How to Get Home?

I spent last week in Windom, MN. It rained/iced/snowed the day before I went up. There was a solid two feet of snow on the ground when I got there. Later in the week, it warmed up and rained a couple of inches, which melted all the snow.

Thursday night, things started getting bad in the upper midwest. The western part of Nebraska was pounded by a blizzard, and the east got a ton of rain. If a road wasn't snowed over, it was washed away. I-29 and I-680 were closed by Omaha. All but two bridges across the Missouri were closed. Same for the Platte. A dam up by O'Niel broke, bridges were washed away, and levees around several towns broke. This is going to take a while to fix.

The drive home was pretty. In NW Iowa, the flood waters were calm and blue in the fields. By the time the water got to the Missouri, it was churning and black.

Southbound (the road I'm on) highway 60 across Iowa was open. Northbound (the submerged road to the left) was not. I had to take some backroads to sneak past the flooding in NE - all the while the radio was awash with fresh reports of road closures and evacuations. 

We are safe, sound, and high & dry in Lincoln.

Amp Repair and the Couch Guitar

While shopping for speakers for GP for his gig, I ran across a cool guitar that called out my name. It's a smaller-bodied acoustic with cat inlays. When we got back, I scrounged up whatever unused gear I could find and traded in the old cheapo acoustic for the one with the cats. The new guitar has found a home in the living room where it has become the couch guitar.

One of the pieces of gear I traded was an old 1974 Peavey bass amp that I had repaired. As soon as I lost it, a friend at work asked me to look at his 1974 Peavey guitar amp. It's got power tubes that run at 500 volts DC. Yikes!!! It took a day to clean it up and resolder all the components and now it sounds pretty sweet.

With all the snow gone, it's time to sit & strum on the deck.

Tolerance

When it's cold out, the cats tolerate the dog. Sort of.

Snowy Day

We ended up getting around 9" of snow. It was so nice to get it on the weekend rather than during the work week. Although everyone had their driveways cleared off down to bare pavement within a few hours, the City of Lincoln took an entire week. The belief in Nebraska is that salt doesn't work if it's below 20 °F. Even the major streets in town were solid ice for three days.

S loves the snow & cold!