For the most part, the standing water we had in the backyard is gone except for a few spots. Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day and it really helped to dry things up. We still had to wear our rubber boots however, as the ground was squishy. As you can see in the photo here, today is starting out a lot differently than yesterday. It’s warm at 62 degrees F at 7:30 am but the weather forecast is dismal. Rain, wind, the possibility of strong storms, tornados, and hail all exist today. In our area, the Gulf Coast, we can get weather from the West and South at the same time. Warm air moving from the South in the Gulf can interact with cold air from the West and can give us some wild weather here. It looks as if today is the day. At least this is what the weather experts tell us. Weather is a fickle thing. Science has learned a lot about it throughout history and yet there’s still so much we don’t know. Forecasts are based on hard science and guess work. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don’t. The best we can do is wait to see what happens.

Yesterday Barb decided to try something new in the kitchen. She made wild rice meatballs and we had them with our homemade fettuccini and alfredo sauce. Wow! This was great! The meatballs had the nutty flavor of the wild rice which blended perfectly with the noodles and sauce. And there’s enough left over for tonight!

I could be better at cooking than I am, if I took the time to work at it. If I got really good at it, I’d wind up weighing 400 pounds. I like to cook, and I like to eat, but I gain weight easily. In September 2019 I started a diet and lost 50 pounds in 4 1/2 months. I had gotten too heavy and needed to lose the weight. Since then, I’ve done well at keeping it off. I’m 5′ 9″ and weigh 160 pounds. But I have to be careful. I really need to watch what I eat, and how much. Such is life.

We’re still working on our back porch, trying to seal the opening between the porch and the house. The porch was built without attaching it to the house. Who knows why, but that’s the way it is. Yesterday we put up a new piece of flashing, under the first one we put up, with one edge bent up and the whole thing pushed up under the overhang of the house. With the rain coming today, we’ll get the chance to see how well it’s going to work. If it works, and we stop the leaking, then we can get on with the rest of our plans for the porch which include putting in a solid floor over the deck boards, and the wall board and a ceiling. Eventually we want to have electricity and heat and air conditioning for those sweltering Texas summers. So bring on the rain and we’ll see what happens.

And The Rains Cometh

Well the rain came, just as they said it would. It’s now Tuesday, January 9th, the sun is shining and it’s a lot cooler than yesterday. By 3:00 in the afternoon yesterday, it was 76 degrees F and the dewpoint was at 70. Warm and humid, just the way a January day should be. We only had 6/10ths of an inch here at home, but some areas got way more than that. The sky turned black, there was lightning and thunder, a good old-fashioned thunderstorm. The heat was brought on by a warm front which was crossed by a cold front soon after, a recipe for thunderstorms. There are several sunny days forecast for the rest of the week. Maybe our yard will dry out.

Well, the porch still leaks. Not as much as it did, but it’s proving to be an enigma. We just can’t seem to find the source of the leak. And the stray cats in the neighborhood are still getting under the house. We’re working to find a way to keep them out and we’ll keep you posted. Most houses around here don’t have basements and therefore critters can get under them through the smallest cracks. This means crawling around in the crawl space on our knees and finding holes, and plugging them somehow. Oh boy!

That’s all there is for the time being. We have our projects, and they will get accomplished eventually. Everything takes time.