Better Put Yer High-Water Pants* On, Texas

I made a comment in an earlier post about us getting some rain because of swirly storms horsing around in the Gulf (of Mexico).  Yep.  We’ve been getting a goodly bit of rain here lately, real gully-washers, and one of them swirly storms name of Harvey is slamming into the Texas coast as I type.  It was upgraded from a category 3 to a category 4 just as it started coming ashore at Port Lavaca  (slightly north and east of Corpus Christi), which is mostly evacuated by now according to one of the masochists on The Weather Channel .

As my regular blog readers might remember, I have maternal relatives in the Houston-Galveston area.  They are not in any immediate danger from the hurricane, thankfully, but Jiminy Christmas, they’re talking 2 FEET (60.69 cm) of rainfall along the coast, including the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area between now and Tuesday, maybe as much as 30 inches. (76.2 cm).  Never mind your umbrella; better take your flippers and a snorkel.

And roll an eyeball over the rainfall prediction for the next 7 days.

Where I am is in the blue bit in the extreme upper left-hand corner.  But the worst part of all this hurricane business is that they think Harvey is not going to start dissipating when it makes landfall like most hurricanes do.  He seems to want to wander around a bit and may have a little sit-down first, so there could be widespread and severe flooding.  I hope my cousin WM can get her cows — and herself! — to high ground.  She lives at the edge of the flood plain of the Brazos River west of Houston.  My cousin EJ’s boy and his wife and little daughter Raelyn Rose (Little Raelyn is the one I made all those baby clothes for about two years ago.)  live in Galveston — in a brick 2-storey house, but only miles from the beach.  They don’t expect much in the way of storm surge, but they’re in that 2 feet of rain area. That whole end of Texas is going to be soggy and squishy for months.

Well, after Napster/Rhapsody did me dirty, I decided to finally bite the bullet.  Consumer Cellular was having a really good sale on its Samsung Galaxy J3(6) phones.  I have been saving up for one for months now, foregoing junk food, cakes, cookies, ice cream and candy, and putting aside the money I would have spent on them.  It came Wednesday.  I ordered a little wallet for it from Amazon, and it came this morning — in the pouring rain, no less.  Changing to a smart phone is only going to up my bill about $3-$5 a month, depending on how much data I use.   I just texted my cousin EJ a while ago — now that I can! — to let her know I was thinking about her.   Napster has an Android app, and I can download music through it over WiFi, which doesn’t use up my data, and then play it through my phone, again without using data.  The phone only has 16GB of memory, but I have my eye on a 64GB memory chip that is around $20.  My mom is not going to be happy with me for getting yet another gadget, but there it is.

In the knitting news, I’m doing a toboggan out of some camouflage patterned yarn KC donated to my chemo hat efforts. (Chemo camo!)  It’s a regular knitting worsted weight (Medium:4) yarn, which I have not used for toboggans yet.  I’ve only used the Red Heart Unforgettable yarn, which is actually about halfway between a Medium:4 weight and a Light:3 weight. I think it’s going to take the lion’s share of the skein of yarn to make it, though.  I thought this style hat in a camo yarn was bound to go over big with guys undergoing chemo and needing hats.  Apparently in this part of the world, something that might be considered wimpy/sissy becomes automatically “manly” if it’s in camo.

I need to get all the donated Dazzle yarn knitted up so I can wash it. The yarn has been in storage for probably 30 years, and needs the dust washed out, for one thing, and it’s easier to wash after it has been knitted up.  I’ll set my washing machine on delicate and pour in hair (shampoo) conditioner at the point in the cycle where you are supposed to add fabric softener.  That is supposed to soften the yarn right up.  We’ll see.

Well, it’s after midnight now, so I’ll say goodnight, Gracie.

*high-water pants