Def-y's Categorizing: June 2011 Archives

I love rainy days! I like to hear the rain on the roof, and watch the drops make the leaves on the shrubs and trees dance and shine. The only thing better than a rainy day is one with my family around!

Last night, two of my sisters and a niece joined us. My-Sister-The-Nurse came to visit and have dinner with us, and my youngest sister, Frankie, and her second daughter are here for a couple of days. I love it when we are together, sharing what's been going on in our lives.

Today, we are going to look at a quilt in progress, and see what we need from the fabric store to complete it. My niece is working on a quilt for her sister as a birthday gift, and that birthday is only three weeks away! And, I need some backing fabrics for three of the Scraps on a Mission tops that I've been getting ready to quilt. I can see that we will be wandering the aisles of the fabric store for a bit.

IF we have a break in the rain, we may do a little trimming in the gardens. I need to deadhead the peonies and cut back the oregano and chives. There are still things to plant, but I think the trimming might be the best use of my sister's help. I'm amazed that she is willing to go out there and risk getting drenched, but we are drip dry, after all.

Tonight, Dear Husband is going to share what he knows about glass blowing, or more correctly, glass work, with our niece. She's an artist in training, and he thought she might like to experience one more medium. This is the girl who welded spoons and forks into an incredible owl for a class project. Who knew she could weld!?!

So, I'm going to have a lovely unstructured day with my family, doing two of my favorite things. Life is Good!

We've had a couple of rainy days this week. We have had LOTS of gray days, but not a lot of precipitation. We live in this tiny dry micro-climate, and storms frequently slide just north or south of us. I'm sure that I80 and I88 direct the rain away from us.

I live in an area where a subdivision can not be built unless there is room for a retention pond to collect run-off from heavy storms. Whoever designed the ponds immediately to the east of us clearly needs to go back to school and take those lessons again.

The first year the ponds were created it became obvious rather quickly that the series of ponds, which interconnect, do not drain fast enough. Their response to it was to increase the size of the middle pond. All along the northern shoreline of the pond are homes with walk out basements, just waiting to flood.

So, with just two days of occasional heavy rain, the ponds have filled up to the point where you can no longer see the concrete culvert connecting two of the ponds, and with just a little more rain the last two ponds might overflow, and meet each other on the road between them. The homeowners must have interesting conversations with the developer when we finally get rain!

I think the developer might luck out this week. As I came home today, I could see from a ring of trash on the grass that one of the ponds has actually dropped eight inches or more. We've had gray skies, but no rain today, so perhaps it will drop some more.

I'm very surprised that they haven't had to increase the size of the tiles to allow for better drainage. Perhaps something downstream prevents them from opening up the flow. Dear Husband wondered if they have ever cleaned out the drains.

We're not in any danger. Our house sits almost at the top of a rise, and we are higher than the area that will flood. I'm just fascinated at the ineptness of designer of the pond, and the fact that the building department wasn't able to determine that the design was inappropriate. It ticks me off that my taxes pay for a department that allows problems like this to slide by.