Over the weekend

We had some rain this weekend. In other areas of the country, this storm produced a record number of hurricanes. Here, however, we got hail and plenty of rain. The back yard turned into soup, we had a stream flowing along side the house, and the bridge flooded. We received so much rain so fast, that it almost backed up into the basement. Tim and I spent two hours in the pouring rain digging up landscaping rocks (sorry, Dad) to dam up in front of the basement door so that it wouldn't flood with Cindy and the boys down there. We even had to go so far as dig down the path to the social circle because it was holding up the flow of water (sorry again, Dad). We've decided that to fix the drainage issue, we're going to dig down even further and run some culverts along the bottom of the ditch. Then put the path back over top of it. That way the path will still be there without hindering the torrent. As for the basement door, we're going to bring the level of the walkway there up a few inches and slope it away from the house to encourage drainage without collecting water at the door. We were seriously within 1/2 inch of pouring in.

For the first time in the 2.5 years we've lived in the house, I saw flood damage to the road at the bridge.It actually lifted sheets of asphalt 3/4" thick and the size of my desk and just slid it off of the road and onto the shoulder. I've never seen it do that before.On another note... how about creation instead destruction? I started a new project. Cindy has been cross stitching words as part of a project she's working on for Christmas (I think), and it renewed my interest in counted cross stitch. My unfortunate curse is that I'll start a project and work on it for a while, get bored with it because I don't see any progress, and put it down for weeks (or months) before I pick it up again. Sometimes it's because the project (i.e. the quilt) isn't portable so I can't take it on trips like I can with knitting.

My mother gave me a couple counted cross stitch kits that I showed Cindy last week while we were discussing cross stitch. She took one look at this one and said that her husband would love this one... so I decided to do it for them for Christmas.So I started working on it on 4/11/11. One week later, this is the progress I've made...I've decided to work 1/2 at a time, so I started in the middle with the black on the eagle, then moved to the moon to his left with a second color. You can see at the top that I've started in with a third color and filling in more of the moon with the darker gray. Unlike the last cross stitch I did, this one is going a lot faster because it has about 10 fewer colors and they're not tiny bits here and there with a stitch or two in places spread out so far that it takes forever. Another thing I like about this project is that it is on black Aida cloth so the moon really comes out of the fabric. :) More progress on this in a week!