OT/OOC
On the flooding:
The boil water advisory has been lifted. The only danger to my house is the leaky roof and the leaky basement. We ran the dehumdifier in the basement and put a bin under the leak. I filled a couple of carboys with water before the majority of the flooding, so we had water with no problem.
We helped our local bar get ice. Danny's ice machine had to be shut off because there was no way he could boil the water before putting it in the machine- it's a direct water tap. He didn't know that Ice is trucked into grocery stores, instead of being made there. It might be more sensible to make the ice onsite at the grocery store, but not in times like these.
Gas prices shot up again. There were shortages throughout the area, coupled with the holiday weekend, and up more than a dime it went. Gas prices drive up costs of just about everything. It really makes me wish we could have a realistic garden and get a lot of food out of the earth ourselves. But I have trouble staying outside, between the flowers and the neighbors doing laundry. At least I can smell what I react to most of the time. I have met another multiple chemical sensitive person who could not- and she had seizures as a result of pesticides. It made it very hard for her to go anywhere. I worry about how the increased gas prices are going to affect the costs of necessities throughout. Relatively speaking, we'll all be poorer as a result.
There are piles of crap abandoned on curbs throughout. Vultures are descending to pick through the rubbish heaps to try to find salvagable things, and I'm not above trashpicking myself, although there is little of value amongst the stuff. The Elks Club in Fairmont Park threw out all of the chairs and many tables. The golf courses are completely covered in mud. The local quilt shop had water to the door, but not in the store thankfully. Sadder though are the piles outside people's homes, and the calls on the radio requesting volunteers to come clean out homes belonging to the people who aren't physically capable of doing their own homes. Wally World is donating the cleaning supplies. I am troubled by 95% of all cleaning supplies + the smell of the flood itself, and am not brave enough to risk my health to volunteer. This makes me feel guilty, because otherwise I'd like to. Even the flood plain areas are brown well above the deer browsing lines. There's an awful lot of brown in this valley, and it's not a coffee brown. It's dirt and mud and khaki instead of the verdant happy July green. The fields of corn and other things are all brown and while they may be better fertilized for next year, this year's crops are mostly a loss.
There is a bill being put forward about the State of NY buying flood plain housing back and declaring it no-build zones. I think this will be too expensive to be realistic, but dang it, it's about time the government starts thinking ecologically over economically.
On my vacation:
Life at camp was best summarized when I was growing up in a poem I wrote around the age of 16ish.
Father fixes.
Mother itches.
Brother fetches.
Sister bitches.
I paint.
Only I can't paint any more. There isn't a single building that I haven't painted at least once up there. Some of them I did more than once. Maybe that's part of why I have the trouble I do. When you are young, you don't think of the chemical agents or what they can do to your body. You think, I am young and healthy and I can do anything! I am indistructable! And then you discover in your mid 20s that it just ain't so.
Da's big project this week is replacing the roof over the main cabin. My brother was helping, of course. He started work at 8 a.m. or earlier every day, so sleeping in was Not an Option. Grumble. The main part of vacation that I like is sleeping in. Not that the dog was oblidging of course. I got up around 5 every morning, because that's when Dog's bladder wakes her, dressed enough to open the door without shocking anyone, and let the dog out. Then waited 5 minutes, and let her back in. Jazz and I stayed in a separate cabin called the Winter Cabin. It's one bedroom, a water closet (room just enough for a toilet and nothing else), and a kitchen. Cozy, but what all does one need for two people and a dog? It meant we could have our own meals and schedule, and we prefer it that way. My brother took the Hodgson, so named because that's the brand of modular home from the early 1950s. It's a full bathroom, bedroom, living room and kitchen. But they had their niece (on his wife's side) and their 2-month-old baby with them, plus they fed their boys, so they needed more room. The main cabin has 5 bedrooms, but mom doesn't let anyone sleep in the Attic (too many bats and mice etc). There is one bathroom in that cabin too. So that's 3 toilets for 13 people. The aforementioned boys share bunkbeds in my old bedroom. The front bedroom on that side is my sister's old room, and her son Danny slept there. If you want to be technical, the front room was my aunt Lois' room, and my room was my aunt Carolyn's room. The master bedroom of course belongs to my parents now. It creeped mom out initially to sleep in there, but they changed the bed and now she's okay with it. The back bedroom on that side is a 1.5 bed- between a double and a twin. It's very cozy for two. My sister slept there. Have you counted beds and heads and noted a discrepancy yet? My sister's boyfriend didn't get a bed. He was put on a cot in the Dining Room, which is another building. You see, the Winter Cabin used to be the camp kitchen when it was owned by a Person with Money. The room behind was where the cook slept/lived. The Dining Room was where the Family ate. It has paper outlines of fish caught and written on it type of fish and who caught it and the size and date pinned up all over the walls. The earliest is from 1921 or so. There's a huge gap between 1931 and the 1970s. The table itself was covered in K'Nex and Legos. He had to put all of his stuff under the table every day so the kids could play in there.
My impression of my sister's boyfriend: Well. Let's just say there were a lot of flags going off in my brain and that he reminds me of several exes of mine that I'd rather not think of. The creepy factor was very high. He was talking about plans for next year. He mentioned never being married because he hadn't found the right woman to settle down with and spawn, while looking suggestively at my sister, and she just squirmed uncomfortably. If I do ever see him again, I'll try to make more of an effort to be nice. Not that I made any effort to be rude. I love my sister dearly. But I do worry about her and the fact that she seems keen on trading down.
