggling with an upper respiratory infection made last week difficult, yet the cold weather has been just as frustrating. Today’s fun was finding the hot water lines frozen, the fan used to duct air from the basement into the crawlspace broken, and a window mysteriously out allowing wind directly in.

How that window came to be lying outside is baffling, for there is no way the wind could have sucked it outside, frame and all. We’ve had the opposite problem with windows blown in before which makes sense. I’m wondering if a varmint came in through the cat door and couldn’t figure its way back out. That’s a longshot, a Twilight Zone kind of improbable, due to the location having nothing to climb up to the window in question.

With the temperature at 10 degrees F (-9 C) and a wind chill of –1 F (-18 C), it will take a long time to thaw the pipes. In fact, the thermometer is dropping with the sun setting so it is going to be very cold tonight with wind chills of up to – 20 F possible. Hard to believe it is the middle of November.

I may have to make an emergency run for a fan tonight if things don’t improve within the next couple of hours. If this is what autumn is going to be like, I don’t look forward to winter.

April Snow

Looking out the window this morning brought an unwelcome sight – almost two inches of snow. Tufts of greening grass poke out of the unwanted frozen H2O lit by the glare from a gray sky. This is not the spring renewal I ordered. Unfortunately, there is a no refund policy when it comes to weather.

So far the Easter season hasn’t gotten off to a positive start, what with Russian militia types shooting people in eastern Ukraine and a white supremacist (neo-Nazi) murdering people at two Jewish community centers in Kansas City yesterday. Both are fulfillments of aggression I’ve watched build up on the Net for some time.

The latter bothers me the most, probably due to the proximity of Passover. Lately I’ve seen an escalation of Jew bashing amongst the thirty and under set online that has grown out of control. A lot of it came out of the OWS rhetoric that went mainstream blaming all the financial woes on Jewish bankers. Sound familiar? It should if you know the history of the 1920s and ‘30s.

The biggest red flag has been seeing caricatures of Jews being posted on message boards that looks straight out of Nazi and Muslim propaganda. These aren’t boards devoted to politics or religion, but entertainment. It tells me that hatred and dehumanizing of Jews has begun in earnest again.

Dad is miserable and becoming a cantankerous handful to deal with due to it. He’s even skipping medications when he feels he can’t drink enough food to allow them to be ingested. To say this isn’t good is an understatement, but there is nothing that can be done about it since reason is not accepted by him.

My health hasn’t been great the past week, even by my lowly standards. Returning cold temperatures the last few days has been a trial for us both. Damaging the ability to sleep does is not conducive to healing rest.

I’ve also taken brain damage from watching the first all American attempt at Godzilla from 1998. While taking notes I could feel my IQ lowering by the minute and if I’m lucky it only dropped to double digits. Because I have to take screen captures and listen to the commentary track, the odds of becoming a drooling idiot by the end of the day are rather high.

On with the dreary day…

Hurry Up… and Wait

Probably the most aggravating thing about serious illness is the uncertainty involved. One finds themselves waiting for test results, the doctor to explain things, the medication to arrive, and a many other aspects of medical care. Making it worse is the tantalizing prospect of a solution, progress, or even hope of going home from the hospital.

The latter is the current situation. Step by step Dad has been slowly moved up to a liquids only diet with talk of being release this afternoon. However, low hemoglobin counts are making this iffier. Once again we have hurried up only to wait.

Yesterday was a day of cleaning here at the Boonedocks. The kitchen was focused on to sterilize anything that could contaminate food. Thanks to the help of the Koch family, this became possible without completely destroying my health in the process. That refrigerator alone was a thing of nightmares that I dare not recount in detail for fear of upsetting those of a sensitive temperament.

I still need to clean the microwave, I just realized. Ah well.

Last night was when I started to hit the wall and so careful attention to efforts exerted is in order. Getting an infection going would not be good for being around my father during this stage of the game. Between traveling to Gunderson, sporadic cleaning, and running errands there isn’t much left of me.

With luck, Dad will be brought home later today by my sister, which will save a lot of my meager funds for gasoline that have to somehow stretch to April 3rd when my next Social Security deposit arrives. Also of concern is keeping the house heated. Wood pellets aren’t cheap or plentiful while the LP tank is getting low. Meanwhile winter weather has returned and will be around through most of the coming week.

So please keep those prayers and wishes coming, we need them. Thank you to all who have been doing that and especially those who’ve helped out in person. It is all greatly appreciated.

Bitter Cold, Low Blood, and the Beating of Drums

I’ve fallen behind in posting, so I’m throwing together a variety of subjects into this one to save time. Surviving winter has become a priority thanks to another bitter cold snap dubbed a “polar vortex” by the know nothing media. –35 below wind chills along with wood pellet supplies being depleted locally led us to purchasing corn to burn in the pellet stove. Figuring out the rate to feed the kernels to the fire pot has been difficult, but at least we have supplemental heat to offset the incredibly expensive LP gas during this latest cold snap.

Speaking of temperatures, Dad is doing well with the chemotherapy, but his white blood cell count is down so he’s having to monitor his temperature in case of fever. If he runs a high temperature he is to head straight for the emergency room. Other than that, he’s still running me ragged.

Going with the Flow

It has been one week since the initial round of chemotherapy for Dad and he’s survived it with no ill effects other than with my annoyance at how perky he’s been due to the Prednisone. For the moment he has more energy than I do despite the end of that particular course. We’ll see if that pattern holds up deeper into the treatment schedule.

While the battle with cancer continues, it is the siege by forces of winter that has occupied a great deal of our time, energy, and attention the last several days. Local wood pellet shortages combined with an aerial attack of snow resulted in our being forced to fortify our position. Hunkering down has nothing to do with problems getting the car up the driveway despite what the propaganda arm of the forces of tyrannical Jack Frost claim.

Winter Woes

This has been an unusually cold winter with days of snow falling nearly as excessive. Thankfully the latter have not resulted in very deep snow, but the wear and tear of the season is getting to be a bit much. At the time of writing it is –16F outside and 65F inside the house.

Thanks to not checking the LP gas levels, we are out and the water pipes are all frozen. It’s simply too soon to have run out of gas under normal circumstances and this demonstrates how ridiculously cold it has been. Now we wait for a snowplow to first come in and then we can get more LP.

The good news is it is supposed to get up to 20F today.  Eventually we will have water again.

A combination of cold and moisture has made the season unbearable at night for my father and me. Since it is the perfect weather to make joints ache, we’ve had a difficult time getting restful sleep.

This is a small concern given what else is going on.

After losing far too much weight in the past few months since his auto rollover, my father finally went in for tests last Wednesday. They found a large ulcerous tumor and we just got the results of the biopsies this morning. It’s cancer of a lymphoma type and chemotherapy is going to be required rather than surgery.

All we can do is deal with the situation as it unfolds.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

UPDATED: We have water again as of late last night. It turns out the wind blew out one of the small windows in the basement! Old farmhouses sometimes had windows to let in light that are about a quarter of the size of normal windows. Just one blown back into the basement was enough to turn it into a deep freeze.

Original post:

All sorts of warnings have been given about how bad today would get and I was too ill the second half of yesterday to remember to fill containers with water. That mistake came home to bite me on the behind, of course. While I was at church, the water froze and none of the tricks that normally get it going again in subzero weather worked for my father.

While the raw temperature at the house was only –4 F (-20 C), wind chill was closer to –18 F (-28 C). The blowing wind is the culprit behind the frozen pipes and it will be days before things get better. Overnight forecasts indicate around the wind chill temperature for the high tomorrow!  Add in wind and we’ll see –50 F (-46 C). Blowing snow will be the insult added to injury.

As a result of the preparation fiasco of this autumn, the 50 gallon water drum was never filled and thanks to yesterday, no other containers were. There are few things more annoying than breaking the Sabbath to me, but it turned into an emergency when no empty gallon jugs were to be found. At some time they were thrown away to my ire. So a trip to the local grocery netted four gallons of water for drinking purposes to last the next couple of days.

As far as the toilet goes, I’m melting snow in buckets for that purpose. At least I don’t have to use an outhouse! I don’t even want to imagine what that would be like.

One Week Later: Scars of the Flood

A sunny July 1st provided an opportunity to get a close up look at two places in the Yucatan Valley heavily damaged by the flooding on June 23rd. First up is the bridge at the junction of County 4 and Hwy 76 which was the object of much government concern during the flood.

All the waters funneled to this location during the flood and exerted more force than I saw elsewhere. Approaching the bridge from County 4, you can see a damaged field and water left behind. The bank has been carved out more and there is an object sticking out of the ground with a plastic bag over it.

No, it isn’t debris. That’s a fiber optic cable that was severed by the flooding. It actually goes under the creek rather than on the bridge. Why was this done? To avoid being damaged by flooding. Best laid plans of mice and men…

It isn’t until you crest the hill to make the turn that the dramatic view is seen. A vast cornfield has been obliterated leaving sand and trees behind. The tractor path down reveals the wasteland that used to be very fertile soil with young corn plants growing in it.

The Day After the Flood

Floods do a lot of damage and the full extent of it doesn’t show up until after the water recedes. With that in mind, I went out and took some videos of the damage in the Yucatan Valley and near Houston, MN. Between building a new computer and family visiting, I didn’t get a chance to post what I’d shot.

Here it is at last:

After the Flood

Notice the Ace Communications trucks clustered at the Yucatan town hall. Amazing as it seems, we never lost the Internet during the flood. Others were not so lucky and also had their phone lines out. I used transitions to mark where we traveled on different roads. Okay, it was an excuse to use transitions, I confess.

In order to stitch things together and remove the sound, I ended up having to buy software for the task, Corel VideoStudio Pro. This is my first attempt with it and also using YouTube to host. One of these days I’ll get something that can record better than 480P, but not anytime soon.

Better Pictures of the 2013 Yucatan Flood

All photos are courtesy of Randy Roland, neighbor and friend. Most of the following pictures were taken around 10:00 AM and show some differences from the 5:00 AM ones that I took.

Once again we start close to home at the intersection where the old Yucatan Supper Club once operated. Water has never stood in the area shown despite prior floods and heavy rains.

Creamery Drive was still under five hours after first light. The new bridge held up well but the water simply went over the road in front and behind. It shows man’s limitations in dealing with the weather in a rather pointed fashion.

The Yucatan Valley Flood of 2000

Digging through my digital photographs, I did not find anything from the first flood that I photographed here in Yucatan. However, I did find copies of a friend’s pictures from that time. June 1, 2000 was the day I first experienced flooding up close and it all began when my late mother noticed water in the field where it shouldn’t be. I went outside to get a better look and realized that the creek (South Branch of the Root River) had gone over its banks.

Before long County 14 was under and later we heard from my father that he couldn’t get through from the south because the bridge was closed. Later that evening after things were open again, we took a drive along 14 and State 76 to see the flooding. It was beautiful and intimidating at the same time to see the valley filled with water. I felt like I’d glimpsed what it was like in Yucatan when the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age.