It stormed off and on until I left for church. When I walked in the door for "donut fellowship" before Sunday School, the minister exclaimed, "You brought the electricity with you!" Apparently the power at the church had been out for about 20 minutes before I got there. (Funny - because I had power at my house, and I am something like four blocks from church).
It stormed a little more during the service. It's actually kind of chilly and rainy - in the 50s. As I was driving home I thought about how nice it would be to have a hot cup of tea with lunch.
I tried to put my car away, couldn't get the door opener to work. Groaned, got out of the car, went to the button on the wall - still couldn't get the door open. The power was out. I had to leave my car in the drive. (Because of renovations on the garage, there is no way to walk into it from the outside - the room where the button is is a little separate room, like a potting shed. If I ever spend the money to have the garage extensively redone, I'm going to have the person rip down the largely-useless cabinets and wall that was put in to wall off that potting shed, because it is a nuisance to not be able to get in if the power is out)
So, poo. I had to eat a cold lunch and no tea. I set up my camp lantern (I have an LED bulb lantern I use for power outages) and took one of my clear glass loaf pans and put a bunch of tealight candles in it and lit them for supplemental light. And I listened to my little weather radio. (There is NOTHING on commercial radio on the weekends. NOTHING. No news, no local weather - I think all our "local" channels have gone to using a satellite feed out of LA or somewhere. Makes me wonder what a person would do if the power were out and there were a real great emergency. I suppose they expect everyone has smart phones now that can access the internet, and those of us who don't - well, just natural selection in action if a natural disaster takes us out, I guess. (My laptop battery is shot and won't hold a charge long enough for me to connect to the internet via my laptop....)
I sat and knitted but twitched a bit, wondering when the power would come back on. Finally the power came back on around 3. First thing I did when the power came back on was run out and garage my car; we had had a tiny bit of hail but nothing larger than peasized, so there was no damage.
The other thing - I'm bracing for panicked messages from students (if the outage was widespread). There's a major paper due tomorrow and while everyone had most of the semester to work on it, I suspect there are some people who put it off until the very last minute. I don't know whether to sigh and tell them to get it to me by 8 am Tuesday, or to just look at them and go, "You should have planned for emergencies like this." Then again, the power has been back on (at least where I'm at) since 3 pm, and if a person were really hurting they could pull an all-nighter or something. Though last-minute, all-nighter papers do tend to have somewhat of an...odor....of having been done at the last minute).
I just hope the power stays on now. We're getting lots of rain again but the thunder and lightning don't seem that bad right now. (I have a high-test surge protector that this thing is on, just in case we get a power surge from lightning or something).
And I heartily hope the rain bands move out of Missouri for a while; a lot of people I know who have family in different parts of the state have been talking about the terrible flooding, and I heard on the news that they're talking about dynamiting a levee near Cairo, Illinois, in hope of saving the town at the expense of (I suppose) cropland.
***
While sitting in the near-dark, I finished the heel flap and turned the heel of the first of the Ann Budd lace-and-cable socks.
I also, yesterday, finished the first of the so-called "Elegant" socks. This is a Nancy Bush pattern that she based on a Norwegian immigrant's sock in the Vesterheim Museum collection:
The main feature of the sock - perhaps what makes it "elegant" - is the band of eyelet stitch near the top. I used Classic Elite's Alpaca Sox as the yarn on this one.
Alpaca is sometimes called "Poor man's cashmere" because it has similar qualities - soft, warm, fairly lightweight - but is far less expensive. It's probably my favorite fiber to knit with, even though, living in a warm climate, I can't wear it all that much. (These will definitely be winter socks). One of the nice things about using an alpaca yarn for this pattern is that even though it's knit to a pretty tight gauge, it's not a stiff or hard fabric (the socks are knit on U.S. size 0 needles, which is like a 2 mm diameter - size 0s are about the smallest "practical" size. There are smaller ones - 00 and 000 and on down, I think, to 00000 - but most knitters never use those. (They are mainly for extreme lace* and for knitting miniatures)
(*Heh. Knitting as extreme sport?)
(Then again, I think a lot of knitters don't even go down as low as a size 0 for their knitting - or even size 1s. I've had people who have seen me knitting remark about the "teeny tiny needles" but to be honest, the small needles are more comfortable for me to hold and use for extended periods of time than very large-gauge (like 11s or 13s, which are 8 and 9 mm in diameter, respectively) needles. (Trying to knit a hat on size 13 double pointed needles is something I find far more frustrating than knitting socks on size 1 double pointed needles, just because needles that big tend to get cumbersome and are more prone to slip out of the knitting).
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