Monday, November 21, 2011

Nature Part 2

I guess it's been several months since I've blogged on here.. but I am continuing with the nature theme I ended with back in um, August... :) Between then and now, we've managed to get hit with oh, an earthquake, hurricanes, tropical storms, and flooding, not necessarily in that order. The earthquake was a surprise and the hurricanes were not unexpected, but it was the tropical storms and rain that finally did us in in the end. It pourrrred for approximately 7 days straight without ceasing, day and night. I have honestly in all my life never experienced anything like it. It was hard to drive anywhere, do anything, be outside at all. And at some point, the ground had had too much I guess, and the water began to pour in through our basement. Everything we had moved out here from Colorado but had yet to unpack was stored in the crawlspace of our basement. In cardboard boxes. And as you can imagine, it All. Got. Wet. Sooo, skip to a month later and we finally had sorted through everything and thrown out the bad, re-stored the good, and gotten new carpet downstairs and up. Life got back to normal eventually, but that was a rough lesson in the power of nature. Since then we've kept a close eye on the back drain and been more aware of weather in general! It's just such a difference from Colorado... I was telling our neighbors, we could leave our bikes outside year-round out there and then one day bring them in and they'd pretty much look about the same. When we first moved here, I left our bikes outside for a couple of months. When I went to bring them in, they were covered in cobwebs, leaves, nests of sorts, gunk in general, had started to rust, and the seats were peeling.. they honestly looked as if they'd been sitting out there for years. I am not kidding! My dad has always complained about this kind of stuff but I always sort of thought he was kidding! Seriously?! So this is the kind of thing we are adjusting to.

And then, one day after all the weather madness, I walked out into the backyard to find this little guy:

And so - life goes on......

~ Our house in the fall ~