Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

LAST-MINUTE EDIT: We had a minor flood in our basement last night -- about 3/4 of the basement floor was covered by about 1/2 inch to an inch of water (1.3-2.5 cm). We didn't notice until 10 PM, it had started to recede again by about 10:45 PM, and it was never very deep, but still.

As I write this, I don't really know how bad any of it is going to be, except to know that our situation is not as bad as that of many of our neighbors, who have 1.5-8 inches (3.8-20 cm) of water in their basements. There's also the possibility that we may have worse flooding in the future: during the really big flood of 1993, I'm told the basement of this house was about five inches deep (or possibly more -- the story was sort of vague as to the actual depth). 1993 isn't the kind of flood that's supposed to happen often, but it sure seems like they do anyway, see 2008.

So.

I don't know whether this will affect the blog or not, because we really don't know much about the situation yet, but there is the possibility that posts may have to become less regular for a while. I have one pre-written for Sunday (and I'm now suddenly worried that it could be the last impression I leave people with for a while, which you maybe will understand once you see it), but after that I have no idea what's going to happen. Updates, obviously, as they are relevant, but I figured y'all should know, in case I can't update for a while because I have cholera or something.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled post, the mood of which is so drastically different that some of you may suffer whiplash. (Sorry.)

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When I first posted about Fervor, way back when, Diane left a comment on that post saying, in part, that "having a dog around makes life so much better." I needed confirmation of this at the time, which CelticRose ("And yes, having owned both dogs and cats and lived without either, I think I can say with some authority that pets in general improve your life.") and Diane ("Oh, absolutely they make things better!") provided.

ALERT! Sheba.
Then we took Fervor back because I was allergic (in case anyone is interested -- Fervor hasn't been back on the Iowa City shelter's website, so apparently this adoption is going to take, whoever and wherever it may be) and wound up with Sheba instead.

The dogless period in between Fervor and Sheba was definitely worse, but I was still unsure about having a dog making life better, especially considering that most of my recent prior exposure to dog ownership had been through Cesar Millan's show, which is all about incredibly problematic dogs. Problematic dogs being rehabilitated, granted, but still. The show did probably make us more reluctant to adopt a dog than we would have been otherwise.

And, after four months of having her here, I can say that yes, it's true, life is better. It's actually hard to imagine what it was like before we had Sheba, so I can't pin down exactly why or how it's better. It's nice to have a big, soft, furry thing around to touch occasionally, especially since the husband and I are both of an age where a stuffed animal collection would be creepy or off-putting. She's often entertainingly goofy. It's somehow incredibly delightful to see the look on her face when she's waiting for me to throw a ball for her to fetch. She's someone to talk to when I'm watering plants and the husband is outside doing stuff. I don't know. Life is just somehow less depressing, with a dog. It's weird, and it bugs me that I can't describe it better (the husband concurs but can't describe it either), but there it is. So.

Relaxed Sheba.
In case you'd wondered.

LOLCactus / The Great Dampening

It's been a very wet year. I had kind of expected that after the Snowiest Winter Ever (actually, I think the winter only came in second-wettest, but that's still a lot of snow¹), and the Five-Hundred-Year Flood, we were probably due for a Worst Drought in Recorded History to finish out the summer. This didn't happen; instead, we've continued to be wet, though not in a record-setting way. Just lots of thunderstorms, lots of wind and rain, lots of mornings where I arrive at work to find all the perennials, shrubs and trees laying on the ground and have to stand them back up.

Why does this pertain to our deflated cactus? Well, because: the roof of the greenhouse has a pair of vents running the length of the greenhouse along the ridge, which can be opened. And during days in the summer, they always are. All the way. At night, these are generally lowered part-way, so that if it should rain, the water will roll off the vent flaps, land on the roof, and roll off harmlessly into the alley. And that would totally work, if rain fell straight down, at a moderate pace.

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this.

But instead there are wind and torrential downpours of rain. So even when the plants are inside, we sometimes wind up overwatering. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the only cactus we've lost.

There have also been a few issues with mildew, particularly on the Gerbera daisies, for the same reason. And a lot of the outdoor plants have plain old root rot, though some of our rot issues could have been avoided had certain people refrained from telling me over and over that I needed to be staying on top of the watering, and ohmigod the plants can dry out like [snaps] that if it gets hot and windy out, and oh noes! I think I see wilting! so be sure and water water water.²

Gerbera with mildew. We have about twenty that look like this, and about twenty that look a lot better than this but still have some mildew here and there.
And then the slugs will speak for generations to come about The Great Dampening of 2008, which is a whole other issue. I want to like the slugs; I sorta think they're cute, how they're all formless and blobby and slimy and stuff. But I've found them on everything. In the greenhouse, out of the greenhouse, everywhere. And they're less adorable in large numbers, I gotta say.

Gather around, children, and let me tell you about how wonderful things used to be, back in aught-eight. The world was full of delicious damp leaves, and we had respect for our elders. . . .
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¹ and it was awesome!
² (Not that I'm bitter.)

Cedar Rapids (pictures)

The husband and I went to Cedar Rapids on Friday: I'd wanted to check on Pierson's, to make sure they'd come through the flooding okay, and also to look at plants that I didn't have to take care of, and we both sort of wanted to look at the downtown area to see the extent of the damage for ourselves. Which was, yes, gawking. Well before we were done, I was pretty ashamed: feeling a pretty strong sense of we should not be here, now.

There are, of course, huge chunks of town that were more or less unaffected, where business proceeds as usual, but in the parts of town that were affected, I didn't really have to aim the camera. Any direction I shot was going to show something. So, without further ado, I give you Cedar Rapids as of June 27, 2008:

Downtown is full of guys running around in white hazmat outfits, big dumpsters on the street, and lots of cleaning companies, dehumidifiers, etc. Traffic moves, but slowly, and all the equipment narrows the streets down considerably from what they usually are like.



The message is "WE HOPE OUR LOSS GIVES U SCENIC PLEASURE." Interpretable in more than one way, but it doesn't, you know, sound particularly friendly. I was assuming it was sarcastic, which made me 1) want the picture more and 2) feel more ashamed of taking the picture.

Piles upon piles of garbage. Siding, washing machines, tires, chairs, paper, swingsets -- all the stuff you've got in, on, or around your house, soaked for a week and a half in toxic water and then collected in piles.


Something that fails to show up well in the pictures: everything's also covered in dirt. I mean, in the pictures it looks like just a road, but in person, it's muddy and smelly and neverending.





Houseboats on the (still very high) Cedar River. Can't really tell from looking at them what kind of damage they sustained, but it's obviously not all fine.


And then the part that shocked me: Pierson's. The business is not gone altogether, because they had two locations: this one, the original, which was where the tropical plants (most of them, anyway) lived, and then another one elsewhere which seemed to be mostly for flower deliveries. The latter is far from the river and therefore fine, but the original location is basically ruined. Some plants barely visible in this pile: some unknown bromeliad, a sago palm, a croton.

A couple panes of glass were broken in the greenhouse: I couldn't really see much in there, though it was obvious that there were plants in it still. I couldn't really tell if they'd moved anything out or not: either a bunch had been taken away before the water hit, or else a bunch fell over in the water and nobody had been in the greenhouse to pick them back up yet.
Couldn't make out much of what was going on inside the store, either, though some of the walls didn't look like they were there any more. I could kind of make out a couple studs with debris hanging off of them.

Pierson's is especially sad to me because I can relate: Pierson's is to Cedar Rapids more or less what my employer is to Iowa City, and we were at one point expecting to get more or less what they got: we just dodged the bullet. Plus, on a completely self-interested note, I now have that many fewer options when I want to go out of town and buy a tropical plant. But it's hard to look at that and not wonder what they're all going to do. I mean, the oldest greenhouse was indeed very old, and if they were insured, then they might be better off in the long run to be rid of it and build a brand-new one. But how likely is it that they were insured? They were only a block from the river, it turns out (seems longer, somehow, driving to them). So maybe.

I was kind of telling myself while taking pictures and feeling ashamed that it was okay, karmically, because I was going to be posting them for other people to see, and that meant there'd be help coming, and I was therefore doing something useful even though I wasn't, you know, doing anything useful. But that's kind of a crock of shit. I mean, people knew there was a flood anyway, help was already coming. I was just taking pictures because there didn't really seem to be much else to do, because it was too much to take in all at once, because it was impossible to look away. It's pretty overwhelming in person.

Flood Stories No. 4: Food-Gardening Consequences

How high do you suppose the water got here?
I know, like Iowa didn't have enough to deal with -- mold, dead animal carcasses, memory loss. But now there's another angle that I bet you haven't considered: can you eat produce from a flooded garden?

Looks like the answer is no:

Gardeners should keep in mind that although pathogens will eventually die out, they can remain present in the soil for several months. If the homeowner knows the area was contaminated with sewage, it is recommended that no produce be used from the garden for at least 90 days.

Remember, as always, fruits and vegetables should be thoroughly washed prior to consumption.

There's more detail at the original article, but, yeah, basically the answer is no, especially for lettuce and similar plants that can't easily be cleaned (though they do say that you can cut them back and eat the regrowth, if that helps). Hat-tip to Aetiology for the article.

Not a garden, just a shrub. But I'll bet there are gardens around that look like this. We also have a lot of exciting new smells in town, all of which are bad.
But wait! It can be worse than that, because soybean and corn crop losses are going to affect you (at least, those of you who are Americans, and probably some of you who aren't), because the loss of what corn crop there was (it had been a difficult year already) means that food prices are going to be going up, up, up:

When you’ve lost an early crop (like corn) to damage or flood, and it’s too late to replant (as it is now) the same crop, then you plant soybeans. This is just SOP.

The only issue is, this year, there already has been a shortage of seed. Now with corn acres being diverted to soybeans, and existing soybean fields needing replanted, the problem is worse. (from Sadly, No!: you are encouraged - nay, exhorted - to click through to read the whole thing, which makes somewhat more sense than this little excerpt. I didn't feel right about copying the whole post. Don't worry, it's not that long.)

And of course as corn prices go, so go milk prices, and gas prices, and meat prices. I would so not want to own a restaurant right now.

Grow your own food, grow your own food, grow your own food. (Alternate plan for apartment dwellers: take pictures of gardeners in your area in compromising positions, for later blackmail. Alternate alternate plan: Photoshop.)

Site-related: Now what?

The river, it turns out, has crested earlier than anticipated (last week they were saying Wednesday the 18th, at one point; the actual crest was yesterday, the 15th), and although it's going to take forever for the water to go down, it is, nevertheless, going to go down. So that's good, in that the damage won't encompass larger and larger sections of the city. Also our water and power stayed intact throughout, and aside from the lost internet access a few days ago, I've been able to get online throughout. So.

Iowa City still has a curfew in place, of sorts: one is not to be outdoors within 100 yards of the river between 8:30 PM and 6 AM. I'm a little hazy on how big 100 yards is (a football field, I'm aware, but it's not like I have a real firm grasp on the size of a football field: I never played, nor am I a fan: stating the number in terms of city blocks would, you'd think, be a more useful measurement), but it's not likely to matter much anyway, since I don't really need to go out until I return to work tomorrow. (I could, if I wanted, return today, but for various reasons, some better than others, that's not going to happen.)

So we should be returning to our regular programming within a day or two. If I really get my shit together, maybe there will even be a regular-type post today, but let's not count on that.

Flood Stories No. 3: Mass amnesia

Screen capture from the National Weather Service website.

Here comes the rain again
falling on my head like a memory
(-Eurythmics)

Yup, those little green splotches are heading to the south and east, in the general direction of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. It doesn't look like they're going to drop a bunch of rain, but they might only be the start: the National Weather Service says,

Today: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 83. West wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New rainfall amounts between a half and three quarters of an inch possible.

While I'm here, I just want to make a note of something that's been driving me nuts on the local news: more than once, now, I've seen people who had lost homes or significant amounts of personal belongings talking about how sad it was that they couldn't save more, and phrasing this as having "lost [their] memories." This makes me giggle slightly despite myself (I know what they mean, obviously.); it brings to mind an epidemic of soap-opera amnesia. I hate myself for being bothered, and hate myself for finding it funny, but I'm afraid I can't help it.

So as a public service, I offer this clarification:

People. Your memories are the things you remember, in your brain, like the name of your third-grade teacher or the wild party when you were a high school sophomore where people threw a couch onto Jimmy Yoder's Corvette and then later on you made out with that guy from the next town over behind somebody's shrubs, and then when you got home you smelled like beer and your dad grounded you for, like, three whole weeks and you thought you were going to totally die.

Except in really, really special circumstances involving drowning and maybe hypothermia, the flooding is not going to take those away from you. What you mean are keepsakes or scrapbooks or mementos or something. The all-purpose "personal items" also works. Please stop telling me you lost your memories, as it will make me insane. I apologize for being such a pedant about this. I know it's not important. But please, I beg you, get the words right.

Flood Stories No. 2: More rain! Also, mild blasphemy!

Hey, guess what? More rain! We got three separate rounds of fairly heavy rain (the first one had slushy hail, too, which was a first for me -- imagine being under a tall building, with a couple guys on the top floor throwing snow cones at you) this afternoon, from about 4:30 to 5:30 PM. Awesome.


Well no, not really. It's actually kind of le suck, as the French would say,¹ but oh well. We've got however many feet of water now, so what's a few more inches? The city attempted to reason with the storm, erecting hastily-written, but clear, signs --


but these were sadly ineffective.

The first storm also included what might have been a tornado (they did sound the sirens and everything), though that was never made official. I was a little disappointed: I figured if we were to get really, superfantastically lucky, maybe the tornado would pick up all the water from our river and drop it somewhere else. Maybe I expect too much from tornados. I did enjoy the last one. (At the time of the tornado, I lived about half a block south of the church pictured at the link. Good times.)

Still, I got to see cool swirly clouds anyway, which is my main interest in tornados. I just want to see clouds do something different from the norm. So this was cool:


And anyway. The latest rain did eventually end:

12 And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth." (Genesis 9:12-16, New International Version)

Liar.

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¹(If they didn't speak French very well.)

Flood Stories No. 1: You, lady, are unforgivably callous.

Gist of a phone conversation had by one of the front desk personnel:

FRONT DESK: [name of store]

LADY ON PHONE: Hi. I was just wondering if you were open?

FRONT DESK: Yes.

LADY ON PHONE: Oh.

LADY ON PHONE: .

LADY ON PHONE: So, is everything 50% off, then?

FRONT DESK (presumably in an if-voices-could-kill tone): No.

LADY ON PHONE: Oh. Okay, bye.

To put the above conversation into some kind of context:

We are having what everyone continues to insist on calling a 500-year-flood going on immediately behind the store property. There are ducks, now. And carp. On the premises. (The ducks aren't unusual, exactly, but carp, I think, is a bit unprecedented. Both are adorable, if also bad omens.)

Ducks. Not a good picture, I know, but they're there. The ducks are the sort of brownish objects about a third of the way up from the bottom, next to the center pole of the fence. They were much easier to see in real life, possibly because they were moving.
The local TV stations, and what few local radio stations haven't already been bought out by Clear Channel and DJed by robots, have been running non-stop flood-related stuff, particularly Channel 9, which has a particular interest in the floods because it's centered in Cedar Rapids.

Shortly before I arrived today (a co-worker saw me walking and offered me a ride), I was told that instead of the inch or two of water on the floor in the greenhouses that we were expecting yesterday, the prediction was now three or four feet, which meant that a lot of the work I did yesterday was going to have to be re-done.

Everybody else was going to have to redo what they'd done yesterday too, in order to accommodate the additional water.

Crack teams of sandbaggers, seemingly assembled out of nowhere, were wandering all over. Most of them were teenage boys, which is not really a demographic known for staying on task, so there was extra confusion.

The store, it turns out, is not actually insured against floods. (Flood insurance is too expensive, said the boss when I asked about this yesterday. I winced. She then shrugged and said, well, five-hundred-year flood, what're you going to do?) There's been speculation that if the damage is too bad, we might just fail to re-open entirely, rather than start again, though I think the possibility of this actually happening is pretty remote.

And so on. Pesticides were spilled (from a height, on people's - not mine - torsos and faces), glass objects were broken (didn't witness that one), a good time was had by all.

And then this lady, who apparently has nothing better to do than shop for bargains, wants to know if everything's been discounted yet.

She wasn't even the only individual like that: I'm told (by the same front-counter person) that a lady brought purchases up to the front counter, which was piled high with merchandise of all kinds because, you know, everything had to be three or four feet up off the floor, and we've only got just so much counter space, and when she wasn't rung up fast enough (because everybody who could have rung her up was trying to get stuff up off the floor or sandbag or something), she hollered, "HELLO" in a snotty way.

Front desk person came very close to bashing the lady's head in with a shovel. As she put it later when she was relaying the story to WCW and me,

Oh my god, who's thinking about buying plants at a time like this? [Interruption in the tirade as WCW and I both admitted to having thought about buying plants today, kind of undercutting her point.] Well, okay, but you guys are kind of a special case. I mean this lady was just, la la la, got nothing better to do, guess I'll go shopping. Oh my god! Why don't you go volunteer to sandbag or something, you useless, selfish . . . [non-verbal noise of frustration] You know, I've been sitting around at home crying already, a lot, 'cause of all the stuff on TV - it's just so frustrating and sad. And then to have to deal with these people on top of that - I don't know why we're even open, we should just make people either help out or go away.

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Side note: yes, I have internet access, for the moment, though it's still likely to be sporadic. The husband is anxious to evacuate; the boss expects me to at least attempt to come in tomorrow. One of them is going to win: could go either way. So posting will not resume the usual daily schedule for some time.

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I walk by this every day on the way to work. Normally, the small storm-drain-like slit you see under the road behind the white car is a full-on tunnel, about maybe 12-15 feet high. This was Thursday morning.

I tried to get a picture of the same spot Friday morning, but couldn't get near enough to get it, and when I tried to use the zoom on the camera, I couldn't tell what part to zoom on. The tunnel from the first photo is more or less under a maroon car, except that you'll probably have to click on the picture to see the car, 'cause I'm that far away.

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I don't really have any particularly awesome pictures of flooding. Floods are really very boring natural disasters, when it comes right down to it: you get all the same damage as, like, a tornado, but it's all very slow, and they don't translate well to pictures because, of course, pictures of floods look a lot like pictures of lakes or creeks or other bodies of water, with the exception that bodies of water generally don't have buildings and trees and cars in them. If running water was clear instead of muddy, then floods would be cool, 'cause you'd be able to see all the junk under the surface and it'd be all nice and surreal. But turbid water? What could be more ordinary than water?

Actually, no: floods are the second most boring natural disaster. Droughts are more boring than floods.

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Also: I'm sort of looking forward, in theory, to having some time off of work, because with the heat and such, it's not been so great lately and it's been wearing me out. So I was thinking, yippee! Finally a chance to get some stuff done at home! The husband is getting antsy, wants to evacuate and go south to Fairfield or Mount Pleasant (about an hour south in both cases), which takes me away from all the stuff I want to do, and piles a bunch of stress (adjusting to a new place and everything) on top of me besides. So between us there is Conflict, which is not unheard of, but is unusual enough that it makes an already-bad situation that much worse, and given that we were both anxious to some degree or another already. . . . Well. You see the problem. It's uncomfortable.

PATSP is closed due to flooding.

Lost internet service this morning around 7 AM, and according to Qwest, it's not coming back anytime soon because the server is underwater. Why Qwest chooses to put their servers in basements, instead of flood-safe, tornado-safe third floors or something, I don't know.

Also there's some concern about work: as far as I know we're still open indefinitely, but there is a creek behind the store, and the water is rising, and at some point we're going to have to shut off water and electricity and see what happens. The thinking is that all the plants are likely to make it, though the back greenhouses may or may not be in the same place next week that they're in this week.

Posts will resume at whatever point I can routinely access the internet again; I have absolutely no idea when this might be. They keep calling this a 500-year flood, on the news. This would be a more helpful term to me if I remembered the last 500-year flood, obviously.