3 posts tagged “iowa”

It's just been unbelievable what has been happening here in eastern Iowa.  Cedar Rapids, the 2nd largest city in Iowa, is 20% underwater. 25,000 people have had to be evacuated. North of there, the city of Waterloo sustained significant damage. Downriver, the Iowa City/Coralville area is just now starting to flood and the river is not even supposed to crest there until Tuesday or so. The University of Iowa campus is already partly underwater, despite valiant efforts to protect some of the historic buildings with sandbags.  Parts of Des Moines, the capitol city, are now being evacuated as well. Numerous small towns have been flooded out as well. ALL NINE of Iowa's interior rivers are above record flood-levels.

I-80, the major interstate going through Iowa, has been closed east of Iowa City. I-380, a major road connecting northeastern Iowa with central Iowa, has also been closed, just south of Cedar Rapids. The traffic is being routed through Dubuque (where I live), which is extraordinary considering that Dubuque is about an hour and twenty minutes' drive north of I-80. That's one hell of a detour. But they have to do it, because the rivers are all flooded and most of the bridges are closed.

To make matters worse, a couple of evenings ago, a tornado touched down in western Iowa in the middle of a Boy Scout camp, killing four boys and wounding 48 others. These kids were only 13-14 years old. It's heartbreaking, although the stories coming out about how the other Boy Scouts took charge of things and started doing first-aid on the wounded and cutting through fallen trees to open the road to the isolated camp are very inspirational. People who bitch about bad kids today certainly haven't met these boys.

We're still okay, and so is Bob's family, who lives in the Des Moines area. One of his brothers has a house only blocks away from the evacuation area, but he, himself, is off doing Army service. The rest of Bob's family lives well away from the rivers there. Dubuque has seen a couple of landslides and some roads have been closed due to flooding in the northern part of the county, but on the whole, the most people have to complain about around here are perpetually wet basements. The Mississippi has flooded a bit, but it looks like the cities and town downstream are going to have more to worry about than we will. The biggest inconvenience is the traffic being re-routed from I-80, much of it involving huge trucks, since I-80 is one of the major roads that go through the center of America. The roads in Dubuque just aren't set up to handle that much traffic.

Iowa is normally such a dull place, but this year we've had a record-breaking snowfalls, killer tornadoes and now record-breaking floods. WTF? I'm not sure how much the national media is covering the story, because we've had non-stop flood coverage on the network channels for the past few days, but this is a huge, historic disaster. We've familiar with the areas affected, and it just hurts to see the damage the floods have caused.

A song for the moment: Iowa by Dar Williams

Okay, this is an experiment with cross-posting my Vox blog to my LJ, so any LJ readers, please let me know if this works okay for you.

So for Thanksgiving, we did what we usually do and eschewed wanktastic family gatherings for a simple meal-for-two at the Potter's Mill, a scenic Bed and Breakfast down in Bellevue, a little ways south of here.

Here's the view as we head towards downtown Dubuque (at least on the highway--it's actually faster to walk down our street to get there).

We pass Murphy's Bluff.  This picture does it no justice--it looms over the grocery store (unseen on the left side) like some kind of monstrous beast. 

To get to Bellevue, we take Hwy 52 (the River Road).  This was once the main route linking Dubuque to the outside world.  Now it's a windy old country road.  Very scenic, though.

Of course we're in Iowa, so there are a lot of these around. ;-D

And these, too.  There's a strange kind of beauty to the cornfields in winter.

And we arrive at the not-so-thriving metropolis of Bellevue (pop. 2,350).  Lovely spot, floods occasionally.  It also got hit by a big tornado last spring, but they've cleaned up the mess quite nicely.

At last!  We reach the Mill!

Not supposed to take pictures inside, but here's the sign.

And the original millstone that went with the building.

It's hard to convey the real size of this place.  It's huge, especially for a wooden building.

On the way back, we passed through the City of St. Donatus (pop 140).  Every municipality in Iowa is called a "city" regardless of its size.  St. Donatus Church is famous for its outdoor Way of the Cross, where every Easter, thousands of pilgrims converge to make their way up the hillside.

Next, it was back to Dubuque for the Festival of Trees, a fundraiser for Mercy Hospital's Children's Fund.

This is pretty much what it looked like inside, but we took some pictures of our favorite trees.

"But we've got the biggest Balls Of Them All!!"  was what was running through my mind when I saw this one.

Very Glittery.  Would look nice in our house, but our Xmas trees tend to be pretty pedestrian.

And the highlight of the Festival, the Harry Potter Tree.  Notice Fawkes in the lower right-hand corner.

And the other side of the HP tree.  I don't see much Slytherin representation, however.  :-P 

What's better that hot chocolate during those cold winter evenings?  With whip cream and marshmellows on top!

This tree was downright fugly, but it made me laugh.

Picture doesn't do this tree justice (forgive me, I'm a bad photographer).  It was quite charming.

And of course, the tree we all remember.  You know the one with the tinsel that would choke the pets, the big bulbs that got so hot they'd set the tree on fire, and the glass ornaments that would shatter at every given opportunity?  Oh, those good old days!

I had a hard time getting a good picture of this one, but it was one of the most interesting "trees" there.

This is the Five Flags Theatre, which sits directly across from the hotel where the Festival of Trees was.  I love this building!  Usually, I don't get over to this part of downtown so I thought I'd get a picture of it.

All in all, we had a fun time, and the food was delicious.  Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was a good one!

Yes, my husband and I both voted yesterday.  Our precinct didn't have the fancy new machines that everyone has been bitching about, nor was there much of a wait.  We had the same machines as always and it took the same amount of time.  I'm wondering if Iowa got new machines, or if they were just put in the bigger urban areas?

Yay, almost all the people we voted for won, except Denise O'Brien for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture.  I think she may have been just a tad too liberal for the folks here. Plus, I think the guy running against her actually was a working farmer. 

Races here were close, but the democrats dominated.  Before, Iowa had 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat in the House of Representative, but now it's 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans.  (Our senators are split: 1 Republican, 1 Democrat, so they always end up cancelling each other out.  Neither one of them were up this year, though.)  So we've gone "blue". 

The new governor is also a democrat, but the old one was a democrat, too, so nothing new there. There are noises he (the old gov) will make a run for the presidency in 2008.  Not sure yet.  Watch for him.  His name is Tom Vilsack.  He's good, but not very charismatic.  He does have a dramatic history, though.  His political life started when some crazy guy ran into a town council meeting in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa (Vilsack's hometown) and shot a few people, including the mayor.  Afterwards, the former mayor's father and other townspeople encouraged Vilsack to run for Mayor.  He won, and went forward from there.

The new governor, Chet Culver, has been Iowa Secretary of State for several years.  He knows his stuff, so I think he'll work out well.  The democrats also made progress in the Iowa Legislature--perhaps a majority, but I'm not sure on that yet.

Local political offices were also dominated by the dems, but that's not unusual.  Dubuque is a democrat stronghold and has been for many years.  People here are conservative, but they're also very strongly pro-union, even after most of the unionized jobs have left the area for foreign climates.  The voters did vote down a small property tax increase to assist the Dubuque County Extension (that runs 4H, and a number of other educational programs on a teeny-tiny budget).  That's sad, because it only worked out to @$3.00/yr on a $150,000 house.  People spend more on coffee than on that.  I guess the public wasn't educated enough about the measure.  It's sad.

A lot of Iowans did come out to vote.  The weather was good, but I think the main reason was that people were pissed off about Iraq, and that they felt betrayed by our current administration.  A lot of Iowans join the military, and at one point, our state had the highest number of fatalities in the war (but that was last spring, not sure what the numbers say now).  Also, Iowa has lost a lot of good jobs because corporations are shipping them to sweatshops overseas.  Certainly, our precinct here in Dubuque was hopping.  Very busy.  The volunteer ladies who work the polls were delighted.  It was all very exciting.

So, let's hope some change starts occuring!