Yikes!

Back when I lived in California, and Spain, and Germany, I used to read books where characters stood around, talking about the weather. I thought this was exceedingly odd behavior, but now that I live in the Midwest, I understand completely.

Now, it's a regular staple of conversation: "Well, the weather radio said we were under a severe thunderstorm watch, but it sure doesn't look like it now, does it?" "Yeah, I wish the storm would show up and cool us off..."

Beware of what you wish for.

The storm blew in as we were sitting down to supper, and it blew in hard. The sky got darker and darker, and then the winds picked up dramatically. I heard a swish and a thump among the sounds of trees roaring in the wind.

Fiona was very concerned that all manner of things would blow away, including the decorative wind sock (with good reason; I fished it out of the mulberry tree...) to her bicycle (which I thought much less likely, but I humored her anyway.) When I was taking her bike around to the shed, I saw this:

Er, yeah. That's a good chunk of our northeast tree, broken off from about 30 feet up, and mashed right through my neighbor's porch. Amazingly, no one was hurt (various people had gotten inside just 30 seconds earlier) and the branch missed the main part of the house. I'd have trouble getting my arms around that branch.

Chris and Ryan plotting on how to make the front door usable again.

Well, at least the roots held...

Down the block, there were more limbs, and even an entire tree down. This one split about 25 feet up — that was not a small tree.

No one was hurt, that we know about... and we've got plenty to talk about now.

Row, row, row your boat...

...gently down the street!

It's been a bit wet around here. A few big rains and a lot of melted snow pushed the water level up — way up — to the highest level anyone has seen around here, a good three inches higher then the flood of '81, and much more spectacular than what we had last January.

High enough, in fact, to go paddling around the neighborhood in a canoe.

Alas, I didn't know any gondolier's songs. That didn't stop me from singing, though...

A romantic ride through Venice...

I could commute to work like this. I really could.

I just like this shot.

My neighbor, Chris, taking a lap around the block.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games and photo ops; there were several tense days of pumping water as fast as we could as it rose ever and ever higher. I even went out and got new, larger hoses for my pump (which I've nicknamed "the candle" — as in, "Better to light one small candle than curse the darkness") and watching the green on the radar map stretch from here to California, knowing it was all coming our way.

We didn't suffer any damage other than water getting into the floor of the shed. The carpet's no great loss, but it'll take work to pull it out.

The rest of the neighborhood didn't all fare as well as us. Several houses on our street have basements, believe it or not, and many of those got flooded.

You can normally drive a speedboat under this bridge. Here, I don't think you could even manage a canoe.

This sculpture by the canal took on some new interpretations that I'm sure the artist never intended.

At the height of the flood, the street and the lake became one. You could paddle from one to the other without bottoming out on the curb.

Despite the destructiveness, it was still beautiful and, — dare I say it? — kinda fun. I'm sure we'd feel a bit differently if we'd sustained more losses, but we still would have enjoyed the "wow" factor either way.

One Christmas Down, One to Go

Our family seems to have gotten in the habit of having Christmases on multiple days, or on days other than the 25th of December. I've lost track of ho many times I've been flying on Christmas (no lines!) and exchanged presents the next day, instead.

Christmas 1 (Dec. 25th) went over wonderfully this year. The kids were just about bouncing out of their skin to put up their stockings, and calling out, "Is it time to get up yet?" scarcely half an hour after we put them to bed. Once it was time to get up, Fiona bounded up the ladder to our bed and so sweetly invited, "come have Christmas with us!" before crawling over to give me a backrub (both Fiona and I are totally backrub people). It was wonderful way to wake up.

Christmas 2 (Dec. 27th) starts in a few hours, with Deborah's parents and May having just arrived from an all-day drive from New Hampshire. I'm glad they made it: Our street is a wet sheet of ice, and a thick fog is covering most of Indiana and Ohio. They told us about following "Rudolph" — an 18-wheeler with glowing red taillights — nearly all the way across Ohio. All they could see were those red hazy dots amidst the gray. I've done nearly the same thing — I followed a truck at a crawl nearly all the way across Ohio in a blizzard after visiting Deborah up at Houghton in upstate New York one weekend.

Now, off to bed with me. As I told the kids, the sooner you go to sleep, the sooner it will be Christmas again!

One Candlepower

Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

The rains are back. And with the ground frozen, there's nowhere for the water to go — nowhere good, anyway. So, rather than wait for my neighbor's pump to put in an appearance (it's been three days; surely his crawlspace is quite full...?) I broke down and bought a pump of my own. It's nothing amazing — I didn't have the money for amazing — but it's now been running for a good 12 hours, which has brought the water level down two very welcome inches.

I'm planning to pick up a larger-diameter hose for it this evening, which should allow it to clear things out even faster. It just feels good to be doing something, rather than watching and worrying. It feels better to cheer on the efforts of a heroic little pump than to curse the flooding.

The patio is down to an inch here. You can see the crust of ice on the legs of the sawhorses, and see how far the water has dropped.

Cancel that Trip to Venice...

...we've already got enough water.

It's actually higher than it was back in August — this time, I see water leaking in between the floorboards in the shed. This time, too, the street isn't draining, for some reason.

I always wanted waterfront property. The depth here varies between 4 to 8 inches.

We called the town to come out and investigate, and I saw the worker stick the handle of his rake almost all the way into the drains, but the water still isn't going down, and no-one has any good explanations why. The thing that worries me is that the temperature is dropping again. Care to think of what this place will look like if all that freezes?

In the meantime, the carport got me again — the water soaked the packed dirt floor enough that the sidestand sunk right through it. Grrr. My war with the carport was delayed so Deborah could take some classes, but in 2008 I shall show no mercy.

To my surprise, it wasn't difficult to pick up — 500 pounds felt like 50. Deborah asked if I had been bitten by a radioactive spider. I don't have a better explanation yet.

I'm Dreaming of a White Thanksgiving...

In Winona Lake, for as long as I can remember, the first appreciable snow of the season has, more often than not, occurred on Thanksgiving or the day before. This year falls right into line.

Can we eat yet, daddy?

We had a fairly quiet day; since there were only two adults, we (again) eschewed turkey in favor of something simpler, in this case, steak. We've been married for more than 10 years now, and we've never made turkey. Ever. Grilling duties fell to me, and everyone got their order just right... once I got the fire started. For some reason I have abysmal fire-starting skills.

We did go around the table and share a few things we were thankful for; Aiden, when asked, said he was thankful for "that" — a bowlful of cranberry sauce. Fiona was thankful for necklaces. I was thankful that all the bills were paid, we both have jobs we like, and everyone's healthy.

Keeping Cool

We normally don't get out the air conditioner until the weather here is brutal. We got it out on Wednesday. It didn't take Fiona long to figure out where she wanted to be!

Weathering the Storm

I remember looking at the weather map yesterday afternoon and thinking, "This wasn't such a great day to ride my motorcycle to work..." There was a line of severe thunderstorms all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and they would be hitting right about the time I was supposed to get off of work.

Deborah called a bit later to tell me the power had gone out, and to ask if she needed to go hide out in the bathroom — the safest room in our house for tornadoes. The sky wasn't the sickly green color I associate with tornado weather, and there wasn't anything worse than a severe thunderstorm warning, so I said that she didn't need to worry about how to entertain the kids in our itty-bitty bathroom.

After I got home, we went for a walk around the island (what else was there to do?) to see what damage had been done. There wasn't any to our place, thank God, but a few other places had not been so fortunate. It wasn't anywhere near the July 4 storm of a few years ago that necessitated the evacuation of the island, but there was some damage nonetheless.

This is the coach house, over by the Boathouse restaurant. This tree had dropped several large branches into the canal this winter, so I guess it was fairly weak already.

We followed the flashing lights and found the source of our own power outage. Another tree had come down, taking two power poles with it, one of then snapped off clean at the base. The firefighters were there mainly to keep things under control until NIPSCO could actually show up and do something about the downed lines. Deborah had called to report the outage, and had to listen to a list of some 50 towns that had power outages to see if Winona Lake was already on the list. It wasn't, so she added it.

You can see one of the poles leaning just above the brown shed. The architecture of many of the homes along the canal is... unique.

It was getting darker as we made our way home, and we realized that we only had one flashlight. Or, rather, we only had one working flashlight that Fiona had not disassembled and broken. The one left was a green dinosaur that roars when you pull the handle, and opens it's mouth to reveal the light. It has the advantage that we always know where the kids are...

Roar.

So we called up Paul. He brought over half a dozen or so lights, and I went out to get some batteries, and some ice cream for us all to enjoy by candlelight.

We got our power back awhile after midnight.

More snow?

Whoever bumped the thermostat back to "winter," please go and adjust it to the proper temperature. It's April. The joke's over, OK? Thanks.