Weeds Flourish

Today's twelve hours of incessant, non-stop rain are finally over.  Each hour of the hour-by-hour forecast was for 100% chance of rain, and that forecast was correct.  It was raining from when my alarm clock went off this morning until about an hour ago.

Now the forecast is for snow overnight, Atlanta's greatest existential dread.  It'll probably already have melted off by the time I get up tomorrow, but someone in the city will have already driven a truck into a power pole, someone else will have abandoned their car in the middle of the in-town interstate highway, and traffic won't recover until about mid- next week.   That's how we roll down here when it snows.

The good news is that after the snow passes through we're going to have at least three days of not rain. The sun might even come out on Saturday, but at least this streak of rain has stopped.  Of course, after three non-rainy days, it's supposed to start raining again.

But even better, my kitchen didn't flood this time.  Water had been getting in when the rain got so intense that the gutters overflowed and dumped water right at the back door.  I cleaned the gutters but that didn't help.

I got up on a ladder yesterday to get a close look at what was happening.  The gutter over the back door is supposed to direct water away from the door and toward the downspout, but for some reason the flow was going in the wrong direction and toward the door, not toward the downspout.  Then, when the gutter filled with water during peak rainfall, it would overflow and rainwater got in beneath the door and into my kitchen.  

I cleaned the gutter again to make sure that nothing was impeding the flow toward the downspout, and then I drove in a few more nails to keep the gutter from sagging in the wrong direction when the weight of water got too heavy.  When I was done with that, I rolled up a few trusty t-shirts and tightly packed them at the base of the back door in case my little engineering project didn't work.  

It did, or at least the kitchen didn't flood, but I don't know if it was because of my improvements or simply because the rain, while persistent, was never intense enough to completely fill the gutters.  Still, the t-shirt were damp by the end of the day - not saturated like on Tuesday but wet enough to indicate that some water had still gotten through.  

Hopefully, we'll finally get a window of clear weather soon so that my contractor can come in and finally replace the roof.  I've "only" been waiting a week, but with the tension of the flooding and the general unpleasantness of the weather, it's felt like an eternity.

Zen Master Dogen would remind me that flowers, while cherished, fade and weeds, although despised, flourish.