Rain Finally Comes

If you had seen my local tv weather forecast on Thursday night you would remembered the damage I had from storms in May and July. The hurricane residue was going to rip due north and by Friday we would be swamped with heavy rain and tornado warnings or at least a tornado watch. I didn't feel anxious about it because I have seen all that damage eventually fixed and things get back to normal. So I was somewhat surprised what happened. Luckily the forecast was wrong.

It did rain most of the night I think after midnight on Thursday. I closed most of the windows before I went to bed but left the bedroom window open for a cool breeze while I slept. I got up later in the middle of the night to close that. Yet it wasn't a hard rain but the kind we desperately needed. It was steady and rained for a long time.

The day that was supposed to be rained out was nice and sunny, cool temps and very little humidity. When I got a vibration and a buzz on my watch I was expecting to see that warning for a low heart rate but it was Weather Bug telling me that rain would start at 7pm and there was lightning 3 miles away. I went outside to convince the Henry and Ava to come inside. I took this photo after I had shut the patio door to keep them inside. Within minutes after this photo was taken, the rains came.

Before I did anything though, was to pick up Ava's blanket for the 100th time, shake it out and return it to her crate. She likes to drag everything from blankets to bones from inside to outside multiple times per day.

She was ready for some Friday night football. There were a couple of games on that I was interested in seeing. Being a purist I don't think college football should ever be played on Friday nights. That night is reserved for high school football in my mind. But "follow the money" and anymore my tv schedule just for college football shows me that college football start on Thursday nights.

Morning routine for the hounds and dogs do not change, rain or shine.

And ... their time to go to sleep for the night never changes whether I watch ballgames or a movie. They will wake up and move to the bedroom floor when I tell them I am going to bed later that night.

I have bought more innter tubes for my bicycle tires where I live now, than I ever did in the goathead thorn capital, Sierra Vista AZ. This week it was on my Trek road bike. Two weeks ago it was a flat tire on my Specialize Diverge gravel bike. The interesting thing is with a 28" tire on the Trek the inner tube should be a 700c x 28-32 ... notice the size on that tube is not even close. 

To think I paid money to a bike shop last year to replace an inner tube on the Trek bike while I was in their shop and to see that is what they installed. Very disappointing in finding that out ... thus I will never step in their shop again. Cycling Solutions in Newburgh Indiana ... your attention to detail in bike maintenance SUCKS !!!!

When I saw the different size I took the spare tube from the small bag under the bike seat to confirm I had the correct size of inner tube for emergency flat tire backup.

Besides the trips to the bike shop, a different one, to pick up the right sizes of inner tubes for my road and just in case, my gravel bike, I was finally able to get the new tube installed on my own along with a short test ride up the street.

But the highlight of the week was my neighbor a couple of houses away.

I've been hearing chainsaws for weeks. I have seen him loading and driving heavy equipment down the side yard into his backyard for weeks. So when I was coming home the other day and saw more than these tree limbs in his front yard, I had to pull over and get an update.

With the commercial lift he is able to cut 90' trees tall in back from the top down. He has cut 8-9 trees in his backyard with the last one being a cut of 20' long and a diameter of over 3'. With the front loader on his small tractor he was able to put that in the big gulch for excessive rain water when it storms. He also put the cuts of the other eight trees there.

The irony is how that affects my old friend up the street, who has spent the last 20 years of cleaning out that same gulch that runs at the bottom of his backyard hill and on his property, will now have some of those logs that were cut way up here ... block up his gulch around the corner. He told me there has been enough water in the past to move those tree trunks from my neighbor's house to the back of his house .2 miles away.

My friend did that work of getting free flowing water, to control his erosion and to keep his backyard from sliding downhill. You might thin all those large trees would help with the erosion but the problem is the amount of water that flows through that gulch during heavy rain storms or large snow melt.

That tree in front is on the first three he is cutting down in front. The rain stopped any cutting on Friday ... When I asked "why are you cutting the trees in front" I got an answer I didn't expect .....

"I got tired of the leaves in the yard".

A perfectly healthy tree that was NOT a Bradford Pear Tree, beautiful wood, all being cut, loaded and transported in back to be dumped with the other eight trees in the gulch that was made with decades of rain water. 

You can see the large lift that makes the tree cutting job so much easier. He brought up how hard it was to find a company(s) to not only do this work but to show up when they said they would. We compared his stories with mine of May and July. They were close to the same believe it or not. That is why he decided to do the work himself.

Well it is College Football Saturday as I write this. I will post photos of the hounds and dogs I take today and tonight but probably will not be much different than last week. Only change that I know of, I will be keeping a closer eye on Ava when she is spending time outside while I watch football on tv. 

As I post this Sunday night, no new photos, nothing to report or write about. Saturday nights of sleep are always torture after football season starts. I watch game after game but I don't eat as much as I use to during these games. Still the different combinations of food taste good at the time but I pay for it that night, sleeping in 50 minute shifts and waking up with indigestion.

That makes Sunday a recovery day, low motivation and more sleep than normal. Let's see what happens this week. 

It was great watching IU beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl from my couch here in "the tropics" of Southern Indiana.