High and Dry

We got about 18" of rain in about 30 hours. The weekend was a wee bit soggy. Here are some pictures.

Looking North from our porch.

You can hear the river rushing from our porch (something you can't normally do).

Barn.

There is a very wet John Deere in there somewhere. We could barely see the steering wheel and exhaust pipe.

The North end of Boxley Valley Road.
There is a fence on the left side of the street that is completely under water. I can zoom in to the full size picture and see that the water at the end of the street is only about 4" to 6" down from the bottom of the stop sign. Our neighbors, who own the pasture across the street, can only access their home via boat. The blackberry farm is underwater.

Other than a wet basement (which had little to do with the flood, and more to do with a tennis ball being stuck in the corrugated pipe) we stayed high and dry and fared pretty well.

Aravis's First Giggles

Bumper Crop

With all of white flowers now in bloom, were bound to have a banner year with our strawberries. The asparagus was looking good, too, but we paid someone to cut our grass and he took care of that for us. But the story of the year has to be the dandelions. These are absolutely EVERYWHERE.

If only they were a little more life-sustaining. Or at least tasty.

Hay Goat (where you goin' with that gun in your hand)

I was doing some ruminating while cleaning out the goat barn (sharp ones will notice the pun in that last comment). Goats are notorious for wasting hay. But its way more fascinating than just that; goats actually defy the law of conservation of mass. If you feed a goat one bale of hay, they will scatter two bales of hay on the floor right below the feeder, and the empirical evidence dotted all over the yard indicates that they ate something along in the line, too.

This discovery is not quite as revolutionary as the invention of the flux capacitor, but almost. Who needs the Large Hadron Collider?

Cherry Blossoms!

And what a cute one she is!

Hello there cutie with the pig-tails!

BTW, that's a balloon (mylar mom- no worries) attached to her pig-tail. She enjoyed having it follow her around:)

The latest addition (or is it edition?)

Aravis

"The Crew"

Snowmageddon

Just a few pics here to show the immensity of 'Snowmageddon' this past week. I was off work all week (okay, I could have gone in Friday, but there was already a late arrival and unscheduled leave policy in place- and I already had today off as an AWS day anyway and had plans- Oh, and we have President's day off too [start government worker jokes here]).

Geena's height compared to the walls of snow (she's on the sidewalk to our front door).



The 'Man Machine' and the snowblower:) My neighbor let me borrow his- saved me a whole day of shoveling and a lot of Ibuprofen.



Geena likes icicles:)

So simple, a caveman can do it?

The DC Roberts' haven't posted in a while- which means me. So, I will post at least two articles to show you what we've been up to.

First, we decided for MLK weekend we would get our 46" LED TV mounted on the wall. Should be simple- screw a few things in the TV, screw a few things in the wall, hang TV. We've had the bracket and TV since late Sept., at least we're finally getting around to it. Well, that wasn't all that had to get screwed.

The bracket was made to modern building code, 16" between studs. Our 1954 Rambler wasn't, 24" b/w studs. So, I opted for the most difficult and dumbest solution, install a new stud (I already had one anyway from the basement demolition project). Here are the before, during and after shots. I still need to mud up the back wall, but we'll eventually 'get around to it'- hopefully before guests arrive.

Spotted: Short-haired Snaggletoothicus

Here is the evidence presently available to confirm the sighting:

(It was a little funny seeing a mass of Timnah's curls in an envelope labelled, "Baby's First Haircut.")