Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

I got snowed on yesterday.

Oh, it wasn't at all serious. And it isn't all that unusual for West Michigan to see flakeage sometime in October. And there was no accumulation -- it was 41°F, after all. But I did see many small white things falling out of the sky in Kalamazoo as I finished my drive in on Thursday. And there were still flakes falling on me as I walkered from Blazer to Everett.

The month is ending with cold, wet weather. Will even rain on the little kiddies on Saturday's Halloween. November, however, is going to start with a week in the 60s, even 70s, and sunshine. Go figure.

Wednesday was Exam 2 day in both my classes. Unlike Monday and Tuesday, which started in the 30s, I realized it was 50°F at 7:30, with a high of about 55°F. Since I don't have a proper raincoat currently, I use a waterproof winter coat. I skipped the heavy sweatshirt, since I would've broiled with sweatshirt and coat in the rain -- and I can turn up the heat in the Blazer on the drive. Good call, because the heating system in Everett/Rood was caught off guard. It was hot and humid inside. In fact, the front door to Rood Hall was propped open with a rock.

As for the exams, in a fifty minute class, I'd like to see the first papers turned in between the 20-30 minute mark for PHYS-1070 and 30-40 minutes for PHYS-2070. The former clocked in at just fourteen minutes -- pretty much no one finished before time was called in PHYS-2070. Guess there'll be a curve. Just joking, there's always a curve.

Gas as $2.18.9/gal this morning in Allendale. It's been jumping around this week, sometimes with very different pricing on nearby gas stations, instead of the usual gentlemen's agreement colluding slash responding to market forces. Low of $2.14.9 and high of $2.38.9/gal. The latter, alas, was at the Shell station in Wayland, where I sometimes gas up on the way home. They also are the only station I use with a 29¢ differential, instead of 20¢/gal.

Guess gas prices this week are as uncertain as the weather.

Dr. Phil

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So, it's the One-st of October -- and we've had a full week of autumn now.

Took a while for the weather to sort itself out. The week before the equinox, summer ended on a cool note. But for most of the first week of fall, we had maybe three days with highs in the 83° to 89°F range, then days in the 70s which were just putrid. High humidity, with air you could shovel. Everett's air conditioning has been irregular since before the semester started and it was brutally humid in the buildings. Not only was there no point in trying to do a Van de Graf generator demo in E&M, my hands were sticking to the wrist rest on OUEST, the university's Dell laptop... Ugh.

Wednesday morning the temp was about 41°F. Today it was clear and 39°F. Ah-hhh, this is better.

There are leaves down in some places, but not a lot of color yet. It was funny that on the 23rd or 24th, as I drove up to my handicapped parking space, there are these two relatively recent maples in the lawn by Everett Tower. The one on the right -- half the big leaves were green and half were sort of beige. The breeze was blowing a snowstorm of beige leaves onto the ground. It looked like something you'd see on a cartoon, or maybe the pine needles falling off all at once on Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. (grin) We're talking about knocking off all the beige leaves in minutes, not hours or days or weeks. Very odd looking.

Maybe October will bring some pleasant cool jacket weather -- and some great leaf color. We shall see.

No pictures yet.

Dr. Phil

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For the last several weeks there has been some disturbing news affecting West Michigan. One wishes that the plagues of stupidity and evil elsewhere don't light here -- but that's sadly just wishful thinking.

There's at least one sniper targeting cars on West Michigan freeways.

There have been upwards of 30 reports going back into August at least -- three have them have been confirmed to be bullets. Sad to say that Michigan roads are crappy enough with debris and broken pavement -- and Michigan truckers carry such large loads which might be falling out of or bouncing out of open top trailers -- that it takes some forensic work to determine if something striking a car or even breaking a window is actually a bullet.

3 to as many as 30.

I hate to call it good news, but... So far I don't believe any people have been hit. Certainly no one killed, that we know of. And this seems to be happening east and west of Kalamazoo on I-94 and I-69 -- and I think some other smaller roads. So far none of this has been happening on US-131 or any of the roads I'll be traveling on five days a week starting Tuesday.

But I don't take any comfort in that.

Statistically, there are far more cars than shots taken. If the police have more information, regarding patterns, times of day, types of rounds -- either it's not been reported or it didn't show up in anything I've read/heard. And I'm far more likely to get hit by drivers trying to text, merge in without warning or, as we head into fall, deer bounding across the road.

Of course, in many parts of the United States, including West Michigan, there are plenty of shooters taking shots at STOP signs, insulators on power lines, whatever. Even read how priceless petroglyphs in the Southwest are being destroyed by such wonderful plinkers. Graduating to moving cars is but a small step, I'm afraid.

Though I haven't done it in years, I do enjoy target shooting. Even went deer hunting in the U.P. a number of times, but the brush is thick up there and the deer regularly makes fools of mere humans -- you can sit against a tree for two hours and find fresh deer tracks in the snow not more than six feet behind you -- and never even got a shot off.

But I was taught how to shoot and firearm safety by a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant at Northwestern University -- and it would never occur to me to shoot at property, most especially occupied vehicles.

Either this guy(s) will quit as inexplicably as (t)he(y) started, or there will be mistakes or too many attempts and they'll get caught. Not looking forward to the nervous behavior or even panic if this escalates.

I do hope someone explains to me how "a good guy with a gun" will be able to deal with this situation In Real Life.

Dr. Phil

PS- These days I occasionally hunt trains, but I use a Nikon. Bagged one last week -- have to put the pictures up Real Soon Now. But this is not the time for levity.

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Wednesday ended up being a good day -- a very productive day.

It almost wasn't.

Late Tuesday night a storm rolled through while I was preparing handouts for a Wednesday meeting. Yes, I have surge protectors -- even on laptops -- but still. If things are going bad, then you just know they'll go all the way to putrid if they have a chance. Meanwhile, the forecast for Wednesday had a nasty line of thunderstorms rolling through Kalamazoo and the US-131 corridor between 11am and noon -- just when I would be expecting to arrive in K-zoo.

Why don't you leave earlier, Dr. Phil? Sure. If I had planned on leaving early, say on a school day, I would be going to bed earlier -- not working on a number of things on the computer until after 3am. I've been using mornings as nap time after getting up with Mrs. Dr. Phil and getting armored up in my foot brace. Left to myself, I'm afraid I tend to go to bed around 4am... I am not going to try to stupidly function on 2-3 hours of sleep.

What was bad about the forecast wasn't just rain, but big storm. 60mph winds. Hail. See, I work really hard to keep my bad foot dry. It was storm water getting into an open blister on my foot which probably caused the initial infection back in April 2013 -- and I'm still recovering from that. Also I still have a hole in my foot, though these days it doesn't go down to the bone. And it's one thing to get in and try to be careful when one is teaching. But for a meeting? Pfft. Alas, rescheduling was going to be complicated.

But by 7:35 in the morning, the Weather Channel app on my Kindle Fire HD was showing that the line of storms wasn't going to come in until 1pm. That was the time of the meeting, so I'd already be on campus. In fact, it never did rain -- percentages were dropping steadily during the day -- not until after dinner in the evening.

So after a nap, quick check of emails, bathroom, a hard boiled egg -- we added an egg to my diet to bring my protein levels up and promote healing, but it's easier to mess with the egg at home (grin) -- I gathered up my stuff and headed out. Time out logged in the Blazer was 10:11.

Gas has been flirting between $2.38.9 and $2.89.9/gal for the last month or so. And then it's been going down -- "$2 gas for Labor Day" said the pundits. Until last week when it shot up 30¢ one day and 30¢ the next, eventually pinging up at $2.99.9/gal for regular. Seems a BP refinery in Indiana was unexpectedly down. This after the gas mavens were already nervous about a West Coast refinery outage, even though there's no way for gasoline to easily cross the Rockies, so their shortage shouldn't have affected Midwest prices. Anyway, this morning regular was $2.87.9, making midgrade $3.07.9 -- except I had a 75¢/gal coupon from Family Failure -- which made it $2.32.9/gal. "$2 gas for Christmas" say the pundits this week.

Don't you love it when your 75¢ discount just happens to be magically eaten up by the 60¢ spike plus the 20¢ grade differential?

The drive in was mostly sunny, with some big clouds playing in between blue patches of sky. It was humid and unfortunately, the A.C. on the Blazer has been getting more and more anemic with each passing week. We'll take it in for a recharge tomorrow. But I couldn't just open the windows. I've been on doxycycline for over a year, and while I've not had much problem with it being a photoreactive antibiotic, in truth I am a little mole person who doesn't get much direct sun. And I needed the UV protection of the glass.

But I got in. My usual handicapped parking space was there. I made copies of the handout I'd written in the wee hours. No problem with making the 1pm meeting.

See I'm teaching PHYS-1070 Elementary Physics this fall -- the 29th time I've taught this course -- and we are switching to a free online Physics textbook. One that we're using for PHYS-1130/1150, the full year course. For the one-semester PHYS-1070, I've been working on chopping it down to a reasonable amount of material. The meeting was about the PHYS-1080 lab course, which is getting completely updated for the first time in a long time. To put it another way, some of the labs previously used had been typed... Making it all interesting is that the three largest group of majors taking this course are pretty different -- Aviation, Speech Pathology and Exercise Science. Good meeting. The lab people have been working hard.

Oh, and while I was on campus, I downloaded the textbook onto my second Kindle Fire HD -- 93MB took about 15 seconds. This is what happens when the WiFi nodes are hooked up to gigabit Internet. At home the DSL is the limiting factor, not the WiFi. My students will have no excuses. (big-grin)

Lunch back at my office. Then a 3pm conference call with the care facility in North Carolina where my mother is these days. Hmm, is it still a conference call when only one person is on the other end? Anyway, things are stable. Stable is good.

Rechecked the Weather Channel app -- no rain until at least 8pm now. No particular reason I had to stay until 5pm or later, so Elvis Left The Building at 4:35. Campus is pretty empty right now. By next week things will begin hopping. So, I took this opportunity to go left, instead of right, out of Lot 61. HEY! They finally fixed the road markings! A couple of years ago they changed the left and right turn lanes onto the street into a single exit lane, to make the entrance lane bigger. Because they had created a new bus stop, taking up a chunk of the parking lot and they needed the clearance for the buses to make the turn. But they put in the new new bus stop last year -- or was it the year before -- freeing back up all the parking spaces. Unfortunately, they left only one exit lane. So normally I turn right and at 5pm I'd be stuck behind all these idiots waiting to turn left onto a traffic jam.

Anyway, the point of my turning left was to go down to Parking Services and get my '15-'16 campus parking hangtag. Yes, as part of the Part-Time Instructors union contract we finally got real parking permits. Before I had to get a temporary permit every semester, which was taped to the far side of the windshield and had to be peeled off and moved if I was driving a different vehicle.

Next week they'll be lines out the doors with grad students, part-timers and some campus apartment dwellers all getting parking. Today? No line. Two wads of people obviously together -- and three clerks. So at 4:45, I was in and out in minutes. Don't even have to sign any stupid paperwork anymore either.

Coming out there was another SUV in one of the 15 minute business parking spots past my Blazer in the Handicapped parking. A black family was standing around their tailgate. In the middle of the parking lot lane was a trio of blonds. Apparently the girls on the right had realized that the college student girl on the left with her family was in their dorm -- and they'd gone over to help the family figure out the byzantine paperwork and parking procedures. Ah... one group of students feeding the hard won arcane knowledge to the next student. Gotta love college.

Easy drive home, except for playing sun battles again. Amazing how you end up with drivers arm in both directions between morning and evening. How is this fair? (evil-grin)

We're getting closer to being operational for Fall 2015...

Dr. Phil

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The official weather temperatures are not always the same as we imagine it or what some local thermometer is saying. As I've reported earlier, we've flirted with 90°F temps in West Michigan, but neither Grand Rapids nor Kalamazoo actually officially hit 90°. Until now.

I thought we'd hit 90° on Friday 17 July 2015 (DW) (LJ), but that was just our thermometers here in Allendale and not the official GR or Kzoo reports.

Monday night's forecast, pointed out that there were 90s in Michigan on Monday. 91° in Sault Ste. Marie and Alpena, 90° in Marquette. Those are all in northern Michigan. But the forecast 90s here didn't materialize.

Tuesday, though, we finally did it. Holland reported 91°F -- they may have hit 90° earlier. And Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo both hit 90°.

For Kalamazoo, it had been 326 days since the last temps of 90° or higher -- that would be 5 September 2014.

For Grand Rapids, it was even longer. 683 days or 13 September 2013. That was way back when I was in the hospital for The Year Without A Summer. Hard to believe that Grand Rapids never hit 90° all last summer, but then both last year and this year Lake Michigan had almost frozen over -- and the cold lake water has moderated the temperatures here in West Michigan.

Remember, kids, climate and weather are not the same thing. And that climate change involves churning which will give highs and lows.

Dr. Phil

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Ah, the summer produce of West Michigan...

For several weeks Mrs. Dr. Phil has been buying the asparagus grown a few miles from us. This year's crop has been extraordinary. Most of the stalks have been medium thickness, but they've been as tender as the dainty thin ones. Not a woody one in the bunch. We've had the wonderful chicken with asparagus in tarragon mustard sauce -- twice. And the new small upper oven of the new stove does a fine job of broiling/roasting asparagus. Yum.

Last Wednesday, 3 June 2015, was the start of the weekly Farmer's Market on the campus of Grand Valley State University in Allendale. Somebody is apparently using little tents to grow early tomatoes and so we had two nice ripe local tomatoes. We had BLTs and tomato bisque soup on Saturday for dinner, and the first of the traditional Dr. Phil summer tomato sandwiches (DW) (LJ) for lunch on Sunday. Oh. Yum.

But it's the beginning of June and we're awaiting strawberry season. Looking back through the years, I've seen discussion of local strawberries in this blog back in May. This year, though, well we had a long winter and a cool spring. The last few days I've occasion to head up 68th Avenue towards Coopersville -- and as I've passed through Eastmanville, I've looked for the little white signs for Cook's. Consistently for at least fifteen years, Cook's has had the best local strawberries, about a mile east on Leonard.

Today I headed north on 68th at around 10:09am -- nothing. Then south on 68th around 12:09 and BOOM. Sign. STRAWBERRIES.

There were people all around. Some driving up, some driving away, some working, some young teens out in the fields. Cars everywhere. I asked for two quarts. Did I have a preorder? No. What kind did I want? Huh. We've been going to Cook's for a long time. This time, they had two varieties ready at the same time. One called Jewel and one called Honey Something (all I can think of is Honeycrisp, the "new" apple variety that everyone has gone gaga over the last few years). Which do YOU like better? The woman working the stand -- I like the Honey whatevers. The two boys bringing back baskets of strawberries from the field and logging their loads in the book -- both are really good. Great, so why not one of each? Good choice!


Cook's lovely strawberries. The Jewels are on the left and the darker Honey Somethings on the right. Also one of the wonderful brown eggs Mrs. Dr. Phil has been getting from someone at the GVSU library. With natural light, I can get decent color shots at ISO 1600 on the Nikon D1H and the 24-120mm VR lens is very good at low shutter speeds. Pleased. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Also asked Cook's How is the crop? Well... there was some winter damage. So, shorter season? Not necessarily, but the yields per plant are expected to be lower. If you've every grown strawberries, they take a couple of years to settle in -- one of the buyers today was explaining their strawberries are in their first year, so they had to come to Cook's.

Alas, it doesn't sound like I'll get strawberry shortcake tonight. S-i-g-h... But! We'll do a taste off of strawberries and whipped cream, so that's not so bad. (evil-strawberry-grin)

Summer. Is. Here.

Dr. Phil

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Friday. May the First. Temperature hit 73°F in Kalamazoo. Saturday was similar.

These days I mostly commute with a single Nikon and one lens. For the D100 I usually use the 28-80mm f3.5-5.6G AF NIKKOR. But Friday I took a camera bag and from the start of my drive, I used the 80-200mm f4.5-5.6D AF NIKKOR. Ken Rockwell lists this as "Nikon's Lightest Telephoto Zoom", yet optically it is a worthy successor to the original 80-200mm f4.5 Zoom-NIKKOR manual focus lens.


I love furry dry weeds and grasses, especially backlit. This is the edge of the cedar swamp on 84th Avenue less than a mile from our house. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Cropped shot of a tractor plowing with a dust plume behind. I thought I'd try to stay for a shot of it coming back withe plume behind the tractor, but he was driving around in big squares, not up-and-down, so I'm glad I got this shot. Was impressed that the autofocus still locked on the tractor, despite the dust. This is also on 84th Avenue, where all the fields have been plowed now. The big corn fields east of 84th on M-45 Lake Michigan Drive haven't started yet. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Every spring this line of pink flowering trees in front of Family Fare in Allendale glows as I go to work in the mid-morning and early evening on the way home. Since I had a long lens mounted, I pulled into the gas station and shot down the line of trees. A breeze was knocking petals off in big clouds, but this shot didn't have many. Tough lighting for a D100 -- you can see the overblown highlights in the sky. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Leaving the office on Friday, there were dandelions in the grass below the raised sidewalk. I tried to shoot a clump straight down, but the 80-200mm has a minimum distance of 5 feet -- too close. So angled and got this dandelion, slightly backlit by the late afternoon sun. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Saturday I found that the 80-200mm lens on the D100 still fit in the neoprene Zing camera case, so hoping I didn't need a shorter lens, didn't even bother with the camera bag. We had half an hour to kill in Grand Haven before going to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, so we went down to Grand Haven Harbor. While waiting for Mrs. Dr. Phil to return with a couple of chili dogs, I was able to take a few shots.


Cropped shot of a red bench along the boardwalk. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Kids, a dog, parents -- all happy on a warm spring day. Love the pose on the kid in the middle, and the smile on the dog. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Cropped shot of our hearty little stand of daffodils next to our driveway. Looks very happy coming up the drive. Evening light to the left backlighting here. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Pretty pleased with these. Going backlit with a Gen 1.5 DSLR is pretty tough. The only thing I might've changed would have been to take a 70-300mm instead of the 80-200mm. But that would've taken the Zing Pro camera case. Funny thing about zooms -- one tends to use the extremes a lot.

Dr. Phil

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... across another rift in the space-time continuum (DW) on Sunday. We think we're all right, but by the evening it was clear that the sun had moved and was higher in the sky than it was on Saturday.

Weird.

One thing about not teaching this semester, I don't have to deal with the vernal equinox. Or more specifically, the east-west sunrise/sunsets. Despite my working part-time, given nearly three hours of commuting, there are many semesters where I get to deal with heading east on roads dead into the rising sun. And some schedules I have had to also deal with heading west on roads dead into the setting sun. Oh, I have a clever system to defeat the sun from searing my eyeballs, using an old library catalog card stuck under the lid to the vanity mirror on the driver's sunshade to hang down as an extra shield, but there's a week or two of low sun to deal with in both the Spring and Fall semesters.

It always amazes me that (a) people still drive at full speed directly into the sun and (b) there aren't more terrible accidents.

But... there is sun today. In fact, we're in the middle of a week or more of sunny days. And over the weekend the highs hit 42°F. This week the highs will be from 45°F all the way up to 52°F -- actual temperatures will likely vary from forecasts. (grin) Realize that the low Thursday morning was 0°F and Friday was 8°F. We're likely to have lows than don't get below freezing Real Soon Now.

All this means that there is a great deal of melting going on. I haven't checked the snow totals between last winter and this, but the big difference between 2014 and 2015 was when the extreme cold and snow hit. This year it has been more February than January. So the snow totals have snuck up us. Same with the Great Lakes ice coverage. Subzero weather in February, especially a few nights below zero with little wind, has just sucked the heat out of the lakes. The percentage of ice coverage had jumped from 50% to over 80% in 2½ weeks. "The entire Great Lakes is at 88.8 percent ice coverage, with the highest totals coming from Lake Huron and Lake Erie at about 96 percent ice coverage, according to NOAA. Mar 1, 2015"

That was a week ago.

This week, you can really see how this warmup has affected Lake Michigan:

                  3/8/2015  3/8/2014
Great Lakes        78.5%     90.8%
Lake Superior      89.3%     91.8%
Lake Michigan      48.6% **  92.9%
Lake Huron         91.9%     94.7%
Lake Erie          93.3%     95.3%
Lake Ontario       44.9%     52.1%

** Two weeks ago they were talking about Lake Michigan 
freezing over completely.

Data: The NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

It's too early to declare this Spring, for sure. And a few days of 40s and 50s do not mean we've seen the last of the weather. But compared to the incessant drubbing that places like Boston have gotten this winter -- or Buffalo when it was still called "autumn" -- West Michigan doesn't have the same level to complain about.

Certainly not the worst in Michigan. The Northern Lower Peninsula has seen lots of sub-zero temperatures. And MLive is circulating a story from the Lansing State Journal marveling about Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie:

You're the president of Lake Superior State University in the U.P., home of the mascot Fog Horn the Sailor. The thermometer outside your ivy tower office reads minus 40. Not wind chill. An actual number of 40 below zero.

Well, a normal person would send out an email blast to the 2,500 hearty souls on campus: Stay Home. No school today.

Not Tom Pleger, who is the president up there in Sault Ste. Marie. He kept the doors wide open open and he reports, with a smile, that students survived. In fact he attests that many of those students come there for the U.P. outdoor experience.

But 40 below? Are they that desperate for that kind of experience?

"Students safely made it to class. Business continued, and we're in the U.P. and we are tough." And that, he indicates, applies to students and faculty alike, including the president.

"I walk to work," the native of Wisconsin reveals, and after telling everyone to wear mittens and bundle up, he crossed the windblown campus and encountered a "student in shorts." Pleger figures it was an athlete just leaving the university gym.

...

In fact one of those students confided to the president that when he came home from spring break, the temp swing was 130 degrees.

Yeah. Almost forgot. It's Spring Break week for Western Michigan University. (grin)

Oh, and kids? Remember you don't have to specify the temperature scale at -40°. Same for Fahrenheit and Centigrade -- can't happen in the absolute scales of Kelvin and Rankine.

Dr. Phil

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Flood Report

We've been in a steadily losing battle for some days now. For a basement that's never had a serious leak before, water has come in from all over. Some water came in under the back door. And the water table had to have come up to the level of the house because the little cracks in foundation were leaking.

The office carpet was saturated early on -- it connects to a low point with the furnace room floor, so as that flooded, under the wall the water went. Or maybe there was a source there. Many, many boxes and bags of stored papers and things are now awaiting disposal.

The "kitty room" has never had water. A little leaked in from the wall with the furnace room. But then a big wet spot appeared in the middle of the floor -- another under floor leak? And now both carpeted rooms are supersaturated.

Thursday I went out and got a second wet vac. TruValue of Allendale said they had just one, an 18 gallon ShopVac, but then called me right back and said they had one 5 gallon unit as well. I told them to hold the latter for me, but when I got there I looked at the big unit. So much better construction -- with wheels set with a "wide stance" so it can't fall over like the old 5 gallon unit can. AND it has a front drain so it squat over the sump pump and pee into it. No brainer to get it, an outdoor extension cord if we needed it, and a second pair of ear muffs for Mrs. Dr. Phil to use -- My shooting muffs have always been good for lawn mowers and using shopvacs indoors.

The deepest part of the water anywhere was maybe an inch. No more than ¼" anywhere else. And several places never got wet. But something was filling the sump pump and Thursday and Friday it was going off every 15-20 minutes. Our estimate is that it triggers at 10 gallons. So we're still talking about a prodigious amount of water in a place where we silly humans don't think we'll ever see it.

But we weren't winning. Not even holding our own. Worried about the big accordion fold paper air filter on the furnace, which is on the bottom.

Still... one source of smell in the basement was an old cardboard set of drawers that my parents must have bought in the 50s. It got soaked and once it was put outside, things got a lot better.

Friday didn't add too much to the rain totals, but never have I had a day with 6 or 7 rounds of heavy graupel -- my favorite kind of snow. (grin) Graupel is fun -- it bounces -- and just doesn't add much water. Called into ServPro -- finally -- and left a message.

Left a 2nd message 22 hours later here on Saturday morning and got an almost immediate callback. AND they have a crew freed up for tomorrow morning at 9. To be able to clean out the junk and to get a decision to dry or pull the carpet by tomorrow is a huge relief.

More anon.

Dr. Phil

Flowing Onward

On Saturday, when I took some of the pictures in the previous post (DW), I'd been told by Mrs. Dr. Phil to vacate the house for an hour, or better an hour-and-a-half, while the decks were swabbed. That's why I had the Nikon D1, and with some time to wander and adequate, but not great light, decided to check on the flooding Grand River.


This is from LaMont on the Bluff, looking down on Grand River (distant) and its flood plain (foreground). (Click on photo for larger.)
©2013 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Closer to the water, this is where the Old M-45 river crossing used to be, before the new bridges and the Allendale boulevard construction. These properties always flooded in the past. There's a house and driveway in there somewhere. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2013 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


Another view -- you can see the other end of Old M-45 on the other bank. It now has a parking area which I believe is used by the GVSU crew team. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2013 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)


When I got home, I was surprised to realize that the daffodils were seriously emerging. Not sure if any of the crocuses by the forsythia across the front yard are still there. Or whether we'll see any sign of the stunted tulip plants in this same patch. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2013 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Also, as of Tuesday, it's officially Spring as the peepers are making merry in the high waters of their swampy drain ditches and swamps.

Dr. Phil