A Quiet Week

School has started back up here and it's been a quiet week - well, except for the crazy lady jacked up on something unidentifiable who was out in our garden at work picking flowers and plants. Apparently business had been good because she was carrying around a disposable aluminum roasting pan full of plant parts and someone's small empty flower pot. She had crashed through the plants to reach the large hibiscus-type flowers in the corner, so there was a lot of breakage. Then she was pulling up parts of ground cover plants - roots and all! At first I thought she was from the radio station and was taking the weather measurements. When I realized she was the same crazy woman that had come to church and acted like she was possessed, I went outside and ran her off.

At this point, I guess I should backtrack and explain the weather measurements and the incident at church. Many years ago, the then-owner of the funeral home established an official weather station out in our garden. We used to have to take measurements of the precipitation in the container twice a day and whoever closed at night had to reset the machine that recorded temps, get the numbers and call it into the National Weather Service in Springfield, Missouri. Several years ago we turned it over to the local radio station which is our neighbor to the east, but the measurement recording equipment is still located in our garden. Someone comes over from the radio station everyday to record the rain/snow levels, so we see them out there in the garden. The equipment out there is kind of ugly, so we try to camouflage it with plants.

As for the incident at church, well, my husband, being a law enforcement officer in this community for 30 years, knows just about everyone. So when I noticed this woman at church behaving slightly odd during worship and praise time, I naturally asked him who she was. As soon as he got a look at her, he instantly recognized her as TROUBLE (all caps!) and explained she had been arrested many times on drug charges and also spent time in the state mental facility, but was sent back. (More than likely because she isn't crazy enough to keep - they do that a lot because of money). According to my boss, she was recently seen outside on the roof of her house dancing with her sundress over her head. What kind of "odd" behavior was she displaying at church? Well, nothing like dancing with her dress over head, but more like clutching herself in various places and swaying, then abruptly sitting down and rocking her head side to side, then jumping back up do some more swaying and clutching. I was afraid we'd have some hysterics during the altar call, but she slipped out and left.

Similar to flowers that got picked

Hibiscus, similar flowers that got picked

So...when I went outside to the garden after realizing who she was to run her off, I asked her to please stop pulling up the plants. Her response was "Should I stop?" Okay..."Yes. Yes, you should definitely stop that and go on!" Then she proceeded to chatter a mile a minute about how she loved flowers and weren't flowers pretty, and how she was planting a garden and how MUCH she loved flowers...the whole time swaying her dress a la "I Feel Pretty", and swinging her roasting pan as if it was a basket full of beautiful cut flowers rather than the mess of flowers, roots, plants, and dirt that it was. Soon after she left, Lou from the flower shop popped in with a plant and I told her about the encounter. She said it sounded like the person she had heard on the police scanner that was seen pulling up flowers all through downtown the day before. I told her if she wanted a gander at her, she just left thattaway (pointed to the back of the building). Shortly after that, my boss came in and after telling him about it he told me it sounded like the same woman he'd seen up on her roof down the street from him, and if she comes back to call the police. Then Hubby stopped by and after relating the story to him, he said the same thing about calling the station instead of engaging her directly. Noted!

And if that isn't small-town crazy enough for you, here is another example of how things get done around here. On the corner across from the back side of our building, city crews just finished weeks of work tearing out the old curbing and putting in the brand new curbing all the way down the block to the south. This morning I had to detour around because they are now tearing up not only weeks of work on the curbing but the street as well. So now they are going to put down new asphalt and then new curbing - again! There's no doubt that section of road needed to be re-done, but unless they just needed to waste time and money, I think someone made a big mistake tearing up that new curbing. Or possibly they made a mistake in the curbing and it all has to be redone. Who knows? One thing that can be agreed on is that a mistake has been made somewhere, and I will tell you right now that is typical for around here. Nothing gets done without at least one major flaw. So does that classify as crazy or just plain stupid?

So that's the news from my dusty little corner of Kansas. I leave you with a pretty close-up shot of the Crepe Myrtle in our backyard. I took this Saturday while pulling nails and staples out of the clapboard siding on our house. The siding that is what I would call Goldenrod or maybe 70's Harvest Gold. Remember when everything from appliances to carpeting was green (avocado),  brick red, orange, yellow and brown? Ugh! Even though I was a small child, I remember it very well and hated every moment of it. It was everywhere! And so was plaid! And if it wasn't plaid, it was big ugly flowers or stripes. And all in those obnoxious colors - on furniture, walls, and yes, even on me! It's no wonder that I love blues, pinks, and purples. I do like greens also, just not that nasty color the 70's called Avocado - it didn't look like the inside of any avocado I'd ever seen. Yikes!

Where's Noah When You Need Him?

Well, it's been a wet and wild couple of weeks. I would have to check the statistics (but I'm lazy that way, so I won't) but I think this is the wettest August ever for our area. We had so much rain and had been under flood watch and warning so long it was becoming a way of life. For the first time in three or four years, water came in our garage. Our new neighbors across the street were quite shocked to see that much water. Apparently no one mentioned it to them. Our neighbors to the north were quite surprised as well. In fact when I went outside to take pictures, Mr. Neighbor was outside on his front porch looking at his new lakefront property. He asked me what was going on and I told him it used to do this all of the time, but since we had two years in a row of actual drought conditions, the ground absorbs most of what rain we get. Not this time - we're saturated. 

The front (looking west)

Looking southwest

These pictures to the immediate right are all of the front yard on just one day. This day, the water didn't get into the garage but came up to within two feet of the door. The two times it came into the garage, it happened overnight so there aren't any pictures. We prepared for it the best we could by getting things up off of the floor and moving important things towards the back of the garage, but you can only do so much. My neighbors to the north, us, and my neighbors to the south all have it the worst. We are all at the lowest point on the street, with our house the lowest, plus there is a run-off channel between our house and my southern neighbor. All of the rain from the western neighborhoods which are on a slope feeds down to us and is directed through that short channel. The problem is that the channel feeds into an old small sewer pipe which can't handle all of that water, so it backs up. And then you get idiots who try to drive through it and cause ginormous waves to crash up onto your front porch. All of the mulch we spread a few weeks ago is washed away, as well as a good bit of our gravel drive in the back of the house under the carport.

Looking due south

If we have a lake out front, then we have a river out back that feeds into another lake. At times the water was rushing so fast between my southern neighbor's house and my house that you could almost grab a kayak and do some paddling. My dogs sure didn't like going out to do their business in all of that, but unfortunately they haven't learned how to use the indoor facilities.

Looking north

The river out back looking to the south

So all of this water has played havoc on electronic equipment. Phones, cable, and internet have been going out sporadically all over town. We've also lost power a few times all over the city at random. Our internet was out at our house at various times last week and over at my dad's house it was out for like four days. But, I feel blessed because we are okay, and others have not come through this weather okay. Some folks out in the county got hit with a small tornado - a 2.5 on the Fujita scale is what I read in the paper. Apparently it picked up a house and rotated it on its foundation by about six feet. And then there are those who live near the river and have had it come into their houses, and the farmers who have lost crops to the flooding. It's not been very fun this summer.

The river feeding into...

And talk about hot! It has been so hot and humid that even if it wasn't raining, you wouldn't know it for all the moisture in the air. And throughout all of this, pieces of my house were still coming off and floating around. Thankfully, though, the tear-off process has finally started as of yesterday - YAY! So now I get to look at the nasty 70's Goldenrod color on my house. Yeehaw! About half of it is off and what's underneath is in pretty good shape. We just have to pull nails and patch holes and pick out paint. Of course agreeing on the color is an issue, but hopefully since the whole Greenbay Packer fanclub thing we had going on last year in the kitchen, we've learned a few things and can avoid any potential paint disasters.

...the lake out back

I am thankful that our roofers did a good job because with all of this rain, a lot of people who just got new roofs on their houses are finding that they now have leaks. I can only imagine how peeved I would be if that happened at our house. In fact, I'm pretty sure "peeved" wouldn't quite cover it. Not even a little bit.