Scattered Thoughts . . .

P arts of downtown Waterbury are under water again.  There are photos of this all over Facebook but I don't want to share other people's photos on my blog so you'll need to find the photos on Facebook.  In addition to extensive property damage to homes that were damaged just last July, there are significant road closures mostly due to the roads being washed out.  Some of the road closures are to keep people out of the areas that are still under water. Below is a map of northern Vermont showing the road closures.  As you can see, there is a big concentration of road closures in Waterbury.   At the moment, the status of our barbeque scheduled for Saturday is unknown.  Liza and Whitney are both trapped with no way to get out of there immediate area.  This may change by later today or tomorrow but, for now, they cannot go anywhere. We had some water in the house at a known roof leak.  Actually, it is a leak around the furnace flue.  Every fe...

W e're having a fairly big barbeque on Saturday for all the combined summertime birthdays so all the grandchildren will be here.  As luck would have it, about a week before we are having people over to eat some food, our oven broke.  After waiting on parts to arrive and for me to squeeze in some time and effort in fixing it, we finally have a working oven again. We've been sort of neglecting the oven since COVID so it needed some work.  In order to replace this part, I had to disassemble quite a bit of the oven.  While I had the oven disassembled, I decided to give it a good cleaning too.  We can actually see through the glass door now!   This was a last minute task for today before dinner.  I was only about 30 minutes late with dinner tonight so this task wasn't too time consuming.  It was a pretty dirty and disgusting task though. Most of the day was spent programming my large scale steam locomotive.  I've spent quite a bit of time on ...

Let's start with the good stuff.  Unlike many people who live along the Winooski River, as well as some other rivers in other areas, our home did not suffer from any flooding.  Our home is still intact, standing and in relatively good condition so that is very good news.  Sheila is working from home for the foreseeable future but we expected that to happen.  Montpelier was devastated due to catastrophic flooding.  Sheila's office building fared relatively well through the flooding but, since the entire downtown area is in recovery mode, they don't need people driving in and parking in areas that are in full recovery mode.  They would only get in the way.  Consequently, Sheila will continue to work from home for the foreseeable future.   On a sidenote, we've also heard of a few buildings in downtown Montpelier being condemned.  This will make the recovery significantly more difficult and more prolonged.   We had a couple of powe...

Two lines of severe thunderstorms rolled through our area last night just a couple of days after catastrophic flooding.  This threatened a repeat of the flooding only hours after most of the flooding at receded.   There is no doubt that there were severe thunderstorms in these two lines of severe weather but it just barely clipped us.  Most of the severe weather was slightly north of us.  We got about an inch of rain and the sky was like a midwestern light show of constant lightning and rumbling thunder.   I've lived all across the country and I have to say that the most common thunderstorms in the midwest are what would be considered very severe thunderstorms in the northeast.  These common midwestern thunderstorms are ominous with lightning every second or two, heavy downpours, damaging hail, ferocious wind, with constant rumbling of thunder.  Last night, it was easy to tell that this type of weather was in our area but, fortunately, the tr...

This has been a very strange winter. After a little bit of snow the other night, last night the temperature warmed up into the 40s and we had driving, pouring rain all night long. The rain was coming down so hard that it kept me awake most of the night.  Why would rain keep me awake? The back section of our house is covered with a tarp because the roof needs to be replaced... roofing joists as well as the roofing material. It is in bad shape requiring demolition and rebuilding. My health has not really been well enough to tackle this enormous project so we are just waiting for my health and the weather to be in sync so we can repair/rebuild this section of the house. In the meantime, whenever we have heavy rain or heavy snow, I am constantly expecting the worst. As Sheila drove to work this morning, she noticed flooding in all the fields. Actually, the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning and the flood stage was in the "Action" stage. Common sense ...