HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

At 8:11, weighing in at 8lbs11oz it's Eleanor Ruby! Yes, it's hard to believe but one year ago this morning our beautiful daughter was born. What's more cliche than saying how time flies but what could be more true? I can't believe a year has passed, she's walking (nearly running now) all over the place and nearly talking. We're planning a parents party with her tomorrow and the BIG shindig next weekend!

Goodbye George

Not to be a downer on the blog but George Carlin died on the 22nd. What a awesome comedian and human being. He's my all-time favorite and his death has made me pretty sad. Here's an NY Times article about it: LINK.



Goodbye George.

weekend in durham

last weekend, we traveled to durham, north carolina to visit our friends ernie, samantha and sofia. it's hard to believe that i've known samantha for almost ten years already. we started grad school together in the fall of 1998. way back when, ernie and samantha's relationship was relatively new and i wouldn't even meet rob for another three years, a few months after s & e's wedding. a lot of wonderful things have happened over the past decade--we've both labored over intellectual babies (our dissertations) and labored with real babies (with another little girl on the way for samantha and ernie).
after some pesky travel delays, we finally arrived in NC on friday night...
...and on saturday morning, sofia was ready for a busy day, complete with the new pi t-shirt we brought for her. note the sun hat, water bottle, and totebag with baby toys for eleanor. she's definitely gearing up for big sister-hood!
we ate lunch at a great spot called elmo's in carrboro. samantha described it by saying "it's like the hamburg inn, but healthier." on our way back to durham, we stopped for bargain yarn shopping and some gourmet popsicles at locopops. mine was mojito flavored, rob had creamy lime and samantha's was pear almond. i'm jealous that there are no locopops locations in iowa city, but if there were, i'd have to eat them everyday, so maybe it's better that you can only get them halfway across the country.

she isn't even four yet, and sofia already knows how to rock a tiara and dangly earrings when she goes out for a pizza dinner. love it.

on sunday morning we went to duke gardens and got to drive around campus a bit, as well. the gardens are gorgeous and the duck pond was definitely a highlight.

here are the girls with their dads near the end of our stroll through the flowers.
that afternoon, samantha made a delicious blueberry peach buckle ("it's in the cobbler/buckle/ slump/grunt family of desserts") with some help from sofia.



the little ones had some fun on the swingset. sofia did a good job pushing, but note my nervous mom comment. yikes!

we got a little silly on monday morning and decided to put sofia's little mermaid wig on eleanor. normally the wig is worn only by cuddles, a teddy bear, which as you can see, is wise.

our visit was over all too quickly and i promised that next time we would stay longer. though blog posts, e-mails and phonecalls are all well and good, nothing beats seeing old friends live and in person. i miss them already! thanks, you three (and a half) for a wonderful weekend...

new shoes

last week, eleanor went for a backyard and front sidewalk stroll in some old school leather baby shoes of mine.
she was there to greet her papa when he got home from work.
the next day, she got a special early birthday present from her grandma...
...baby keens! her first rubber-soled, no messing around, let's do some serious walking shoes.
here they are in action. apologies for the sideways video. at least those of you with laptops can rotate your monitors accordingly. sorry desktop folks.



coming soon: photos from our fun weekend with samantha, ernie and sofia in cackalacky!

Flood

Awesome things are happening in Iowa City. Awesome in a bad way. Thursday the 5th we (at the City of Iowa City) were given notice that Normandy Drive... an area of Iowa City also known as "mosquito flats" needed immediate work in terms of sandbagging to prepare for rising river levels and imminent flooding. This past winter in Iowa City was the second worst on record and this Spring has been nothing but constant rain for months. A bad combination. In addition, the areas North of us, particularly the Iowa River basin have been getting hit with even more precipitation than us down here. Having been a student here during the floods of 1993, I had a decent idea of what was in store (I thought.) My boss, Steve Miller, has been at the City since 1972 and had been right in the heart of the 1993 floods. He stood waist deep for days in the Iowa River sandbagging the old water plant to protect it from flooding and keep water to the City's residents. The old plant was over 100 years old and not very capable of withstanding a serious flood of that nature... but it managed to get by.

In 2008 we're in better shape to withstand something like this because a new Water Plant was put on line in 2002 (some of you may remember that I was the inspector for this project over its 3 years of construction) and it's far more state-of-the-art in terms of handling things like this. In addition, we have internet now (I guess it was very fledgling in nature in 1993) and much better radar, etc. to plan for things like this. So going into it on the 5th, we felt like things were going to be bad, but felt like maybe we had a decent grasp of the situation.

We started out immediately with a good number of volunteers, many from the Mennonite and LDS churches in the area were down on the first day and many subsequent days to assist with sandbagging - both making and placing them. My boss, Steve, ran the operation and eventually we split into two main groups with each of us coordinating one of them. There were many people in the lower areas very nervous right off the bat, and requests were made for various areas to be bagged, etc... We began in one of the lowest areas which was the house of a World War II veteran who came out that afternoon and spoke to our group to thank all of us. This was a very heartfelt and emotional moment for everyone there, but was only the beginning of many more moments like this.

Calls began to fly in and Steve's phone rang continuously all day long, and has been doing such for a week straight. He could barely get time to even coordinate any work in between all of the discussions. FEMA had a coordinator down there that assisted with things, our Streets department began hauling truckloads of sand and packages of bags, and the Red Cross and Salvation Armies began to drop off energy drinks, water, snacks and meals (Wonder Bread sandwiches have never tasted so good as they did here.) Eventually, by the end of the day, water was already beginning to back up the street intakes, and large pumps were delivered to the site to try and staunch much of the inflow and return it to the outside of the sandbag walls. By the end of the day perhaps 100 volunteers were going on various areas all around the street and in behind houses. It was managed chaos.

The next day brought more of the same as did the next few days. Beginning this past week I was reassigned to the Idyllwild subdivision which is on Foster Road just N of Taft Speedway and Mayflower. When I arrived we surveyed the area and discovered that water was about 4' from the edges of the S side of the area. We had no sand, or any other materials for that matter. To compound the issue, we had no volunteers there to help and also were on the N side of the floodwaters which meant a long trip to get over to the area for anyone traveling there. Over the next 4 days we proceeded to get things rolling with between 50-150 volunteers a day, lots of sand loads, rolls upon rolls of plastic sheeting, trips by the Salvation Army and City staff providing food and drinks, and a lot of elbow grease. I tried as well as I could to coordinate people, keep residents informed, instruct people on how to do this (as best as we knew how) and about 300 phone calls. It was just as busy as the area we'd come from. Assisting me the entire time was my co-worker and good friend Crystal Smith, to whom I will always be grateful as she kept me grounded and made a huge difference in all of the coordination. If she hadn't been there i'd never have been able to do it and things wouldn't have gone nearly as smoothly. Another coworker and friend, Dave Panos was able to get away from the office and help us about 50% of the time as well and his help was also a huge benefit.

On Thursday morning at about 2am I received a call from the EOC (emergency operation center) that was somewhat frantic saying that Idyllwild was flooding. I scrambled out of bed and got down there immediately to see what was going on... in a near panic. Things were bad when I got there, but not as bad as the phone call had made it sound. I called another inspector that I work with and began plugging intakes on the main street as best we could, wheeling pumps around and getting them started up, and trying to calm water levels on the access to the area to allow people time to get out. The plan had been to get all cars out later that day, but things were quickly adjusted and after daylight hit, we went door to door to inform people that things needed to happen more quickly. After getting this done, we got volunteers slowly due to heavy rains and lots of dangerous lightning. The entire day was a scramble to coordinate, patch walls, attempt to finish some other areas, pump down rising water and maintain a sense of calm for the people that live there. We were soaking wet and even our knee boots were full of water.

By lunch time, it was clear that the situation was deteriorating rapidly. Forecasts put the water 3' above the walls we'd worked on for 4 days and we'd later find that that would increase to around 5' above our walls. The amount of material and labor to get to that point would have been 200% of what we'd done already. Crystal and I began the process of going door to door and were assisted in this by Dave in what was to be the most difficult part of the entire week for me.

Standing in a person's doorway, many of whom you've come to know quite well over the past days, and tell them that they may very well lose their house proved incredibly difficult for me. Telling someone that they have hours to evacuate and that there is nothing else you can do for them is a difficult way to throw in the towel. I felt that many of these people were looking to us to be the answer to this crisis that many of them needed. It sort of felt like counselor/laborer/foreman. When I came to the house of an older couple who i'd spoken with earlier in the morning and had to break the news to them it was just too much for me. Their demeanor and attitude about the whole thing put me to shame. To be in a situation like that and maintain the sense of calm they had, to not be worried about things, and to not even require help getting out through the water and over the 5' sandbag wall just astounded me.

We finally pulled the plug on the job a couple of hours later when everyone was out and simply left everything we'd done for the last 4 days. I'm not sure what it was that I was feeling at that time. I was able to eat a meal at the Hamburg Inn which was a welcome change and go to bed early that night. The following day (yesterday) I was assigned to sandbag making at the City's transit facility which was one of the most welcome things i've done in awhile. To spend 8 hours with my friends making sandbags and doing mindless physical labor was a welcome respite.

Today, for the first time in a long time, I got to be at my house, spend time with Eleanor and Carrie and not think about things too much, although to say I didn't think about them at all would not be true. At lunch, we walked down and had some pizza with my co-workers, and then went to the parking ramp on Clinton Street behind the UI dorms to take some pictures and then walked over to the top of the Dubuque St. hill to take a few more.

The flood effort, and especially the cleanup are a LONG way from over... repercussions from this will resonate for months and years. But hopefully, based on the forecasts we're getting, the water is about to slowly die off and things might return to normal. Even now, though, I am reflecting on what has happened already and am astounded by the wide variety of human nature that was on display this past week. There were wonderful things like selfless people who gave of themselves nearly everything that they could have given for days on end, never asking anything in return... often times not even a drink. Most of these people weren't even residents of the area they were working in. As I stated earlier, there were many people who weren't able to help because of age or physical limitations that seemed to take everything that came their way with a grain of salt... something that is quite impressive when you consider that the last time anything like this happened, this area was probably only inhabited by Native Americans. There were people who helped me, day after day, never questioning me and giving me the things I needed and doing the things I requested. I'm not sure what gave them any sort of confidence in me when often times I felt like I didn't have much myself... but without their help... nothing would have been possible at all.


And there were bad things too, like selfishness, bickering, people who didn't help but simply sat and watched their neighbors work, and even some situations that degraded into physical confrontation.

I guess it's not surprising that during a natural disaster like this, the whole array of human nature will be on display... but that doesn't make it any less of an experience. Someone told me today that you see the best of people and the worst of people during times like these and that is most certainly true. But it is the best of people that helps you to keep going and push on through it.

Peace.This is the area where I was working about 3 days in. You can see Taft Speedway in the foreground and water already up to the edge of the housing units. If you look, you can see our white sandbag walls.

This is another shot from a different angle at about the same time. You can see how the streets were beginning to become impassable.

Pictures taken today of the area show our walls barely visible anymore and the homes surrounded by water. Water is expected to be 5' higher than this at the crest this coming Monday.

Another picture taken today from a different angle. Water has surrounded everything and has spilled onto Foster Road making the entire peninsula inaccessible.

The last picture that I have of Idyllwild from today... taken from directly overhead.

Some additional pictures I grabbed from the media of things people might find of interest:

The Coralville strip today. Walgreen's is in the lower left, Hardees in the lower right. The 1st Ave/Highway 6 intersection is in the center bottom.

This is the Dubuque Street/Foster Road intersection looking South. The area I worked in is just to the right (W) of this picture. Water will be into the intersection at it's crest. Mayflower is in the back of the picture.

This is the Riverside Drive/Highway 1 intersection looking West. In the lower center are Hill's Bank, Pleasant Valley Nursery, Los Portales and the Gas Station. You can see the old wastewater treatment plant just above them.

This is the Iowa River Power Company restaurant in Coralville and the pedestrian bridge project I worked on from 2003-2005. The water across is has no fall right now... it's level across it (it's the same on Burlington Street under the bridge.)

One of the "No Parking" signs Crystal had made for the Idyllwild project.

Current view of the spillway and dam.

Here is Taft Speedway just South of the Idyllwild area.

Lastly, here is the Shakespearean Theater in City Park where Carrie and I were married.

The few facts that I know as of now which people might find interesting. Obviously things are changing daily, but it looks like things might be settling down.

1993 (100 year flood)
Spillway hit 716.7... crest is 712.0
Inflows to the reservoir were somewhere around 33,000 cfs (basically gallons per second)
Outflows to the Iowa City/Coralville area were around 28,000 cfs.
Flooding covered Dubuque Street, got up next to the old water plant, closed Mayflower, and got some of Normandy Drive and the Coralville Strip.

2008 (500 year level +)
Spillway will be near 718
Inflows estimated around 50,000 cfs
Outflows estimated around 44,000-48,000 cfs.
Flooding covered Dubuque Street all the way to the stoplight, all of City Park, covered all of Mosquito flats, Rocky shore drive, most of the Coralville Strip and First Avenue.
Flooding covering Gilbert Street, near Pauls, the armory, the dog shelter, and multiple other areas... all bridges in town closed except 1/2 of Burlington Street bridge (so far.)
Flooding South of town took out the Baculis and Thatcher trailer parks, South Riverside Drive, South Gilbert, Stevens Drive, Commercial Drive and more.

Here are more pictures that I uploaded today (6/15):

City Park

Music building and Clapp across the river

Looking W over the old water treatment plant

Looking West across the river just N of the laser center

Park Road/Dubuque intersection

Taft Speedway

Parkview Church on Dubuque

Looking S down Dubuque St.

Sandbagging at Idyllwild

Street flooding at Idyllwild

First house we sandbagged on Normandy Drive (WWII vet)

River overflowing near Hill's Bank

Protection at the Java House warehouse

Dubuque St flooding

arts fest!

this weekend brought pete, betsy, henry and clara to town for the iowa arts fest (you can see their post here). it also brought some crazy heat and humidity on saturday. we managed to get in a good hour of...

...meat on a stick...
...picnicking (who knew that has a "k" in it?) under a tree on the pentacrest...
...watching the leaves and being an adorable 5-month-old (clara only) before we had all we could stand and headed back home for some indoor activities, including...
...wooden bird house painting...
...and front porch swinging.

on sunday, we had a breakfast whip-up (as rob would call it) with eggs and homemade bagels from up the street. the decker siblings wore their commemorative t-shirts. i tried to get a photo where neither rob nor betsy were eating (special thanks to betsy for not posting the unbearably horrendous photo of me eating pizza at pagliai's) or making crazy eyes...

...that's better!

a few hours later, rob went in for a full day/evening of work helping with the flood effort. he and his co-workers have mostly been pulled off their projects to help coordinate volunteers and relief efforts. the iowa river has gotten dangerously high over the past week and water levels continue to rise. he estimates that there are over a million sandbags in place at the moment. unfortunately, a crazy winter of ice and snow storms has given way to a spring and summer of heavy rains, tornadoes and flooding. maybe he'll post some photos here as he did with the 2006 tornado. keep an eye out...

i'm walkin' here!

our little girl is definitely on the move.

it's hard to keep her in one spot for long. she has lots of important things to do: flip through some books, pick up some toys and then put them down, monitor all first-floor happenings, shake a spoon so that it looks like a teeny tiny UFO when photographed, etc.

"now really, mama..."

"...i just don't have time for photographs right now."

here's some plain and simple video of E demonstrating her walking skills. every day she gets more confident and now she can easily make it across a room before dropping on her bottom or pitching forward onto her arms.


with all of this new activity, she's been napping and night-sleeping like a champ (knock wood). tonight when i left her room, she was wide-eyed and smiling. since she started being able to stand up in her crib a few months ago, this bedtime expression of glee has meant that she's going to flip over and pull herself up at any second to goof around till you lay her down again. now that she's on walk-about, she's out like a light in a few minutes. amazing!