Ummm...Wow.

Thanks to ZantiMissKnit for sharing this bit of movie-magic...I'm gonna go say nice things to my yarn now.

DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I AM DONE. DONE. DONE. DONE.
No more papers. No more reading.
No more classes.

Two weeks till graduation...
and I am ALMOST a MASTER of Social Work!
Or the master of disaster, depending on when you catch me...

So Close...

Last paper passed in, last group presentation done, one seminar and one class left to attend. As of 3:30 pm thursday, I will unofficially be done with my graduate studies. And I am so excited I could...I don't know...what's soooooo exciting? Umm...I could, well, something. I am so excited to be done with school I can't even identify something of equivilant short and long term excitement. And I'm a little fried on writing, so the english language and I are not the best of friends. As a classmate said last week, "The closer to graduating I get, the dumber I feel. Pretty soon I'm gonna be talking on the phone, setting up a job interview, and I'm just gonna start drooling and babbling like a crazy-person!"
Get me a sippy-cup, cause cap-n-hood, here I come!!

Sooo...Houston, We've Got a Problem.

When your farmhouse was built in the 18-somethings, people back then planned ahead. They knew that things would leak, and that in the spring, floods might just happen. Just like the running of maple sap, every single spring. They planned ahead, and made ways for water to get out once it got in (aka dirt floors). Then came modern fasinations like electricity and oil heat, and then things went a little awry. Here in Maine, for those of you who don't live nearby or listen to the news, we've had a heck of a noreaster and more than a bit of flooding.

Sidenote...We up on the hills are lucky, as what comes in will end up going out. Folks on the coast got blasted with spring-high tides, easterly wind, and 25 foot seas. These pics are just a bit south of Portland. The bird that looks an awful lot like a bald eagle can't be a bald eagle as no eagle would be quite this dumb. But it sure looks like one!
This poor house? There are more than several that are in similar states of washed-away-ness. Entire seawalls washed out to sea. Boats sunk, roads are gone. And this is Maine, where they generally try to do a decent job of hurricane-proofing to start with. It must have been REALLY bad on the coast.
Inland a bit more, we got this...('xcuese the pj's, I just woke up)
This is at @10am, and the water was around 6 inches or so...a little higher than we've had since Mr. VT and I moved in.
By 12:30, we were to here...(to compare, look at that wierd blue pump-thing)
And it kept going. We didn't have power (no surprise) and by the time our best-housemate-in-the-world was able to wrangle a generator from Home Depot and we set it up (thank god for the quick guide that came with it), the shallows that you see in the pictures were at 9.75 inches, and the deep end around the corner was up to 11.75 inches.
Unbelievable, we didn't loose anything! The furnace seems to be okay, we didn't have anything stored down there other than the wine and beer-making supplies, lots of bottles, and our beer/wine collection, the latter I saved about 1/4 an inch from the floodwater breaching the corks!! We got really lucky.
So we had a storm party, cranked up the wood stove, plugged into the generator, called friends, and ate woodstove slow-roasted lamb and veggies, homemade bread I baked up the day before, and we all stayed up way too late drinking and laughing about how crazy this storm was.
We are now warm, dry, three days behind on schoolwork (we couldn't quite justify plugging in the laptops or internet router to the generator), and VERY ready for summer.

Spring Changes...

My "yeay, I passed my test" treat, which after the healing time, will switch to this:

My new piercing is called a helix coil, or a helix corkscrew, and I love it...I can't wait to switch to the new jewelery. And no, the first hole didn't hurt, the second one hurt a little, and the third hurt more than any of my other holes (including my old eyebrow), probabally cause of the accumulated trauma to the area. I don't think I could have done a fourth even if I wanted to (which I don't).

Happy happy for me!

Flash my Stash

With it all laid out, I have to say that I am impressed with how much of my yarn is stuff that I really like! And how much is wool! And I forgot how much of it I can't wait to knit with! I actually forgot I had some of it, and I don't have soooo much that that is likely to happen. Clickie on the pics for really big close-ups.