Noticing

I've considered restarting my Blog for a while now. My personal coping process often involves extended lecturing or writing, blogging could be a way to avoid sending loved ones long emails instead. So here it goes today, as I review the series of occurrences that I just experienced from noticing things.

It started, as many things do, with the weather. I noted the temperature would be dropping below the level we'd set our house thermostat to, 74 degrees Fahrenheit. My kids have mostly embraced the better/more precise metric measurements, so they will trade temps in Celsius, so in case they are reading this, it was going to drop to below 24 on its way to 15 or 16 Celsius. 

So when I saw on Weather Underground it had reached 74, I opened my bedroom window first, and noticed a vine had grown up the wall and was visible in front of the screen.  We had put a lot of effort into clearing the front wall there of the vines, so I decided to walk out and pull that one down.

In doing so, I noticed that water was pooling on the driveway, which happens during heavy rain when the drainage area becomes blocked with leaves or dirt.  So, since I was running to Brad's later to pick up our weekly vegetable order, I decided to open the garage door so I could move the Hybrid out now, and also get a shovel to clear the drainage route.  Moved the car and grabbed a long handled trowel to make the drain work better.  It started to rain really, really hard, and since I was in it working, the soaking of my clothes didn't bother me.

After finishing the driveway, I walked around to the front window to pull down the vines growing below my bedroom, and noticed water was cascading over the gutters near the downspout.  Since I was already totally soaked, I got out the ladder we use when climbing to the roof, and went around to every spot where I could see water overflowing the gutters, and pulled out the gathered leaves/twigs/seeds/gunk.  Stopped the overflow, but wow, there was a LOT of water flowing out the downspout.  Good thing I cleared the drainage path on the driveway already, water was like 5 or 6 inches deep out there now, and I had a little stream of it rolling across the lawn and front sidewalk.

Happily, I did not notice anything else, so I put away the ladder and trowel, tossed the vines into the yard waste for collection next month, closed the garage door, and came into the kitchen.  Where I noticed the towels hanging back the back door there, which I had been intended to fold and put away since I'd taken our little pool down for the year and there would be no more swimming for a while.  Wow, THAT was a good happenstance, I used the towels around my legs/feet to keep from dripping rain water everywhere while I walked carefully into the bathroom to take a shower and wash off the detritus of cleaning the gutters.

So, my apologies for the multiple pieces of clothing hanging in the shower drying before I put them in the laundry.

And please tell me if you notice any other spots where water is coming over the gutter edges.  The gutters work great, it was worth the investment to replace them when we did the roof last year, but I still have to manually clear out some of the heavier leaf-fall.

Finally, I am NOT planning to make dinner tonight, let me know if you need me to pick anything up while I am out in a couple of hours.