Holding Back the Flood

It's raining. Normally that would be a wonderful thing. Rain instead of snow means Spring instead of Winter and that's an excellent thing. ... Isn't it? Well, normally the answer would be a resounding "yes" except when Winter's grip is still firmly in place. So we're getting rain - a lot of it - but the ground is still frozen and we've still got snowbanks everywhere, sometimes towering into the massive mountains of snow that you'll see in the major shopping center parking lots. Where does all of this rain go? 

Although this particular photo is from Cleveland, Ohio, their
parking lot snowpiles are pretty similar to what you'll find
here or anywhere else in the snow belt. Huge, high piles of
snow around the periphery of the parking lots. 

That's the problem. We don't hate rain, but when the rain has nowhere to go, we get flooding. Bad flooding. The low points in the freeways flood out, the low points in parking lots become temporary lakes, the roadways get lovely glare ice because the water sheets down them, and here, in our cozy home, I will get the job of checking the back door regularly throughout the day today to make sure we're not flooding through it. 

Do you remember this photo from 2016? Here, DH was in full
"build" mode, constructing the curved tiered walls that make
up the western part of our lower back yard. I'm standing just
about where my back door is located. 

The back door is where DH has been building the castle over the past few years,. The curved and terraced walls of flowers and other plants, the herringbone patio we had set two years ago, and the cleared bank for the eventual pergola we were fixing during buckets of rain last summer. The difficulty isn't the construction work, it's the fact that there's no real channel established for the run-off just yet, and right now the water level is almost up to the level of my basement door. If DH gets a chance, he'll try to clear away some of the ice on the patio and create a larger channel for the rainwater, but if he doesn't get the chance, I might be doing that myself in the pouring rain later this morning. 

A year or so after the construction above, we got the patio laid. It's
done with paver stone in a herringbone pattern. They did an OK
job - not the greatest, but OK. We used it often last year, though,
sitting on the patio and enjoying margaritas. 

Of course I also have the usual stuff for my "day off" - shopping (grocery and Target today will make it an expensive day), catching up on reading and writing my daily story for B2MeM, a nice chat with Aearwen this afternoon, and several loads of laundry. I also have to gather our paperwork for our Tuesday night income tax appointment with our accountant. Yeah - it looks like a busy day, even without the rain, glare ice, and ... yeah! 

So here's hoping your weather is a bit better than mine and that you have a wonderful Wednesday. It's a fact that I'm still planning to be back tomorrow, although I might be crabby from having my schedule totally disrupted by floodwaters coming into my den. Been there, done that, and really don't want to experience that again. 

Random Monday Thoughts

The Olympic closing ceremonies were held last night. I'm happy to have my life back, but I'm going to miss my daily dose of Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir. They always managed to make me laugh and I loved their spot-on but irreverent commentary. I hope they'll be part of other skating events over the next four years. They're a great team. I saw some of the skating gala on Saturday night, at which they were doing the commentary. Unfortunately most of the gala was broadcast in late night and I had to go to sleep.

The three mascots for the Sochi Olympic Games gathered to put out
the Olympic flame. The next winter Olympics will be held in South Korea in 2018. 

Sunday was taken up with fighting ice dams on my father-by-marriage's house. It was friggin' cold out and DH was up there on a ladder with the paint stripper gun (basically like a heat gun on steroids), a hammer and a hatchet. Three-four hours later, success. But I turned into an icicle. After I arrived back home and was trying to read and watch the Olympics, but kept falling asleep in my chair. I gave up and went to bed for an afternoon nap. I was totally beat down by the cold.

Taking a nap can be a wonderful thing. No more chances for those in
my schedule for at least two weeks. 

I'm on cat duty for the week while Chickie is rediscovering warm weather in Arizona. I have the morning shift Monday-Saturday, Anne has most of the evenings. Chickie lives a block away from the shop, so it's easy for me to stop by and feed Sasha. I feed her, water her, and clean out her litter box. Easy, peasy. But it is one more thing in my crazy and crowded mornings. However, Chickie is a good friend and it's not really anything of great difficulty to do, so I'm happy to help out.

Of course, I'm only feeding one cat, not thirty. But I couldn't
resist this picture. 

The week will be cold, but they're saying no snow (for a nice change of pace). Right now we're on track to be the 11th coldest winter on record. All I know is that I'm really tired of temps in the single digits when we should be above freezing. Of course, this coming summer I reserve the opportunity to complain about extreme heat. Fair is fair - LOL.

I reserve the right to complain about the heat this coming summer.

So while I drive to my chiropractor and then on to kitty care later this morning, I'll be happily listening to classical music, avoiding the icy patches on the road, and thinking about warmer times and warm friends. I hope all of my friends reading this have a truly marvelous Monday.

Back to the Fun Stuff

I'm finally finished with my Yule Exchange Fic and submitted it last night. What a haul. It was a subject that I had fun with, and it wasn't all that long - about 4200 words in the end, but the editing process and getting a good wrap-up to the tale, those two things were a slow slog. Eeesh! Still, it was fun to write and I'm happy.

I got through the "tearing my hair out" phase and I ended up fairly
happy with the fic.

Now I can get back to what I really want to write - my o-fic. I pulled up the files the other day in my Scrivener and worked on it a little bit. I had to literally sit on my hands to keep myself from editing what I had already written, or changing where I had left off. That's a big NO NO at this stage. I have to allow my plot to run its course with all the little twists and turns. Changing things, knocking out whole chapters if necessary, that will come in the editing process. I still have doubts about the plot, but I love the story and the characters and still want to work on this. I don't want to continue on my next novel until I have this one at least into the editing process, and there are thousands of words still to write.

Here's a good quote for all of you to take to heart. It's
far too easy to become complacent in your life. Take
chances, live on the edge a bit. 

The thing that really concerns me in this novel is the Mary-Sue effect. For those of my readers who are not writers, the Mary-Sue effect means that you are actually writing a story where you have put yourself as a character instead of actually allowing an original voice. Since I do have a musician as one of the major characters, as well as a setting of a town that I loved growing up in, I'm trying to be careful about this and not make it "all about me" but rather "all about the story and the characters". I hope that I'll catch and squash any residual Mary-Sue problems in the editing process. Right now, I'm in a car on the roller coaster and I can't stop the ride midway through the curves.

Have a great weekend. We'll work hard today with the last day of our 3-day sale, then have tomorrow off to finally celebrate DH's birthday a few days late. He was amazing yesterday, making sure that our ice dam problem was fixed, at least for the time being. It was a hell of a lot of work for my old man, and he was completely exhausted by the end of it. I hope all of you have a chance to relax a bit over the weekend.

Stumbling As We Go

Remember when I said that water issues follow us? I awakened at 1:20 am (yes...AM) to the sound of water drops. Tracking it down, I discovered that we were dripping inside one of the livingroom windows - the dreaded ICE DAM has struck again. I put down a towel, listened to muffled drops for an hour and finally managed to get one more hour of sleep before my alarm went off.

Icicles are lovely to look at but indicate lots of problems underneath.
I'm hoping that we can get our ice dams resolved quickly and easily. 

I'll have the lovely job of telling my DH that he will have to climb up on the roof today and get rid of the ice dam. The really annoying part about this? He has been super diligent about using the roof rake and getting rid of our snowpack. After each snow he's been up there scraping, the last time was on Christmas Day. So it's not for lack of diligence, it's just our curse working once more.

No plot twists like Game of Thrones in my Yule fic. But that's
OK. Not everything I write needs to be angst-driven, after all...

I've finally got my LOTR Community Yule Exchange story ready for uploading, but realized I don't have the name of the person for whom I wrote it. So...a slight additional delay is in the works while I await a response from the mods. But, although not one of my best works (no gut-wrenching or twisting plots for this one, just a nice, sweet yule tale), it doesn't rank as one of my worst stories either. It's middle-of-the-road, and considering where my characters wanted to take the plot, I'm grateful things ended up where they did.

It appears that the color for this year is a dark rose *sigh*. 

I'm sitting at my desk, looking at my Bead & Button Show catalog. With help from DH, I managed to decide on four classes that I will try to register for on the 7th of January. I'll have a Wednesday open, maybe I'll hit a museum. Milwaukee has a wonderful art museum and a great Public Museum that is near the convention center. Hopefully I can get to one or both of these.

The Milwaukee Public Museum is two blocks from the Convention Center.
It's one of my "go-to" places for off-days during the Show.

It's crazy to be planning for June when it is still December, but so is my life. I hope you have a nice, dry, warm day today. Happy Friday!

Success At Last

Yesterday was just one of those days, but it ended up well.  I awakened to find a large bucket placed underneath my lamp in my entryway and a regular dripping sound from the water going into it.  My ice dams on the roof had built up to the point where I was having some roof leaking.  My DH ended up spending most of his day on the roof, shoveling snow and defrosting things with kettles of boiling water.  Miserable and hard work for a guy approaching 60 years. 

This isn't my roof, but it's quite similar.  We were leaking

at the corner where the two angles meet.  It's a bad place

for ice build-up.

My Computer Guru phoned me at 5:30 am to begin figuring out what was going on with my computer.  I worked with him for two hours, we downloaded various programs and tried various things.  I finally left him with a program operating in the background that would either work or would result in my having to bring the CPU in to him for more detailed work.  I left the program running while I left for the shop. 

Arriving at the shop, the new ice shelf that my landlord installed kept the ice from being directly on the door, but the lock was frozen and the drops had built an ice shelf at the bottom of the door.  I took my hammer (standard carry-along stuff while I am having these major ice issues) and hammered the bottom iceberg away.  But I was unable to get the key to work in the lock and finally had to admit defeat.  That meant calling the alarm company, talking with people convincing them that I was who I said I was, and entering the store through the front door which sets the alarm off immediately.  It's loud, and very nervewracking.  But I managed to do that and get it turned off quickly. 

The day went well, until I decided that I wanted some soup from the little cafe next door.  I was cold, and they had Tomato Florentine soup for the day - really good.  So I bought a bowl to go.  I settled down at my laptop, pulled the soup from the bag, and promptly dropped it.  I missed all of the electronics, but made quite a mess on the carpeting and my skirt (fortunately black).  So much for soup. 

I'm not fond of Acer as a brand, but the monitor

(now that it's working) is quite nice.  I'll have to

try it out on LOTRO and see how it is to ride into

Angmar in a higher-resolution screen. 

Things started looking up when I got home, though.  It was Tuesday, so I picked up Chinese on the way home.  The computer fix-it program that I had left running had completed and things looked optimistic.  After dinner I went down and restarted the computer.  Success!  It finally was working properly.  I restarted it several times just to be sure, and everything was OK again.  I phoned my Guru and left him an effusive thank you message on his voice mail.  So, I can now catch up on many things and I finally have a computer that will play along with me again.  Yippee!  I was going to see a movie tonight, but I'm so far behind because of my monitor issues, I had to beg off (again).  I'll try for next week .  It'll happen one of these days :-)

Back to Reality

Well, the Olympics are finally over. They were a delightful 16 days of excitement and late nights, it will be a true relief to be able to go to sleep at 10pm again. But it does seem that the world is starting to get back to us with a vengence now. I am getting drips in my livingroom windows. That means that our ice dams are backing up under our shingles and ruining not only my roof but my walls. The worst of it is that I can't do anything about it until Tuesday. So I'm hoping that since we're going to be above freezing for the next couple of days (during the day only, of course), that it may clear itself up during the day. At least I can hope.

Just LOVE the Canadian Olympic clothing. The sweater and knitted hat are wonderful!

And there was another major earthquake. This time in Chile, South America. The quake was huge - over 8.0 on the scale. But even though there is serious damage, the death toll is much less because this is a nation that understands earthquakes and builds accordingly. So, instead of the devestation and huge death toll that Haiti had last month, we have a relatively low death toll and devastation because buildings used rebar and were built to withstand these forces of nature. I fully admit that even a single death is one too many, but 1000's is far better than 10's of 1000's. I hope that you have a non-catastrophic day today, even though it is a Monday!