“flooding devastates vermont”

August 29th, 2011

How odd to read that headline. I’m only just starting to grasp the extent of the storm damage here, after watching the news and reading the Times online…which I couldn’t do for the last 30 hours because the power was out.

I was going about my business yesterday morning, thinking things weren’t going to be too bad. It was windy and rainy, but no more than it often is. The electricity went out around noon, but that happens all the time too, here in my mountain redoubt. We got out the candles and the headlamps. Here I am drawing last night.

Hol and I had a crank radio that we listened to from time to time and we heard people calling in with reports of flooding and bridges washing out. But somehow, without the visuals, it didn’t sink in fully. Still no power this morning. I checked Twitter as I was charging my phone in my car, and started seeing all these stunning photographs of Richmond, the town near me. The ramp to the interstate was underwater. The river was running through the town.

Hol and I got in the car and drove down the hill to see what was happening. At the bottom, here’s what we found.

We watched a couple cars plow through the water–it was about two feet deep. We turned around and went home. When the power hadn’t come on by 3pm, we decided to make our way into Burlington to recharge our devices. We had to go a long, roundabout way because of the flooding.

On our way back home, we crossed the Winooski River bridge which was lined with people watching the surging floodwaters. All the rain from the hundreds and hundreds of brooks and streams all across the state was churning through the mouth of this river into Lake Champlain.

It was much worse in the southern part of the state than up here in the north. I’m a little concerned about our friend NLC, who last checked in here at 2:30 am on Sunday. I hope it’s just a power outage and that he will report in soon.

excellent fun home parody

August 19th, 2011

I keep meaning to post a link to this funny sci-fi takeoff on Fun Home, Space Home. One of the artists, Laurel Leake, alerted me to it last month. It’s an episode of Wilson Parker’s webcomic, Unwinder’s Tall Comics. As Laurel puts it, “We shamelessly gave your memoir’s authorship to the son of a recurring character, Gary P. Rastov, a C-grade sci-fi novelist from the 70s who ground out volume upon volume of stories that managed to turn impossibly vast interstellar conflicts into painfully mundane lists of statistics.”

It’s pretty funny. I got confused though about all the layers of fiction and reality. Is Gary P. Rastov a real person or a fictional one? I can’t keep track of much of anything lately except the pen nib moving before my eyes.

Jerome, thanks for the link to this in your comment on the last post—that nudged me to finally put this up.

working

August 13th, 2011

Ever since my memoir about my dad, Fun Home, was published in May of 2006, I’ve been working on another graphic memoir–this one about my mother. Why is it taking so long? You can find a partial explanation in this little video clip.

But the good thing is, after many years of writing and fretting and throwing things out and starting over, I’m finally, actually drawing. (this movie was actually shot in April, which is why the news in the background is talking about the government crackdown in Syria.)