Rain, Rain, please go away!

Well, it's another day of rain, flooding, tornado sirens, and 45 mile an hour wind gusts. This evening, I spent a bit of time in the basement listening to the tornado sirens going off. Not my idea of a good time. We had lovely flash floods and Robert and I watched the floodplain behind our house literally fill up within an hour. Today, we got lucky - the worst of one storm hit just a few miles south and east of us where there were "rotations" in the clouds. So close, but thankfully so far away. Another storm hit going from Richland Center to the Wisconsin Dells area - which is one of the hardest hit areas. In the Lake Delton/Wisconsin Dells area, the rivers are flooded over and houses were even washed away. I feel so terrible for the families affected. Our "area" has just been devastated by all of this rain. I can't even tell you how many roads are closed due to the flooding. It's absolutely unbelievable! Towns have been told to evacuate, the Red Cross is in full-swing with shelters. So sad.

But, thankfully, we are both safe and our basement is still DRY! Well, time to let the thunder and lightning lull me to sleep.

Well the cut-off date is official now

The CCAA has finished the placement of children for the families whose adoption application documents were registered with dates of January 13 - 20, 2006. It was an 8-day referral batch.

I feel like we're going to be parents

Our Robin, who we've decided to name Dori (she's a little dingy for having picked our back deck as a place to nest). She has now laid 3 little blue eggs and we're now awaiting the arrival of her little babies. Today, she even allowed me to sit outside with her on our patio set. I was totally shocked and elated at the same time.


If anyone has any naming ideas for the 3 future babies. I'm open to suggestions. Just leave them in the comment box.

Most Robins lay any where from 3 to 4 eggs at a time. Dori laid eggs number 1 and 2 yesterday and egg number 3 today. The eggs will hatch in 12 to 14 days, and then she'll be a mama bird. How sweet!


If you'd like to read more information about the American Robin, here's a great website for you. http://www.learner.org/jnorth/search/RobinNotes2.html

Mondays are movie nites!

Every Monday at the Memorial Union on campus they play a different movie for free on the terrace (or in the Rathskeller if it's raining). Tonight was a beautiful evening out (finally!). Robert and I bought some gyros from the Parthenon (Greek dive restaurant downtown where we used to eat as students) and took them to go to eat on the terrace. We split a pitcher of our favorite beer - Spaten Optimator - and watched the sunset and at 9:00, the movie began. Tonite's movie was "South Park". We watched about the first 45 minutes and then it was time to go home to get ready for bed. A lovely date night. The joys of summertime in Madison! :-)

For those of you unfamiliar with Madison's lovely terrace at the Memorial Union, here's a photo. The movie screen is placed right in front of the band shelter you see in this photo.

Matches have arrived for this month

Matches have been received today, but no news yet as to what the cut-off is going to be. I will keep you posted. It's looking like it will be somewhere between January 20 - 22, 2006. Which will translate into an 8 to 10 day referral month. It may be a "decent" number of days, but number of babies referred this month went down. Well, I guess I need to think of it as 8-10 less days to go. I try to keep optimistic, but it isn't easy!

Cool Lightning Storm

This evening and still going on we've had flash flooding and really cool lightning storms (alerts expire at 12:30 a.m.). Some of the lightning literally went totally across the sky. Amazing to watch! The streets are REALLY bad. I went out this evening and some of the roads in town are closed due to flooding. We found this out first-hand. Even our street right in front of our house was flooded over the curbs and onto our front lawn earlier in the day. It was pretty scary. But we are all safe and that's all that matters. Robert got this great video of one of the lightning storms. Enjoy!



... and yes, our basement is DRY!! Can't say that about the flood plain behind our house. I think it's the worst we've ever seen it in the 5.5 years we've lived here.

The weather outside is frightful...

Well, the weather may be frightful, but it certainly didn't stop our feathery friends from stopping by for a visit. We've had severe weather for the past 2 days with hail (thankfully we didn't get it at our house, but just a few miles away they did) and flash flooding. It's not been fun. North of us, they were expecting even possible tornadoes. Didn't hear of any officially, but there was a report of a roof removed due to high winds.

Our Robin has been making her visits to her nest and is getting more used to us being around and she doesn't seem to mind as much that we're around. We're trying to keep our distance to not disturb her too much, but I do need to get to our herbs on the deck.

I've lumped 2 video clips together to get a sense of where she is in relation to us. Why she chose our deck and a potted plant of all things to build her nest in, I have no idea. She seemed quite content to nest in the pouring rain. You will also see the huge amount of flooding that we had in our flood plain. The birds have been feasting all morning long...

A New Home...

... for a Robin, that is... I was looking out our kitchen window this morning and what did I see - a Robin who was nesting in one of our flower pots that we have on our back deck. By the time I got the camera and then opened the door to take his/her picture, the Robin had gotten too scared and flew away. Here is the Robin's new home.


I guess they love our deck. Since we all know that our cat isn't such a big threat to them, they feel quite at home perching and nesting on our deck... It just cracked me up!!

OK, we're both getting OLD!!

Our weekend all started out great. We had some great weather and got a bit ambitious in deciding to clean out our garage. It hadn't been done since we moved in 5.5 years ago. It was about time we did it! It took us about 5 to 6 hours, but now it looks great and mostly organized - bought a few garage tech stuff to hold our shovels, ladders, etc that still need to go up (we have one up already, but 2 more to go) but it is mostly done. But, in the process, Robert got a hernia. Poor thing! He has a scheduled appointment with the surgeon this week to discuss his options (surgery most likely). He's been in a bit of pain from it. He needs to get the surgery done soon so he has plenty of time to recover before we go to Yellowstone at the end of August.

So now, the running total is:
Robert: hernia - surgery to come
Sue: rotator cuff injury - physical therapy to come

We are truly starting to feel our ages! YUCK!!

Charity's Woodstock Bread

Thanks to a lively discussion on home-made breads using our bread machines with my CCAI chat group, I got this wonderful recipe from Charity for making her famous Woodstock Bread. It over-rose a bit when I made it, so I'll have to adjust the recipe slightly (she has a fancier bread machine than I do with more controls to adjust). It's a whole wheat bread with lots of seeds in it. I can't wait to take a bite out of it this evening! YUM!! If only there was smell-o-vision with this blog...