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Good Morning, Irene

Aug 28th, 2011
by htwollin.
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UPDATE THREE:
Sunday, 7:30 a.m.:
71 degrees F, 75% humidity, winds, 6 mph with gusts in the 10 mph range, foggy, raining hard and steadily, Barometric Pressure 28.20.
When I went to sleep last night, it had not started raining yet but it’s obviously been raining for most of the midnight-7:00 period because we have a pretty well-developed stream in the driveway. Now, we get that when we have a really hard sustained rain here, so this, so far is not a huge disaster but we are just starting in, in terms of our exposure to Irene’s effects. Later, it will get worse. The DH went up to do chores and everyone is a little annoyed at being inside (the turkeys are basically outdoors all the time in their yard and only come in to roost or get food and water), but and ounce of prevention and all that. We debated getting them in last night and now I’m glad we did because chasing them around to get them inside in wind and rain would be absolutely no fun. Looking at the radar, basically the entire state of New York except for perhaps Buffalo is completely engulfed in the storm which is yellow. No red. We’ll see how fast this storm moves now.

UPDATE FOUR:
Sunday:
9:00 a.m., 71 Degrees F, 76% humidity, winds: 5-10 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.14. Raining hard. Lost power at 8:30. Wanted a second bucket of water for flushing…just in case. Ran around the outside of the house to find… one of the downspouts did not have an extension on it to take the water away from the foundation (not a good thing in general but good for the purpose of putting a bucket underneath it), so I put a five gallon bucket under it, which filled to the top in less than 5 minutes. Now, a downspout extension will go on the hardware store list NOW.

9:30 a.m, 71 degrees F., 75% humidity, winds 5-10 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.11. The DH and our son out in the garage finally able to get the generator to work. The choke needed adjustment. Lesson learned: Having a generator in a box ‘just in case’ is great until you have to use it and don’t know how to make the thing run. Note to self: Next time we have this sort of warning, let’s all not only clean things up, tie things down and get the animals inside, but also do the drill on systems such as a generator.
Regular utility power came on at 9:35. Lucky us.

10:00 a.m., 70 degrees F, 76% humidity, winds 13 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.11.

One of the things I’ve been keeping myself busy with this weekend is making some winter fleece clothes for my grandson. Our house is a lot cooler than his house and he spends a lot of time here with us, so I need to make sure we have plenty of snuggly clothing for him here, especially because he will be starting to walk this winter. I already finished a black set with a sailboat on it. Our son came up with this ‘Buck Rogers’ space ship design for an applique. I put this on by hand, with a buttonhole stitch, which worked out really well, considering we lost the power and I wouldn’t have been able to finish the front if I had been depending on my sewing machine. The zigzag power lines at the bottom are done with doubled up sewing thread, in a chain stitch.
LAST UPDATE:
7:30 p.m., 67 degrees F, 71% humidity, winds out of the SW at 2.9 mph, Barometric pressure: 28.50. Little bits of rain still around. We were lucky here; others in the county and nearby were not so lucky. Lots of flash flooding of the ‘usual suspects’ in terms of streams. Police were evacuating some roads in rural areas. About 50 miles from us, in the Catskill Mountains, a little village, Margaretville, was completely flooded and Governor Cuomo went down there. The water was up to the fenders in his SUV. Margaretville is in a valley which drains from the Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna rivers so they have had more than their share of massive floods over the years. Everyone will have a big job cleaning up in the coming week. For the moment, though, we’re done here.

Busy Summer Days

Jul 3rd, 2011
by htwollin.
5 comments

Well, like everyone else in the summer, we tend to throw the household into ‘overdrive’ because so many things need to be done and can only get done when a) they are in season and b) the weather is warm and dry enough to do them. So, this week has been super busy, starting out mid-week when our eldest daughter called me when I was coming home from work to announce that a local apple grower also had sweet cherries and they were ready to pick and would I like to come along (Would I?!). In Upstate New York, the fruit schedule goes strawberries (and we are just about done with that), then sweet cherries and raspberries, then pie cherries, then early blue berries, then maincrop blues and black berries and early apples, then late blues and early peaches and plums and more apples and on it goes through the fall with apples until nearly November, when all we basically can go out and do ‘you pick’ for is Northern Spy apples which are great for baking. (more…)

Cary Grant Didn’t Sleep in a Steelers(tm) Jersey

Jun 25th, 2011
by htwollin.
5 comments

And I’m not going to (and you shouldn’t) either.

I was reminded of this bit of wisdom recently when I started thinking about the trip the DH and I will be making to the UK next month. We will be staying in various B&Bs, the reservations for which have been left in the hands of one of my UK cousins who will be traveling with us for certain sections of the trip. (more…)

Top Ten Things For Your Wardrobe

Jun 5th, 2011
by htwollin.
1 comment

It doesn’t matter if you read news sites, fashion (or non-fashion) blogs, but I think at least once a week, I see a headline which reads: “The Top Ten… that you must have in your closet this season” (or, next season, or this year, or..).

And it doesn’t matter what it is or what they are touting but I have to tell you when Aunt Toby goes down through those lists of items, invariably, the little voice in her head is saying, “Nope…nope…are they kidding?… nope, that’s another useless item…only on women under the age of 30 who are over 5’8” tall… I’d break my ankles if I wore those…even if I liked that I wouldn’t be able to find it or find it in MY size… nope …and where did she get those clavicles?” (more…)

Sustainable Sanitary Products

May 1st, 2011
by htwollin.
7 comments

Are we sustainable yet?

And now, Aunt Toby is going to discuss something ‘ooky’ – which is personal sustainability. No, not the ‘in the kitchen’ sort – this is the ‘in the bathroom’ sort.

One statistic out there claims that at least 1/3 of all sanitary napkins (or “Kotex” or ‘pads’ if you will) purchased in the US are bought by women who haven’t had a period in a very, very long time. The manufacturers know this – it is not a secret to them. If you look at the packaging, look at the descriptions of the ‘anti scent strips’ or the absorbency ratings that they are putting into the napkins. This is not just for women who feel that their menses have an odor, believe me. This is for women who have one of the forms of incontinence and who are not ready to either move to a more absorbent product or go see their urologist or OB-GYN to start discussing surgical intervention. (more…)

Every Month is Skin Cancer Awareness Month

Apr 23rd, 2011
by htwollin.
2 comments

Well, next month is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, so I’m getting the jump on everyone here to talk about skin cancer. Part of this is that I feel that EVERY month should be one where we remind ourselves that we can get skin cancer, not only during the spring, summer and early fall. Temperature has nothing to do with the risk of skin cancer. As a matter of fact, if you asked a thousand people in this country what states have the highest rates of skin cancer, they’d get them wrong – they’d pick Florida or Texas or California. The highest rates of skin cancer are found in states such as New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Vermont. Cancer by state

And don’t ask me why (more…)

What to look for at end-of-winter sales

Feb 20th, 2011
by htwollin.
1 comment

Actually, Aunt Toby had a whole program planned out for this weekend. We’d had wonderfully warm temperatures this week, even for Chez Siberia – by Friday it was up to 63 degrees F. About 12-15” of snow cover melted and I was ready to get out there and shovel off one of the garden beds and talk to you about getting ready for spring planting. Unfortunately, overnight, the temperature plummeted down in the low 20s with high winds and snow, so I didn’t deal with that yesterday, and you get ‘housekeeping bits and pieces’ today. Sorry.

At this point in the season, we’re all extremely tired of winter, the snow next to the road is grimy, and we’re all itching for spring. For most of us north of the Mason-Dixon Line, though, we’ve still got several weeks of winter and some of it will be extremely nasty. We also have (and they’ve started already) ‘end of the season sales’ going on not only in our local malls but over the internet. So, at this point, I usually take a serious look at what my family has been wearing this winter, what shape it’s in, and whether or not the item actually performed its function HERE. Now, depending on where YOU live, (more…)

In Search of the Warm Blouse

Feb 13th, 2011
by htwollin.
1 comment

The dress code (such as it is) in my office is pretty casual: The guys wear chinos or other casual pants with the occasional blue jeans, golf shirts in the summer/casual buttondowns in the winter. On the distaff side, it’s mostly pants all the time, with knit tops and sweaters in the winter. If someone shows up in the skirt or dress, it’s either one of us older types with things left over from the 90s in our wardrobes or someone suspected of being on their way to a job interview. I try to dress a couple of steps up for the only reason that I’m really short and rather round and I feel more formal clothing suits me better. I’d like to wear blouses with my dress slacks in the office but at this time of the year, most blouses are just not warm enough. At that point, I’m starting to layer on a vest, a jacket or sweater and I’ve lost the entire effect. (more…)

Peacoat Done and More Paper Dolls – for pockets

Jan 30th, 2011
by htwollin.
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For those of you who followed my last little paper doll experimentpaper dolls for peacoats
to deal with making the changes in my son’s peacoat, here is the final result. (more…)

Using Paper Dolls to Improve Sewing

Jan 9th, 2011
by htwollin.
Comments are off for this post

Sometimes, my eyes are definitely bigger than my ambitions. I wanted to make my son a coat that would be nicer than what he wears for work and he pointed out a coat in this bookMen’s Coat Book that he wanted.

A pea coat. But I wanted to make it a bit more stylish than that (yes, Aunt Toby realizes that the pea coat is a men’s style icon but if I’m only going to get one shot at making my son a coat that he can wear for everything from a concert to a trip to a restaurant, then I want to make it a bit more fashion forward than a pea coat), so I looked through all my Burda pattern magazines and found a man’s jacket with what we’d refer to as ‘princess seams’ (if it’s a man’s garment, do we get to call them ‘prince’ seams?). My son is a bit more narrow in the shoulders than he is in the hips, so having extra seams would give me more fitting spots for him. So, being not the ‘forward thinking person’ that I should be, I just frankenpattern’ed the two of them together, making a new pattern. (more…)

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