40 days and 40 nights

Rain, rain, rain.

It rained yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that....and when I say 'rained' I don't mean a half hour sprinkle, I'm talking about sunrise to sunset downpour, it's even been raining at night too, just in case everything wasn't completely saturated.

Consequently there's a lot of water about, our back lawn is turning into a pond (it has drainage issues), but at least there's no water in the cellar (touch wood). Rebecca's cellar meanwhile has a stream flowing through it - apparently the water builds up behind a window at the top of a cellar wall and flows through the gaps in the frame*, and then the water flows unchecked through 2 rooms until it reaches the drain - 'fortunately' this is a regular problem and 'fortunately' this is a cellar in the old fashioned style of the word, i.e. although not meant to be damp, it isn't meant for habitation, unlike our, much newer cellar. Aurelia (3 doors down from us) had her cellar washed out a year or so ago and her's is used as ours is - it's carpeted and full of the kids stuff - or at least it was...flooding of cellars seems to be a common thing here, but maybe that's because we have cellars, whereas in the UK a cellar is something that only seems to come with an old house, when we were trying to buy a house here I was insistent that any house I wanted to own had a cellar.


And it's not just the housing that's suffering from the volume of water, the roads are...interesting, puddles the size of duck ponds of indeterminable depth which is what always scares me - ever since the time, many years ago that Simon drove into a large 'puddle' and the wheels of the Rover lost contact with the road and water started to flood into the cabin of the car. I refused point blank to get out (because I had new boots on & didn't want to ruin them) I had to crouch on my seat until Si took pity on me and carried me to safety and the dry road. Consequently, when faced with water deep enough to ripple, that covers the road surface from one side to the other I will, if possible find an alternative route - this policy of mine suffered at the weekend when we went to Ikea and partway through the carpark was not 1 but 2 'puddles', I took the decision that as we had to go through (in order to get out) at some point, then it made more sense to do it sooner rather than later as the water would only get deeper and deeper - Jas shut her eyes, I was tempted to, but someone had to steer the car!

We went out to 'Road Stop'** for lunch, the children's favourite eating place, parked as close to the door as we could and then had to paddle our way into the restaurant. The building is at the bottom of a slope and all the water from the top end of the carpark was flowing downhill and into the outer indoor/outdoor area of the restaurant - nice. Fortunately the addition of fresh flowing water to the environment had no impact on the kitchen.

The photos running down the left were all taken on Sunday morning, the 1st few hours of the day were dry (from above anyway) and as the river had burst its banks at one point on the Saturday I knew the water levels would be even higher.

What can I say? I'm glad I had wellies on and Logan was in seventh heaven, he's not a dog for swimming, but he does like the water, he's more hippo than fish and will wade in and lie down no matter how cold the water (he does it in the depths of winter, when there's snow on the ground and a crust of ice to break through) the locals think he's crazy and can always be relied upon to pass comment/judgement.



* I should point out that this is a rented house with the most lax landlords known to man.
** an American styled diner owned by a guy down our road - they have an extensive menu of burgers, chicken wings, nachos etc and lots of U.S. memobabilia over the walls.