Why is it that whenever I sit down, dream up a bunch of writing projects, plan a blogging schedule, and am content with how things are finally fitting together someone throws a wrench in the wheel???
I was feeling so good about everything last week. Even my body was cooperating – for those that don’t know, I’m cursed blessed with a crazy ride on the hypothyroidism bandwagon.
And then Friday happened. I woke up to a loud crack of thunder just as the skies opened up and the rains came down.
We have a small mountain stream coming out of the hills behind our house. The stream feeds into 18 inch culvert pipe that runs under our yard and out on the other side of the driveway.
After an average rain, the stream looks like this …
That photo was from last November. Notice the high bank, about 4-1/2 to 5 ft, on the left side.
When I first looked outside Friday morning, the stream was barely running. In fact, it looked sorta like this …
That’s actually from 5 days before, but you get the idea. It didn’t even look like that first picture.
About 15-20 minutes after the skies opened up Friday morning, the stream looked like this …
Um, yeah… Quite shocking. Water was roaring out of the hills. And, honestly, I haven’t seen that much water in our stream in the 5 years we’ve lived on this property.
I immediately realized something was blocking the entrance to the culvert pipe. I called for help, ran to get a shovel, and proceeded to almost lose the shovel in the pipe. The suction was so strong against the pipe that there was no way to pry what we later discovered was a log away from the pipe entrance.
Because the log was blocking the bottom portion of the pipe, the dirt and small rocks washing down the stream started to pile up. Before it was all over, we had a 4 foot high island in the middle of the stream and a sandbar in the backyard.
Remember the photo with the daisies? Here’s Spot standing on the island.
Notice he’s almost level with the top of the bank? He’s standing where the bottom pool of water is in the daisy picture. Crazy, huh?
So, that mess is what consumed most of our Friday morning and afternoon. Then, just when things were getting back to normal, our electricity went off. *sigh*
Not only were all my ideas for Friday totally messed up, but it rolled over into Saturday too. No computer work. Almost no housework done. Seems like I did a little bit of nothing since it was incredibly hot Friday night with the humidity level at 90%. If you blinked your eyes too many times, you broke into an immediate sweat. Yuck!
What have I learned these past weeks after periodically losing our DSL, the flooding, and no electricity? Flexibility!!! And not to sweat the small stuff. What day I post a blog post is no big deal even though it stresses me out when I can’t do it like I plan. It’s all about flexibility.
And even with all the ugliness of the water, there’s still beautiful things, such as these …
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Love the pics and the story.