Wet Weather Karma

We've had unseasonably dry weather lately, which has led to wildfires, watering restrictions, insanely high pollen counts for allergy sufferers (me) and just all around crunchy grass and plants. Do you know what happens if you complain about this? Karma comes and kicks your butt and you get days and days of heavy rain, which leads to street-level flooding and overflowing drainage ditches.

And…it leads to me and Farmer B spending some quality time together from midnight to 1 a.m. last night (or should I say this morning?) in the back yard. Such a sweet time to spend with your spouse outside in the pitch dark and the unrelenting pouring rain…there's nothing like pulling wellies and a raincoat over your pajamas and wading out into your yard in the middle of the night to make you feel special.

Our first concern was the chickens. Although their coop has a nice shingled roof, the main roosting area for them is walled in by hardware cloth. It had been raining heavy and sideways all night and I just knew the girls were soaked to the bone. I was right. Their coop was soaked. Their food was wet. The hay was floating around and the hens had water pouring off their backs. There is a covered area where the nest boxes are, but they don't like going in there yet. We brought them in to the patio in the chick brooder box to dry out under the heat lamp. They're a little big for the brooder box, but I could tell they were happy to dry out for the first time in days.


Then we noticed that the pool had overflowed. It was seeping over the edges and lapping on the patio. This means that all the gross muddy yard goo can flow straight into the pool. So Farmer B hooked up a hose at about 12:30 a.m. to begin draining the pool water down to a safer level.

And finally Farmer B whipped out one of his favorite hurricane supplies: Downspout extenders. Do you know about these? They saved our house last hurricane season. They open up like a big accordion and link together. You make as long of a snake as you want by attaching them together then attach one end to your downspout from your gutters and then point the other end as far away from the house as possible. This prevents the gush of water from the downspout from making huge puddles next to the foundation of your house, causing house flooding. We know this because we learned about these extenders after our house started flooding in Tropical Storm Faye last year.



So I'm tired today. And I have a lot of clean-up to do. And an ark to build. But at least my allergies are better.