Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

Nice hot summer day.  A little on the humid side.  All of a sudden, a thunderstorm just blew up out of nowhere.  I looked at it on the weather radar and it didn’t slide in from the north or south, it just spontaneously combusted.  Nonstop thunder and lightning.  Judy put the dogs in Thundershirts to keep them relatively calm.

 

Six inches of rain in an hour.  Can’t see across the field in front of us.

 

The temperature dropped from the 90s to the 70s so we can leave the door open.  Good thing, because the power went out which makes the air conditioning gone.  We can hear the frogs again.  They love this.  Just before dark; the lake is back in all its glory.

 

The string of unexpected adventures continues…

 

Update:  It’s dark.  The power is back on.  We can sleep this off and deal with it in the morning.  The frogs are still happy.

 

 

The trauma of being there; the conflict at home about being there.  It didn’t take long for the protests to start.  The longer the war went on, the greater grew the protests and violence at home.  Massive civil unrest.  Domestic opinion turned against the war and it ground to a halt.  It had gone on for 10 years.  Over 50,000 U.S. soldiers died.  It left our country divided.

 

Now, in a period not of ten years, but of six months; one twentieth the time of the Viet Nam war, the lives of 150,000 Americans have been lost.  Three times the death toll of the Viet Nam war in six months.  Every individual life lost has a heart-wrenching story, but at this magnitude of carnage, we’re just watching numbers roll past on the television screen.  Where is the outrage?  Where is the civil unrest?  Where is the political will against a common enemy?  The sacrifice we’re being asked to make for the common good is to wear a mask, and we can’t decide whether to do it or not?

 

Can we just wear the damn mask?

 

 

The Sandpiper Wetlands this morning.

Less water.

 

This evening.

 

Even better!  When you stand right over it and look down, the grass is still wet, and the pumps are still running, but we’re getting better fast.

 

 

The park in front of us was still grass.

 

Now today, it’s a lake again.

 

Well, at least wetlands.

 

No rain.  Rising water.  The entire neighborhood outside our gates is flooded worse than we are.  Go figure.  The combined output of our pumps in the park is 1,900 gallons of water per minute being pumped into the nearby ditch.  We’re just breaking even.

 

 

We’re done with the hurricane.  We’re mostly done with the rain.  Almost all the water was drained out of the park.  But now it’s rising again.  There is not enough rain going on to feed the amount of water coming back in.  It’s not an immediate problem for Judy and me, but grade matters.  Here on the south side of the park we’re a few inches higher.  It’s a different story for our friends on the north side of the park (about a block away).  If it wasn’t enough for them to get the attached carport blown off the top of their house, now they’re being threatened by rising water from the bottom!

 

 

 

There is a lake/reservoir just down the road from us and an intricate web of canals all over the valley to provide water where it is needed for crops, and to drain the water away from where it’s not supposed to be.  Up until today, it was looking like the county had this whole drainage thing under control this year.  Darn.