Tag Archives: rain

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Kars for Kids. I hear their two octaves too high jingle every morning at 5:45 AM. I know this because almost without fail it comes on the satellite radio station I’m listening to almost precisely when I’m starting to shave. Mercifully the throat it makes me want to slit is not my own. I have no idea what organization Kars fronts for nor do I know what portion of funds raised go to support their good cause of the day. It doesn’t really matter because with their deeply agitating icepick-in-the-ear method of early morning advertising if they were providing free food for life to every kid in America.

2. Getting wet. Spending two hours milling around a parking lot is bad enough by itself. Add a heavy does or rain and you to spend the rest of the day squishing around in sodden shoes. Here’s a pro tip for you – having a pair of dry socks is important, but dry socks don’t mean a damn think when you’re sticking them back into waterlogged boots. Lesson most definitely learned.

3. Thursday. Why on earth isn’t Thursday the day before the weekend starts. Instead, it’s mostly just Monday #4 and I hate it for that.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Fall foliage. I live in the woods… but not the deep woods. That’s a plan for the future. After a couple of days of wind and rain I’m reminded that I have neighbors. For the first time since mid-May I’m starting to see them again. Well, not “them” exactly, but certainly their houses. I’m deeply happy with my little plot of land, but at this time of year I’d be ok with another hundred yards – or maybe a few more miles – of trees between me and the next guy.

2. Rain is the new snow. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve seen any rain to speak of. I know it must be a frightening and unnatural experience for everyone. I know this because for the last two days everyone has driven like there was eight inches of new-fallen snow on the roads. If nothing else, it has served to reinforce my long-held belief that most people are idiots. As usual, though, it’s probably all my fault for having even the lowest of expectations of my the average man on the street.

3. Draftees. As the American Army, the most decisive fighting force ever fielded in history, is drawing itself down to the pre-World War II levels, the Russian president is drafting an extra 150,000 of his citizens into military service. Let that sink in for a minute. In terms of troops in active service, that will put Russia within spitting distance of parity in manpower. Figure in their increased pace of modernization and the simple fact that they don’t have to move their personnel across an ocean to get at many of the world’s current “areas of interest,” and in my humble opinion, this brave new world of our is going to look very familiar… almost like the one we left in the early 1990s. Talk about back to the future.

Breaking eggs…

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Today was largely the part of the project where we shatter the eggs in hopes of making an omelette at a later date. Lots of concrete came out. Lots of shrubbery went away. The air conditioner is, somewhat precariously, perched a foot higher waiting on the backfill to arrive tomorrow. The window well is cleaned out and ready to be reset. Basically three guys did in eight hours something that would have taken me three months to plow through a few hours at a time. Is it worth the cost? Probably. But that doesn’t make it any less humbling.

Tomorrow the real digging is going to start. Trenching will crisscross the yard in an effort to redirect every possible drop away from the house. Combined with the improved elevation that should theoretically resolve most of what ails this particular side of the house. For the time being I’ll be satisfied with that – even while knowing there’s at least that much work to do in the front at some point.

Still, I’m willing to call the first day a success… even if the actual heavy lifting is yet to come. All in the name of a dry basement.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. You drink too much coffee. So you say. That’s purely a matter of opinion, but in a world where I’m not allowed to smoke, where all food should be salt-less, carbs are off limits, red meat is the devil, and cake is a hanging offense, I don’t care what your opinion about my coffee intake is. Too much joy has been sucked out of life for me to willingly give up my all-day infusion of warm, roasted, caffeine-laden goodness. Sure, maybe it would extend my life a few years… but is it a life worth living if you’re stuck drinking nothing but water and eating nothing but sprouts and granola? Feels like a decent trade off to me, so you can go ahead and stow your objections to coffee.

2. Primary Season. Every week we seem to find a few more would-be-candidates wandering onto the field of electoral combat. I know it’s primary season here in America and that’s what happens. That doesn’t mean I have to be the least bit interested in anything they’re saying at this point. I’m an educated voter and so far all I can really tell you is there’s a brain surgeon, a socialist, a guy who wants to make us use the metric system, Hillary Clinton, and a bunch of other people whistle-stopping around the country trying to scrape up enough money to stay on the road for another few weeks. There will be more of them before the field starts to winnow – then maybe I’ll start paying a bit of attention. Until then the whole conversation – the left-on-left, right-on-left, and right-on-right hypocrisy – is just too thick to warrant giving them any serious thought.

3. Rain. I spent a lot of the last three weeks complaining that the yard needed rain and was in danger of turning into my own mini-dustbowl. I was wrong. Now that the rain has come and (mostly) gone I’ve been giving myself a crash course of rainwater diversion and storm water management. Talk about things they don’t teach you in school. Well, they don’t teach them to history majors anyway. So far, my plan of attack seems to require a combination of roofers, heavy equipment operators, landscapers, air conditioning repairmen, and possibly a general contractor, soil specialist, and hydraulic engineer. All of these are skills I could probably learn myself given an unlimited amount of time, but as things stand I’m not willing to wait that long to bring good order and discipline to the free flowing surface water that finds its way into the back yard every time more than a light mist falls.

Wet spot(s)…

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I’ve been waiting on a good hard rain to get a look at how water flows around certain parts of the yard. That rain was delivered early this morning, so I missed the live show, but it left plenty of evidence for me to ponder when I got home after work. The bit of diversion I did in front seems to have done the trick. It’s not a permanent solution, but it bought time. My little back yard diversion worked as planned, but also revealed that water wasn’t just sloshing against the foundation and door sill from an ill-placed downspout. The sidewalk slab in that spot has subsided enough to channel some amount of water flowing off the hill and through my back yard. Even with how hard it rained last night it didn’t appear to be what anyone might call a flood, but there was enough residual water on the garage floor nine hours later to make it obvious that it was something more than a drip… and explains why that door and sill were rotted to the point of needing to be replaced before closing. Correcting the drainage situation in that part of the yard has definitely jumped up a few spots on my list of major projects to undertake.

I knew coming in that this was a “wet” lot and a damp area in general. From walking around I’d be willing to bet there’s more than one underground spring within a quarter mile of the house – probably far closer. The basement block is nicely coated with Drylok, which seems to have done a respectable job so far. The corners I was most worried about appeared to be dry this evening, although there was one unexpected spot on the basement slab where hydraulic pressure looked like it was doing its thing.

None of it is cause to make me want to dig out the back yard tomorrow, but nobody likes being in the wet spot so it’s something I’ll have to make right at some point sooner rather than later.

The art and science of the commute…

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I think of myself as a fairly seasoned driver. I cut my commuting teeth on the DC beltway, it’s safe to assume there isn’t much traffic can throw at me that I haven’t experienced before. A 90 minute delay because the drawbridge was open? Check. Snow-induced gridlock on 95? Done it. Five hour office to home drives because a tractor trailer hauling gasoline fell off an overpass? Yep. Run a line of red lights at 5 AM on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast because certain unsavory characters got a little too close? Did that too. Snow, sleet, hail, rain, wind, all manner of natural factors have conspired against my daily commute at one point or another and I’ve bested all of them.

It’s been a long time since I’ve run the beltway gauntlet and you’d think that living in the backwoods of Ceciltucky would leave me free of most of the urban and suburban commuting hazards I faced while fighting my way into and away from the District every day. Commuting is an art and a science, but the one thing making the drive down 95 every morning prepared me for was the complete asshattery of the people who stop in the middle of the road during a driving rain storm. I don’t mean that they slow to a crawl. I mean they come to a full and complete stop right there in the travel lane as if nothing could have prepared them for the sight of liquid falling from the sky.

Look, if you need to pull off to the side and wait it out, good on ya. God bless. But for the love of Pete can we at least agree that stopping in the middle of the road, when by your own actions you’re admitting that visibility is less than ideal, is a very bad idea? And if, for some unknown reason, you do feel compelled to stop in the middle of the road, how about cutting the rest of use a break and flipping on your hazard lights so we have a fighting chance of seeing you before your cute little toy car becomes my hood ornament. Yeah. That would be just great.

Oh. And I had to drive over a tree today. A tree. Right there in the middle of the road. That was a first in 19 years of being a licensed driver. Surely that adds something to my cachet as a recognized power commuter… like earning my “Rural Living” merit badge.

Some days leaving the house serves no purpose other than reminding me why I do it as little as possible.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Nature. I’ve never made any bones about not being a hippy tree hugger. I like the idea of the outdoors… as long as it’s neat, and orderly. Wandering around in the woods looking for a place to poop isn’t high on my list of things to do without a damned good reason. I like to think of it as the difference between enjoying an English garden and enjoying the rain forest. Both have their role to play in the great scheme of things, but I really only need to be involved with one of them. Being a practical man, I know that I need nature to cooperate with me from time to time, though. Basically, what I need it to do is stop throwing thunderstorms around every afternoon so I can get some stuff done outside. Stupid nature. Why can’t we control that foolishness yet?

2. Lunch. I use to enjoy a wide range of lunch options – assuming you consider a score of fast food joints and gas station sandwich shops different enough to count as “a range.” Part of my furlough survival plan was to reduce the cost of lunch by bring it from home. It doesn’t sound like much at first blush, but $200 odd bucks a month adds up respectably over a few months. Now that I’m bringing chow from home, I’m thoroughly bored with everything. I’m philosophically opposed to being one of those people that brings in home cooked leftovers to reheat for lunch (throwing good food in the microwave is pretty much on step above reheating it on the engine manifold – sure it’s warm, but it probably tastes like ass), the options do tend to dwindle. There are only so many ways to be creative with salads and sandwiches when you don’t run your own deli counter or just happen to keep a lot of exotic ingredients on hand. When this furlough is over, I may never touch finely sliced roast turkey breast again. Ever.

3. Shipping. I’ve never exactly been known for my patience and I’ve been spoiled by features like Amazon Prime that default all of my purchases to 2nd day delivery. For a few dollars more, I can arrange for an item to be at the house in less than 24 hours. That’s the kind of service that makes me happy. Then there are the surprising number of things I order online that don’t have an Amazon Prime-like option for rapid shipping. They want to take my money, wait two or three days, and then get around to shipping my item by standard mail so it will take an extra three or four days to arrive safely on my doorstep. Maybe it’s just me but a seven day interval between flash and bang feels a bit like an eternity. They say patience is a virtue. Apparently “they” are idiots.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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It’s Thursday night… and that means it’s time again for your regular installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. In no particular order, here we go…

1. Ron Paul. As much as he’d like to roll back the clock, it’s not 1789. The Constitution and the laws have to be expansive enough to deal with the real world, not the loony tunes world you’ve created in your own head. It’s not ideal, but I’d rather have TSA running security at the check in line than turn that mission over to Blackwater. Guaranteeing free and secure movement around the country is a compelling national interest and belongs in the purview of the federal government, you cranky old coot.

2. Rain. Enough already. Between pansy hurricanes and tropical storm remnants, it’s been raining more or less for two weeks with occasional pauses to regroup, reinforce, and start raining again. It’s really time to knock it off for a while. Since the dogs still won’t go out unless I go with them, this is becoming a priority as getting soaked to the bone two or three times a night is no longer a sustainable solution.

3. People who over-share personal information. I don’t need a running narrative about whatever you happen to be doing over there. I don’t care that you think oysters are disgusting. And I absolutely, positively don’t need or want to know the fascinating medical history of your family and the trials and tribulations of elder care. We happen to share office space, I promise you that doesn’t mean we need to share our deepest, darkest secrets… mkay? Thanks now.

4. Apple. Yeah, I said it. Apple. Release the damned iPhone 5 already. I’ve got money and I want to give it to you.

Adding it up…

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Heavy rain + dogs = wet dogs + wood floor + shaking dry = skating rink + wet dogs banging into everything + dripping dry = entire house smelling like wet dog = not cool.

I always thought I’d like having wood floors, but I think I’ve been disabused of that notion. Carpet has its limitations, but in the end I can douse it with powder or Fabreze, run the Dyson over it and it’s good as new. Oddly, the wood floor only seems to encourage the wet dogs getting excited and sliding headlong into everything in the house. Letting the carpet suck up that wet dog funk and then covering it up seems much more practical, because let’s be honest, the chances of my mopping the entire house on a Tuesday night are slim to none. At least with carpet you can’t really see how bad things are. Ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

Telling tales about the end of the world…

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I was really warmed up to take the worst that Mother Nature could dish out… and as usual, Mother Nature turns out to mostly be a pansy. Her worst, at the moment, would appear to be denying me access to cable television and high speed Internet. Both of these are annoyances to be sure, but not quite the mayhem and chaos we had been promised earlier in the week.

I know there are flooded basements, trees downed, and homes lost out there, but for most of us in the all-Irene-all-the-time news cycle, all this experience has really served to do is reinforce the already strong notion that weather is almost always over-hyped and under performing. That’s a pity, because the time in the future when calls of imminent destruction go out and it’s not just a drill, most of us are going to shrug, go on about our business, and think we’ve seen it all before.

There’s got to be a better way to handle these things than the media going crazy and making every story a tale of the end of the world…