Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and miraculously I sustained no serious damage. In fact, storms of much lesser magnitude have been more destructive for me than this one. Last year’s Halloween snowstorm left me without power for three days. Now that I see what Sandy has wrought, I have stopped complaining about that outage. Parts of my municipality are still without power, and some won’t have it restored until the weekend. And this is hardly as serious as the problems many in New York City and New Jersey are facing. I’m truly grateful that I was spared.
A few large tree limbs fell around my garden, lots of leaves came off the trees (so much for this year’s fall foliage), and shingles blew in from my neighbor’s roof. But we’re still eating garden-fresh carrots, and there is a bit of spinach.
Nature does appear to be telling me that it is folly to grow Brussels sprouts (lower right). After battling cabbage loopers last year, and aphids for most of this growing season, Sandy just blew them over. There’s a chance I’ll scrounge up a few sprouts eventually, but next year I’ll be planting fall lettuce and kale.
We did face some minor inconveniences. Finding gasoline this weekend was an exercise in futility (supplies were restored yesterday). I had some issues with my phone and Internet, possibly from the power glitches. A Verizon tech saved the day by replacing my router.
I’m wary of the nor’easter that is headed our way tomorrow. There are some iffy limbs on some of the trees, and the prediction is for gusts of over 50 miles per hour with up to 5 inches of snow. So the “big one” for me might just be on the horizon.
Luckily, I took a break from Mara to knit a scarf out of beautiful Zen Garden yarn (Serenity DK; 90% merino, 10% cashmere) for a gift. Zen Garden, whose website has tantalized me for a long time, had a booth at Stitches East. Their yarns are even more spectacular in person than with my nose pressed to the monitor screen. (Unfortunately, I had to take this shot indoors, at night.)
The simple basketweave stitch is something I can manage by lantern light. We’ve got all our storm gear handy from the hurricane, and I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.
