Hurricane Hilary and Daily Life #MondayBlogs

Well, it’s definitely not poetry today! 🙂 My tiny slice of the California desert experienced a tropical storm last weekend, from Hurricane Hilary moving through Baja.

In places accustomed to weather, or even just some regular rain, the storm itself would have been inconsequential. But, in a desert, we just can’t seem to absorb rain. Even more ridiculous, the new homes going in behind us decided to grade their properties four feet higher than the rest of us, and not include drainage. When you have the high ground – after you’ve created it for yourself – I guess you decide that drainage is someone else’s problem.

So, we had a bit more than one year’s worth of rainfall in six hours. As the rain overwhelmed the perfectly serviceable drainage space in our yard, we realized that our sandbags weren’t going to keep the mud out of the house. At that point, we had to start scooping buckets of water out of the patio and yard and carrying them to the street.

We had 5-gallon buckets. I stopped counting after I had schlepped 30 of them. By then, the water at the front of the house – where we hadn’t had a problem – was up to my knees. For the record, I am pretty short. But knee-deep water still gets my attention. The morning after, my muscles screamed at me in a way they hadn’t since I used to life heavy weights recreationally.

Thank goodness for those friends who are family to us. When we called to ask for advice, they just hopped in a truck and came over with a pump. Once there were five of us at work, we managed to stay ahead of the water enough to keep it out of the house. We were lucky, and our neighborhood in general was fairly lucky.

All that said, I think I would prefer to stick with my earthquakes (we had one of those during the storm, too, just for added fun) than throw hurricanes into the mix.

We had family events this week, following last weekend’s chaos, so it is only now we are really able to assess and start our clean-up. With all of that, poetry didn’t really come to my mind this week. Still, we found some hilarity in the situation as we went through it. Especially when disaster was averted.

I hope all of you are well, and safe. Blessings to you all.

Some footage from the news: Hilary Aftermath: Aug. 20 11 p.m. Update – YouTube