Ivan’s rain

Ivan’s rain yesterday came in sheets. Firstly it was misty sprinkling, wind making sprinkling misty, then heavier sprinkling, then the rain really came down in torrents and sheets. It was wonderful to watch.

The wind beat and howled at the back of the house. That would be wind coming from the South, then, as we have the major direction points adjacent to the corners of our house/property.

Standing on our little front porch you could see that wind rushing from beside the house to the front, it was really neat, I mean , with rain coming down you can see such huge steady gusts of wind, it was like a channel through the air and water … where there was no house to put it on guard.

Other gusts would come from various directions, but for the most part the front of the house was calm and the windows were fine to be opened up fully. The back was just pounded with the wind, and water misty and splashing around, though the rain came directionally down from the West sort of, in huge sheets. So the house was being pelted with the rain on the western side, and that has no windows at all. Actually both ends of the house have no windows, just the front and the back do.

There was a bit of lightning in this storm and we were under Tornado Watches. One really nast band of the storm was overhead for quite awhile, it was very much a fun time. :)

Frances had no lighting around us, and her wind was much less, from how it seemed here. But it was more gusting and whipping off and on, whereas Ivan’s wind was pounding at us continuously … quite fercocios though nothing bad happened at all. The hen pen roofs were solidly in place the whole time, so the wind just wasn’t getting up and under stuff as some storms it does. I really enjoyed the wind, it was quite refreshing.

The rain wasn’t so heavy later last evening, though it continued lightly off and on, and this morning was misty sprinkly all morning, and then the wind was whipping around a bit and gusting high up. Then mid afternoon, it was quiet, then the sun came out midst heavy puffy white clouds. Darting in and out, no full sun, but nice bright yellow sun now and then, a welcomed sight!

The ground was very spongy this morning, and most of the water seemed to absorb well by mid-afternoon. The grass will be growing fastly soon, and probably a new rash of ugly mushrooms will pop up too. Our backyard has been overlong all season, and is just getting worse and worse. It’s a bear to cut, this long. Frank has to use the weed wacker first. It’s a 1/4 acre or so of waist or more high grass. It’s just impossible to cut when it’s so wet too, and so Frank has had little opportunity to cut it back the last couple of weeks. Hopefully it’ll dry out enough this weekend to cut it, before Jeanne arrives, if she does, but it looks like, according to accuweather, she probably will regain strenth and aim her way at the SE US, being by us around Thursday, by todays forecast. :)

Ode to September 2004 Storms

Ivan came and sang at our door
Four- inches or more from Frances, just the week before
Four-inches or more from Ivan, this is very true
We needed rain,
God sent these storms
We’re overfilled
But happily so
The earth soaked up that water blue

Frances, she wailed and weeped ‘oh please come out and play’
Ivan he roared, he wanted to come in
Ivans winds were wickeder, they pounded our back door
Seeping in the cracks and moaning all day and night and the next

Then suddenly it was quiet
And then the sun peeked out
Ivan’s visit was over
We saw no floods
No major destruction
Just many leaves
Early falling from the trees

The trees wanted water earlier this Summer
they began dropping leaves in August in defense
only to have storms galore in September.
Who’d have known? God did!

And Jeanne will be coming next …?

By Marysue Meints
September 17, 2004

Intentional rhyming/not rhyming … etc.

End of Summer Organizing

My computer, the desktop, has sparked a Re-Organization, which I’d say is akin to what’s known as “Spring Cleaning”, just not “cleaning” –but moving around, throwing away, re-doing this and that –cleaning automatically happens with such as that. :)

My User Profile seems to have gotten mussed up somehow. I was getting Blue Screen of Death errors when accessing different folders and what-not. My browser would crash often, and myriads of other little things over the last month that have crept closer and more often reared their ugly heads.

So in looking at something online last week, I saw that what was recommended was deleting the user profile and moving ones data to a new user profile.

I’ve done that before, for different reasons, different gliches. This time the glitches were moreso Memory related. Anyhow, I decided to give THAT sort of solution a try, and created a new profile and moved my stuff.

But I have a backlog of massive other stuff — from my laptop. I burned most of my laptop data on CD-ROM’s, but then in a fit of “just to be sure” I also moved the whole enchillada onto the desktop hard drive.

When I clean-installed my laptop, I didn’t load all that stuff back on. I had been working off of the desktop for so much longer than I thought I would have, I just left all the stuff alone, had re-created certain kinds of folders and documents, which just adds to the bulk of what I had already from the laptop. I’d go into that stuff off and on to get something particular as well.

So this whole profile switchy has me going through that laptop data and deleting useless stuff (like all the old Movable Type stuff I had saved, for example), and moving pieces of things together with other things I have elsewhere … and that leaves a littler whittle pile to work on. Phew!

I have my profile and in it I have shortcuts to another partition with folders for PICTURES, DOCUMENTS, and MUSIC

All my stuff will go into those folders. Some programs will automatically put things in MY DOCUMENTS, some are programmable to change that, some don’t, but mostly new programs will “remember” where you last saved something.

Well I will not primarily save my stuff in my user profile anymore. I used to move it, on my laptop, and have my documents and settings folder and subfolders on a different partition. This is different now. I have manually set up folders on the other partition, and have short_cut links in my user profiles to those folders, more than one link to each folder, just different places to put them to work well to quickly navigate to the right place.

One good place for that is SENDTO, right-context menu SendTo is a fabulous place to add special links to to send data to a folder with few clicks, anywhere on the computer, or accessible via the network.

The way I have my folders set up now is more friendly towards doing whatever in the future, with the data. It’s more easily figured out since I can use the My Documents for recent stuff if I want, and move it or delete it in order to clean up those areas, keep them pruned down. Archived information is on the partition. Almost all my stuff is archivable, the question is: did I save it for archiving the first time as I should have? So I need to re-apply my “organization plan” to include those areas.

How does this help me Re-Organize everything? Well, it’s sort of like my brain. My computer in disarray, though not as bad as that, just lots of things that could be pruned out, folders put together, split apart, etc., and it’s sort of like static in my brain. With a good fresh start in my profile in WinXP and actually working with my old data to make it more accessible in the future, I know what’s where and what and why, and it’s like the tumblers in a lock, they fall right into place. Ahhh.

I’ve gotten more laundry done of late, and that’s one key to my computer organization. The timing of it all is good. I’m able to do more now, become more of what I should be, get the closets cleaned out, clothing fixed, sold, given away, readied for winter, etc. I admit, I’m pathetic with household stuff usually. I’m great at ripping the house apart, banging nails and such. It’s the “stuff” that drives me nuts. It’s the “stuff” that gets out of control. I need my family to help me, of course. As it’s not all MY stuff :) It’s there’s as well. Traditional name for us is Messies. Did y’all know that Visual-Spatialness is tied in with that in lots of folks?

Well, that’s why to “clean” I have to “re-organize” or “re-arrange the furniture”. Spatially I say, “this will go ‘here’ and that over ‘there’.” I do it, it fits without measuring. I get out the broom and sweep everything out of the way, blah, dee, doo, dee, dah … voila! Nice room again.

I’m convinced that to live a good life we must pare down stuff. We haven’t much stuff, it just seems that we do. It’s still “too much” though. It’s sort of a monster that grows 20-feet more tall for every 2-lbs of stuff you bring home.

So motivation is what I have, if only the allergies would leave me alone, or the Claritin would kick in and help more … motivation needs energy as it’s friend and tool, and I have none the past two days since Frances left us. Pollens and molds must be high again. Ever a creature of my environment, I look forward to the New Earth, no allergies ;)

I’m just trying, trying, trying, to pass my motivation on to Frank and the children. The Garage is a biggie, and needs attention. :)

Our Frances Experience

It started raining after we went to bed. Maybe around midnight, or after. It was after that I remembered, oops, the dog is still out in his kennel. So we had to get out of bed and put him in his crate in the basement. We also had to shut all the windows due to mist and rain blowing in. That made the house stuffy.

So then around 4:20am I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep and feeling miserable with a nagging beginning migraine that wouldn’t go away all night, I went downstairs to the desktop pc and did a bit of surfing. My browser started crashing when I was trying to get some better radar over Georgia to come in, and IE wouldn’t work thereafter, so I had just got Firebird (mozilla) fired up and tuned to accuweather.com when PHOOWAP …. everything went BLACK.

It wasn’t very long since I’d come downstairs, the sun wasn’t up at all yet. I stumbled to the left and put my foot out for the step, and there wasn’t anything there. I had gone to far to the left and was hanging out over the steps that go down to the basement. Whoops! I didn’t fall though. Just moved over and found the right stairs and went up, where there was a tad more light to see by. It’s actually nice when the power goes out, for all the neighbors flood lights go out too. That makes our house really dark. It’ll be nice someday to live where we control the lighting.

So I got upstairs and opened Frank’s laptop, had to fiddle with it a few minutes to get it to wake up. Once it did, it said it was 5am on the nose.

Power was off for just over 2 hours. We had gotten the firestarter stick out and I lit a candle, then my kerosene lamp. I had just blown the lamp out when I had catnapped and awoke to find Frank telling me it was somewhat light out now. Within 10 or so minutes the power snapped back on, with me staring straight up at the overhead ceiling fixture, which was mysteriously “On” when it hadn’t been on when power went out. Talk about pain to a migraine sufferer!

So it’s light enough to see outside. The rain is blowing down the street, across the backyard, etc. in sheets. I don’t have a rain gauge, but I have some jars on the deck that were empty, they are all filled up.

We are gauged for expecting 4 to 8 inches or more of rain. Reports have area creeks already at bank level or overflown this morning. It’s supposed to rain all day, or off and on, or something. Frances is depressed and crying all over us. ;)

We’ve seen nor heard any lightning or thunder thus far. Just rain and gust of wind whistling forlornly.

Tropical Storm Frances in Georgia

Former Hurricane Frances, now Tropical Storm Frances, has been overhead all day, her Norther Tail, that is. It’s been breezy and gusty, nothing bad yet, just very much more “windy” than any given day. Overcast with the low flowing tropical formation clouds, making it all seem surreal, as in a sci-fi movie, sort of.

Hurricane Ivan has ramped up today, at 2am 135mph, and then down to 105mph by the 5pm update. Incremental step downs all day. But he still looks good. He’s projected to hit the islands in his pathway, then either go up the east coast of the States, hit Florida, or go into the Gulf of Mexico on to Texas maybe. 3-major options.

Here’s a Visible Satellite photo of the Atlantic: morning to afternoon … which you can see the darkness turning to light and the light turning to darkness … starting with the African coast it was daylight when the picture starts at 5:45am, and light creeps over to the States and then round the other side of the globe where you can’t see but fastly creeps into Africa by the end of the animation when it’s 4:45pm — there’s a big jump from 1:45pm to 4:45pm, which makes the dark come on fast on the east side.


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