tree vs garage

We've had quite a bit of a storm here this last week. I didn't go home on Wednesday or Thursday but when I popped in quickly to pick up some stuff on Friday this is what I found. Seems the big ole pine tree couldn't take it anymore and gave our garage a big hug. Underneath that tree is the old mailbox that got creamed twice by the highway, that thing's a magnet for disaster! At least it pulled the tree toward the garage, it could have been a lot worse and hit the house.

The tree snapped when it hit the garage, still it's twonked the dormer pretty good and jacked that half of the roof and snapped off our stovepipe chimney.

It also jacked the cyclone fence and did some damage to the garage doors too. Nothing too bad.

Amazingly there wasn't any water damage inside the studio above the garage! I nailed up some tarps and everything still seems good.

Because we hadn't complained to our neighbor about the tree it has to come off our insurance and we have a $1K deducible :(

We're working hard on getting it all tidied up and fixed up as soon as possible before it starts raining again. I got to play with my chainsaw for a bit and the people renting the house where the tree used to live came down and chainsawed a lot of stuff too.

2009 - 2010 rainfall: 49.68"

July 1st marks the end of the rainfall season and this year was much better than last year. Last year we got 35" of rain, this year we had 15" more with a total of 49.68. We had some really heavy storms with over 12" in a 24 hour period and some prolonged time of rain, but nothing we couldn't handle.

Weather Station

I've posted data from our weather station before but I'm not sure I've posted about the weather station. It's an Oregon Scientific WMR968 and we've had it for over 5 years now. Just before its first birthday the rain gauge stopped working but they replaced it for free, since then it's worked flawlessly.

The mount for it outside is made from iron pipe segments and bolted to the side of the house. I'm not super sure the wind readings are accurate, nor the temperature either (the temperature sensor is mounted in the shade under the overhand) but I get the feeling the hot air from the side of the house skews it a little. The rain measurements are spot on too (since we check them with a regular EZ Read rain gauge).

One day I'll get round to hooking it up to my computer and uploading the data to the weather underground. I've had an experimental version of it working in the past, I've just never run a serial line to the place where the head unit is.

More pictures in this gallery.

Rain Rain Rain

Hey check it out, if you're reading this at http://www.24351.com/ then over there on the right you'll see a little graph. That's our rainfall info for the season! I'll reset it July 1st and post summary graphs here. Not much going on, we've got almost 40 inches of rain so far this year. It's been much rainier than the last few years but still quite far off our record (60 inches).

10.5 Inches!

Today we got 10.5 Inches of rain in 24 hours, can you believe that? That's the most rain in one day we've ever, ever got. The storm was perfectly timed since it started around midnight which is when our weather station starts counting a new day (It can't do random 24 hour periods until I finally hook it up to our home server and then publish it on wunderground.com). You'll be happy to hear I finished sealing the edges on the roof of the woodshed just 12 hours earlier and the poor thing stood up great to the barrage of rain. It wasn't too windy and my gutter worked great keeping quite a lot of water off the retaining wall. We also got another half inch the next day which was just miserable and not impressive.

Rainfall 2008/2009

July 1st marks the start of a new rainfall season (even though we hopefully won't get some rain for a few months). Last year we got 35.61 inches of rain. Not bad, but also not our worst. one year we got 60 inches of rain, that was the year our downhill neighbors lost a bit of their driveway to a landslide.

Here's a chart of the rainfall over the winter.

The pool is warm enough

The weather's been lovely for 2 days, the water has been circulating around the solar panels for a week and today the pool is officially warm enough to swim in. It was great!

Not much else been happening around the house. I've been working on clearing out the brush down on the terrace behind the pool, it's slow going when you can only chip wood with the wood chipper when my daughter is awake. There's also a huge old rotten log that's about 3 ft in diameter I'm slowly working my way through to get out of the way. I'm trying to get the whole area ready for her to explore around and perhaps make some swings in the big trees and perhaps a tree house and also my big goals for a huge deck at BOTH ends of the pool, but that mostly depends on if we're going to remodel the house or not.

Soon it's going to be time to install a new pool filter which is going to be a big adventure.

I guess it doesn't look like we'll get much more measurable rain so I'll document how much rain we got so far this year: 32 inches. not bad, but nothing compared to the 60 inches we got a few years ago.

Crazy Storm

We just recovered from a super crazy storm! We got over 10 inches of rain including 7" in just one day. The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down in rushing rising rivulets! and the wind huffed and puffed but did not blow our house down. The wind did blow down a big tree in our neighbors yard, mercifully it only crushed their cyclone fence and blocked the driveway a bit. They cleared it out so we could pass and then cleared it properly 2 days later. I did go down to help them clear it, but I fired up my chainsaw and realized my chain was blunt, so went back to the house to put a new chain on, finally found it and installed it and by the time I got back it was raining and they were almost done (whee!).

We lost power early on in the storm and didn't get it back for around 60 hours. It worked out pretty good now we have our generator but since it's so small we can't use the generator for our electric stove or our electric hot water. Boiling water on the wood stove is kinda easy and we took a trip into wifey's office to take a shower which worked out well. Baby was running around the office completely starkers, good job it was the weekend! We had the status number on speed dial and called often, it's maddening to have the time to restoration keep being pushed back and last we heard they said they'd have more info Wednesday, so I didn't even flip the switch to have the power come back on during the night, then I call at 2AM on Monday morning to see if thy have a new estimate and the robot asks me what kind of outage I have. Oh joy! I run out to flip the big switch and sure enough, we have power! It's such a great feeling to have made it through another outage and we're getting so good at it now it's starting to feel less like a big deal. One of our faraway neighbors still had their generator running well into the next day, I wonder if they too really had power, but just didn't know it yet?

I found myself pondering the problem that the electric company has to solve when scheduling the crews to fix the outages, I imagine it's a pretty interesting problem and wonder how automated it is? You need to get the most people online as quickly as possible but need to factor in access to the places to fix, how easy they are to fix and also merge in incoming outage information too, fascinating!

In other news, the initial pool work was done and turned out cheaper than expected and looks awesome, I'm very, very happy with it! I pulled out all the old conduit and it looks much tidier now. I'm going to wait until winter is over before replacing the filter. I might even do that myself now the hard work is done. I don't think we'll even end up getting a pool sweep installed, but it's always an option.