On Golden Pond

I have always envied folks who owned waterfront property.  How peaceful, serene and beautiful!

Just think how wonderful it must be to be able to go out of your home, stroll across your lawn, go to your dock and take a restful float trip on a lake, watching the sun set on another day. 

Being able to paddle by your neighbor's houses and share a friendly wave with those on shore...oh, how nice!

 
 But I should be careful what I wish for, right???   

Because I got it.   

Just when I thought it was safe to 'debark from the Ark' this crazy, monsoon-summer, along comes the cheery weatherman with a forecast for a 'chance' of rain for Friday.  Probably no more than a quarter of an inch, with the exception, of course, of a bit higher rainfall potential during thunderstorms.  Oh, ok.

I didn't feel too great Friday morning, mostly due to the incessant itching with whatever bug/plant/rash-infested things I got into, so I made a doctor's appointment for 1PM.  I don't make doctor appointments lightly, so that gives you some idea how Itchy & Scratchy and miserable I was feeling.  The humidity had also returned with a vengeance too, with dewpoints around 73 degrees.  Yuck.

So, I didn't do a thing outside, and scratched my way to the doctor, who didn't know what to make of the interesting specimen (me) seated on the table.  She took a look at the rashes and shrugged, it wasn't poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac, it wasn't this, it wasn't that......who knows what it was?  So, with a prescription for an anti-itch cream and a steroid, I was on my way home.  (I do feel a bit better today, thank you Doctor!)

I came home around 2:30PM and noticed it was thundering to our south again.  I just plopped down in the living room chair and started looking through other people's blogs and was enjoying myself even though it was a Friday afternoon and I could have been cleaning house or something more productive.  But it's so much more fun to look at other people's gardens. 

I was also keeping a close eye on the radar online too, and thought the two little orange blobs showing up on the screen didn't look too menacing; so I went back to Blogland.  Around 4PM, the thunder was getting much louder, so I switched back over to the radar page and WOW, the two orange blobs had now joined forces and become a Huge Red Blob with a hint of purple tossed in for good measure.  (Any meteorologists reading this will be thrilled with my radar interpretations, I'm sure!)   

Suddenly, the storm was upon us with high winds and torrents of rain.  The power went out (which really bugged me, since I was still looking at other people's gardens online and my battery on the laptop doesn't last very long) and then we lost our wireless connection so I had to drag myself away from the computer and pay attention to the scene outside.  It was too late to grab any of the potted plants, but they aren't looking too good anyway so instead of taking a chance of getting hit by lightning, I decided they'd have to fend for themselves.

After about 20 minutes of intense thunderstorming (is that a word?)  we emerged from our home unscathed and surveyed the results; we only had a few limbs out of the willow tree but nothing else was wrong.   We were very lucky, for less than a half mile from us our neighbors had trees broken off at their bases, lawn furniture broken and flipped around and a few shingles lifted.  Luckily no one had major structural damage.  

But the water!  The picture below was less than 24 hours old:

Add another almost 3 1/2 inches of rain:

And you get:

From the Kayak Cam----there I am, waving to Joel from the Pachyberm

I mowed the lawn on Thursday night because I was afraid we'd get some rain, good thing, huh?

Our 36" culvert at capacity, it eventually went underwater

Don't jump in, Teddy Dog!

Our second culvert, almost ready to run over the lane

Hang on, Tufa Walls!

We thought the worst was over, but gee whiz, good golly, here comes another storm!

 Thankfully, the second storm only gave us another half-inch of rain because we couldn't have handled any more than that.  So, when Mother Nature gives you a flood, you might as well enjoy it, right?  Above, Joel is trying to get in some surfing in the whitewater coming out of the culvert.

Paddling downstream, er, I mean down our ditch

 Aw, a rainbow....

Kayaking up to the rocks I put in the field for our new project the night before, I guess we're going to have to wait for things to dry up a bit before I can get a tractor in here, ya think

There I was, the night before, hauling up rock for the new wall; I wonder if the kayak could handle some stones?

I told Joel to do some weeding as long as he was in the area

He wasn't in the mood

From the Kayak Cam: Joel's view

The cornfield, er, swamp

This is a much bigger rock than it looks

Here we are, this morning...amazing how the water recedes

So, all in all, we were lucky to have no more damage than some floating mulch.  Oh, by the way, pine needles don't float very well which is nice.  I guess I will be getting to that housework today, since it's a 'bit' wet outside.  Today is my mother's 90th birthday, too...I'm off to bake a cake!

Just a few more parting shots of our temporary waterfront property last night:

Karen