Saturday, making noise!

My husband begins his wood pile empire!

Welcome to the rural life!

Well we have certainly gotten a quick introduction to the rural life!  In the last 24hrs, we have lost power 3x, been hailed on repeatedly, nearly had the house flood, and have had more close lightning strikes in 24hrs than we did in 13 years in McKinney!

Today saw the kids and I, trying to divert the river Nile (kids nickname for the creek that suddenly formed in our back yard) from flooding the back bedroom of the house.  The French drain was overwhelmed, by at least 2" of runoff.  We diverted, I dug a trench, we broomed water...And thankfully, the house stayed dry.  We have a bit of dirt work to do I guess!

Tomorrow there will be a storage unit run to go get the generator.  Tonight was a "planned" power outage of about 90 min.  Yesterday was about 45 min, and a  short outage too.  Time to get some more auxiliary power packs got phones and such.

It will take a little time to get it all sorted out.  To get the landscaping planned out.  Some of it we can do, some may get hired out. But it will get done.  You can count on it!

Back from the dead, and ready to party!

For the Technorati out there, this has been a trying week.  First I dropped my smart phone in the pool.  Despite my best efforts, it died. 

While the withdrawal was noticeable, I didn't get the shakes or anything...but after dropping the phone at the repair place 90mi away, they told me it was toast, DRT.  The bad part was realizing all the data, critical stuff, that was stored there, and only there because the program does not sync between devices.

DH said I could have his phone (twin to mine) after he got himself a Nexus 6.  I figured this was fine, as I like the Galaxy class phones, and I also got the truck when we traded in the van, so I wasn't gonna complain that he got a new phone!

I finally got in touch with the phone repair fools and asked then to mail me the dead phone and I would pay postage. 

They called me back shortly, saying they had mailed it back and that it was unexpectedly working! Yay!

Yes, my Galaxy S4 is back from the dead and ready to party!

Now I just have to copy down all the critical files by hand and lock it in the document safe...

3' high, and rising...

My creek overfloweth.  Yes, we have a small creek at the very back of our property.  With the copious amounts of rain in the last 24hrs, the creek is running high, as is the drainage in the back, and the pond overflows (three of them) on the road in to our house.  I'm not sure I will be going anywhere today, as DH took my truck into work today, and the Honda just doesn't have the ground clearance to risk it flooding into the car. 

Meanwhile, I'll be in the shop, building an ark!

Calm before the storm

I sit here in a quiet home, looking out the front dining room window at the clouds and sunrise, having heard the Canada geese earlier this morning as they flew down to the ponds out front.  My coffee, still hot, in its insulated mug.

Not a lot is on tap for today, other than the impending delivery of a refrigerator.  It should be here in about 15min according to the driver.  That's why I am sitting here in the dining room looking out my front window, and not out back on the pool deck.

After having lived in the second house off of a major in-town 4-lane road, I have forgotton how quiet, quiet can be!  I can hear the songbirds out back singing of the impending spring, and of today's storms inbound.  I can hear the soft tick-tick of the library ceiling fan.  What I cannot hear is the whine of traffic, the rumble of big trucks, and the scream of the PD/FD sirens.  Thirteen years of living next to that much noise, I had become used to it.  Numb to it.

Besides the various feathered wildlife, so far we have only seen the next  door neighbor's well fed cats.  There's a standard orange tabby, and a black and white blotchy one.  I think they are friendly--they certainly seem to enjoy exploring my yard!  What a rude shock they will be in for this coming weekend, when my babies, all 90# apiece, of Ridgeback, show up and invade the neighborhood!  We are building a nice large dog run for them in the side yard,  but cats have little respect for fences...they will learn, though!

A short while later, and the fridge is delivered and installed.  In a day, they said, it will be cold enough for use.  The delivery guys were lucky they got here early.  The storms are growing in strength, having already set off the tornado sirens in Tarrant County (Ft Worth area), and it's not even 9:00am yet.  Hopefully, all we will see here is the rain.  My morning is still calm and peaceful.  I hope it remains so.

I'm so tired, my hair hurts!

This week has been a selling, buying, moving out and moving in kind of week.  Today we finally managed to vacate our old house and clean it.  This involved a 26' Ryder lift gate truck, a concrete crew (God bless them!), and an 1100# metal box...oh, and a storage unit full of furniture.

After clearing out the house, we went to the storage units and DH, the Monkeys and I emptied one unit into the 26' truck, and our small trailer.

Then we drove all the way to our new place, and off loaded the Ryder truck, so DH could drive all the way down to Farmers Branch after 8pm to return the truck.  That's about a 2:30hr drive, down.  I don't know yet if he is getting a motel for the night, or if he is driving another 2:30 hrs back home.  Mind you, he got up at 03:30 this morning!

So yeah, we are a little bit worn out!  And there are still two more storage units to clear out...