The Pre Vacation Post

Erica, Lilly, and I are heading to Minnesota for the next week.  It is going to be awesome, mainly due to me not being near work for a week.  I have 14 rolls of film, three cameras, the pano head, and all my lenses and I’m going to rock the star trails and panoramas hardcore.  Maybe the Northern Lights will show themselves for me and I can capture them.  I’ve borrowed a Pentax KM for a fully manual and mechanical camera and a Pentax SF-10 with a long cable release.  The SF-10 will be the star trail camera and the KM will be the panorama camera.  At least I have a plan.

The floods in Cedar Rapids have gone down and the cleanup has begun.  I’ve heard downtown is like a war zone.  I have yet to visit, but Erica and her mom were there this afternoon.  The crappy thing is, the flood water has moved on to the Mississippi and is destroying even more towns.  I just saw a thing on CNN about how the levees are making it worse and the logic makes sense.  We’re stopping a natural process by channelling the water which causes it to raise more during floods and then after a flood, the levees get built even higher worsening the problem.  Evidently this happened after the 1993 floods which explains why the floods so far are at that level or far worse.

The Great Flood of 2008

International News has picked up this story, but Iowa is pretty much underwater.  Cedar Rapids, where I live, has water past the 500 year flood plane.  If you don’t know what the 500 year flood plane is, it’s where there is a 1 in 500 chance that a flood will reach a certain location.  The entire town of Palo, which isn’t that far west of Cedar Rapids, is underwater; all 2000+ citizens have been evacuated to shelters.  

83 of the 99 counties have been declared disaster areas by Governor Culver.

I’ve helped out sandbag the last working water pump/well on the northwest side of town.  1500 people showed up to build a sandbag wall 5 feet higher than the water level.  There is a water order in effect to only use the water for drinking, but I need it to wash baby bottles so Lilly can eat.  If I need the water, it’s only right to help save the one pump that still works.  The efforts we put in from 10:30 to 11:35 pm on the 12th worked and the pump was saved.

Erica has taken over a thousand pictures since Tuesday of the water downtown.  I have some, but don’t have the roll of film developed.

Well I’m off to go move stuff out of her mom’s basement, water got in from the foundation.  We aren’t in the flood zone, but the ground is super saturated.

Adventures with Expensive Gas

Gas prices are on the rise and we drove to Des Moines for a friends wedding.  It was a good time and people enjoyed seeing Lilly.  It was good to get out of town for most of a day.

Erica and I went out and took pictures of the sunset tonight at Nixon Elementary.  Her best are on her flickr account here.  I was able to finish out a roll of film and now have to load another roll; just have to figure out which roll I want to shoot.  I need to get my shots to Hy-Vee DrugTown to get developed and scanned.

I was successful with eBay and got a Vivitar 75-205mm zoom.  There is some slight fungus on the outer element, but I can, hopefully, clean it up.  This will replace my Pentax 80-200mm that is dented and mostly apart.  I was able to get disassembled some more, but still can’t get the dented barrel off to un-dent.

Sean got Falcon 4.0 and started flying that, so I started getting into it.  I have been able to start the plane and take off, but taxiing to the proper runway has been hit or miss.  The last time I played, it wanted me to go to 16 Right and all I found was 34 Left and no other way to any other runway from the taxiway.

This weekend Erica is busy so I’m going to chill at home and do nothing.  I mow tomorrow night since Erica is also busy Wednesday, the grass has been getting long fast because of all the rain.  

Speaking of rain, we’re on the verge of record flooding out here.  Supposedly we’re going to get more rain and should provide an interesting opportunity to take some pictures.