Change in plans

I wound up not going to the meeting last night. (it was the monthly Board meeting at church. I am technically not a Board member any more as my term as an "official" Elder expired (and you can't serve consecutive terms, according to our bylaws), so I'm now instead a "Serving" Elder, which means I can officiate at the table and bring homebound communion and other stuff, I just don't need to vote on the Board.)

It was raining like crazy when I came home after class - the worst remnants of Hermine were probably over us between 2 and 5 pm or so. I called the Head Elder to see if we were still meeting, because at that point many of the streets in town were flooded (we have a "Western" style storm water system, which works fine most of the time but can get overwhelmed because there are so few storm sewer inlets and no real gutters). I drove home the longest way, because the usual way I take, and the second-shortest way I can take both have low-lying roads and I figured there was a good chance they'd be dangerous to drive on. (I was probably right, considering the volume of water I had to go through on the "good" streets.)

I also encountered someone (going the opposite direction) who was going too fast for conditions and threw a huge rooster tail of water up onto my windshield, blinding me for a few moments.

So I was kind of shaky when I got home. (It was also not a fun teaching day. My lab assistant had a major family emergency - a semi-grown child with an unplanned and unannounced pregnancy - come up on very short notice, so I was on my own to teach yesterday afternoon.)

Anyway - the meeting was still on, but we were doing "nothing pressing" so it was up to me to go or not.

Now, I am four blocks from the church. Part of the reason I called was to make note that most people have longer drives, through parts of town more likely to be flooded.

But after hanging up, I watched the weather for a while and saw (a) there was a tornado watch in the area (and one came up with very little warning in Dallas) and (b) it looked like heavy rain bands were re-establishing to the south of us.

And also, I have a meeting tonight. So I just threw in the towel and stayed home. Washed my hair, did the laundry. Made tortillas and had some of the beans I cooked up over the weekend (these were what I think of as "just plain beans" - where you boil up dry beans with some seasonings (in my case, a bay leaf and Adobo seasoning) and a chopped up onion, and salt pork if you have it. (I did. I suppose you can use bacon but I'm not a big bacon eater, and frankly, it seems to me like salt pork keeps longer). I prefer those kind of beans to the sweetened baked beans more common in the North.

And I had some berries and a glass of milk. So even if it wasn't the "meat and two veg" shown in my Farm Journal cookbooks, it was at least a somewhat balanced meal with enough protein. (I think I may not get enough protein in my diet; that may be part of my occasional fatigue and just-not-giving-a-darn feeling. I should probably boil up some eggs to keep on hand and eat as snacks.)

And I did cast on for the new socks. Didn't get very far as I had a couple phone calls and also the laundry and such took time:



Ty-Dy (that's the correct spelling of the name of the yarn) is a lot nicer and pleasanter to work with than either Kureyon Sock, Mini Mochi, or Poems Sock. It's not nearly as splitty (I did have to be careful casting on, but once I got going splitting wasn't a problem). It doesn't quite have the same lovely intergrading-ombre effect as those yarn - it's more splotches of the various colors because there are short random repeats mixed with longer lengths of different colors - but I'm willing to trade that for less splitting and a softer feel.

I think I'm going to knit the cuff in the 2 x 2 rib a bit longer - to 2", maybe - and then switch over to just plain stockinette for these socks.

I also have some Paton's Kroy yarn that is supposed to do the color-shift ombre thing; I'll have to see how that knits up. (I suspect the splittiness of the color-shift yarns is inherent to how they have to be made- that they're different plies combined - so you have, say, green and tan plied together, and then the green gradually grades off into brown, and so on, and somehow the plying process or the color-grading process just means these yarns will inherently be splitting and coarse. Which is sad, because they're pretty.)

As I said, though, I'm willing to sacrifice some of the "pretty" for "well-behaved and soft," which the Ty-Dy is.