Our friend Christopher was in town this weekend, and we always try to find something interesting to do with him. Jen found that there was a John Waters exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which got all of us excited. The show is mainly his 2D work, stills he’s taken of television screens, playing with the juxtaposition of popular culture and stuff he’s created. There was also some sculpture, some video work (a children’s table reading of Pink Flamingos, which was hilarious) and some adult material we, uh, had to talk Finley through when we left the show. The rest of the BMA was great, as usual–it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve been through there, too long–and we headed down the street afterwards to R House for some dinner.
Sunday I took advantage of some rare sunlight to get outside and fix the soffit on the end of the garage, which had come loose from the roof joists and was hanging off the edge. I propped it back up, washed all of the squirrel nest material out of it, and nailed it back into place. Then I sprayed some commercial moss killer on three sides of the garage roof to kill giant clumps of the shit that have been spreading. Hopefully it will make a difference. In the afternoon I got half of the tomato plants pulled and tossed into the neighbor’s yard (don’t tell him), cut the rest of them back, and organized the back of the greenhouse so I could store the lawn chairs for the winter. I emptied two of the three rain barrels, got the front lawn mowed, buffed out a bunch of scratches on the side of the CR-V (the paint looks good as new), and cleaned up the garage somewhat. There’s still more to do but it’s good to have gotten a start on fall.
On Sunday I got up and used the electric edger to clean up the front yard of the house, which took about two hours to wrangle into shape. I was only going to take care of the front but wound up walking around the back and doing the whole thing because I couldn’t leave 18″ tall weeds alive under the picnic table. As with mowing the day before it kicked my ass and I was mostly worthless the rest of the day. It was supposed to rain all weekend according to the weather-guessers but never did (and still hasn’t).
We pulled one of the Indian Stripes off the vine on Sunday (the one pictured yesterday) and Jen cut it open for Finley’s lunch today. I had a small slice and it was amazing. We sliced a bunch of the cherry tomatoes up for a cucumber/tomato/onion salad yesterday and it was delicious. Meanwhile there’s a Dagma that is one day away from being pulled and two Paul Robesons that are turning color. I’m already hatching plans to replace the plastic on the greenhouse, and switch the broken heater out with a commercial fan of some kind. Maybe I can fit two rows of tomatoes in there and just plant one bin of cucumbers.
We hired a neighbor kid to mow the lawn while I was laid up in the hospital, and apparently he did a decent job the first time. Jen had him use our mower, which is brand new and (thank god) starts on the first pull. He came back two weeks ago to do it again and left us underwhelmed with his attention to detail. After I’d gone over the whole yard with him, explained what I wanted him to do, and showed him all of the places to watch out for (imagining him chewing up my shiny new mower blade on rocks and roots and other obstacles) he sort of mowed the front lawn, most of the side lawn and about 2/3 of the back lawn. Left untouched were whole sections behind the greenhouse, under the living room window, and along the driveway.
Hesitantly, I texted him to come back and do the yard again. He dropped by on Friday, was able to get the mower out of the garage and do about eight lanes of the backyard before he jammed the pull-start mechanism and couldn’t get the mower running again. I told him to leave it and I’d fix it over the weekend.
I pulled the cover off this morning, freed up the mechanism, and mowed the whole fucking lawn myself. It’s not edged, because I’m tired out from the exertion, but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did after two weeks of rain. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be up to edging it for the first time since the beginning of July. I don’t think I’ll be requiring his services again. It’s too bad, because he’s a nice kid–worlds better than the Bro–but many cans short of a six-pack.
Meanwhile, the cucumbers have an infestation. The box fan I’d set up out there died about three weeks ago (it was an old, old fan) so there’s no real movement through the plants. There are now clouds of whiteflies who have taken up residence among the big leaves and are busily sucking the sap out of them. The cukes have grown up and into the tomato plants, seeking sunlight and space, so I cut a few of the most tangled up shoots out of the tomatoes and cleaned things up. Then I ordered an insecticidal soap from Amazon to battle them but it’s not going to be here until Wednesday. So I’m considering dragging the cucumber bins out of the greenhouse completely to save the tomato plants in the meantime. If it’s not critters, it’s bugs.
We’re doing a lower-key parade party this year–there’s only 60+ people RSVP’d, which means we’ll get 80–but that still means we have to get the house and yard spruced up. I busted my hump on Saturday getting the lawn shaped up with the new mower and repaired trimmer, painted the front of the garage, washed the front stairs, organized inside the garage, bagged brush and yard waste, and generally made the place look better. Last weekend I shattered the outside window of the front door with a rock when I was edging the walk, so I had to order a replacement unit in the hopes it will be here before the parade. In the meantime I knocked all of the loose tiny bits of glass out of the frame and vacuumed up everything I could see. It sucked being out in 103˚ heat all day, but the yard looks much better for it.
I took some time on Sunday to upgrade the compressor setup I bought from Bennett a few weeks ago. It’s a Craftsman 25 gallon/4HP unit, and dates back to the year I graduated college. It came with two hoses coupled to make one long one, and the first section was old and cracked. I pulled that off, replaced it with a junction and an inline water filter, then re-attached the second hose. I also picked up an inflation kit and filled Finn’s sumo balls to find where one of them was leaking, then aired up all the tires in the garage.
I’d also bought $40 air wrench, but failed to realize the drive size was 3/8″ (the tiniest available). This is not optimal but I’ve got 3/8″ sockets, so I dragged my old cast-iron kitchen sink from 620 South Lakewood out of the garage and used the air wrench to bolt the mounting plates to some reinforced lumber on the wall next to the rain barrel. I still can’t lift anything above 20 lbs. by myself, and I couldn’t barely lift that sink on my own on a good day, but with some added muscle on Parade Day we should be able to get it up off the ground and mounted to the wall.
My sunglasses have gone missing since Friday afternoon, when I went out to get us some lunch. I remember wearing them back to the house but after that the trail goes completely cold and they are in none of the normal places I would have stashed them. I go through phases like this where my systems work for six months or a year and then I have a spell where I lose things, which drives me NUTS. I developed a system for myself years ago that revolves around my messenger bag: Important stuff (keys, wallet, phone, sunglasses, notebook, camera, train ticket, headphones) go in the bag. If it comes out of the bag, it’s with me, and if I put it down, it goes back into the bag. This is how I’ve kept this pair of sunglasses since before Finn was born, and they are on their second set of lenses. They have been everywhere with me for years and now I feel like I’ve lost a limb. I hate to lose things, especially my everyday items. I feel like they have been stolen; I can’t think of where they might be.
I took a chance last weekend and ordered a used Airport Extreme base station to replace the one that got fried in the flood/storm a few weeks ago. I bought it on Amazon’s marketplace and hoped for the best. It arrived this evening and within about 5 minutes it was up and running in place of the old one in our living room. Immediately I noticed an improvement in the speed of our wireless network; the wireless router in the basement is just too old and slow to keep up with us. This will likely be the last inexpensive Apple router I ever buy, as they have just exited the marketplace completely (for reasons I still don’t understand).
I’ve got a few more tomatoes blooming in the greenhouse, but not as many as I’d like to see at this point (and for all the pollinating I’ve been doing). I’m sure bees do it better but I’ve been showing those plants some sexxxxy times and I’ve only got fruit on three of the six plants. Maybe I need to talk dirty to them. The cukes are just beginning to bloom as well, so in another day or so I can start pollinating them as well. In the meantime I dug out some old drip hose, switched out the connectors, and looped it around the bins. With a new electric timer it’s set to drip for 30 minutes every morning at 6AM which should be enough water to keep them happy while we’re gone on vacation. I’m testing it out tonight, and then I’ll disconnect it until the day before we leave–both rain barrels are full from the past couple of weeks and I want to keep using that water until it’s gone.
Sunday morning we got up early and headed out to Larriland for some cherry picking. We started in the tart cherry fields because Jen has a lot of baking she wants to do; the trees were absolutely laden with fruit. I’ve never seen cherry trees like that before. Within about a half an hour we had 14 pounds of cherries in two bags. Then we went and picked another 4 pounds of sweet cherries before calling it a day. We’d originally wanted to pick blackberries but the fields were closed Sunday, so hopefully Jen can carve a little time out during the week to go back.
We kicked our asses on the house in the afternoon. I mowed the lawn and then made a small repair to the carb on my gas edger, which I haven’t used for two seasons, and got that running again. Thank you internets! With that I cleaned up the backyard, cut way back into the pile of brush my dipshit neighbor has stopped mowing, and made the whole place look better again. We made a trip to Lowe’s and I bought some wood to replace a panel on the front of the garage, which has been rotting away for years, as well as replace the bench seat under Finn’s playset. Jen continued mulching and cleaning the beds, and then sat and pitted cherries until she couldn’t move her hands anymore.
The weekend was kind of a blur, partially from activity and partially from sloth. Friday night Jen went out with a friend so Finn and I met the neighbors at the ice cream parlor for dinner. Then we got some pizza and headed back to their house to hang out for a while and have some real food before wrapping up the evening.
Saturday it threatened to rain all day, and the forecast kept pushing thunderstorms back throughout the morning and afternoon so Jen and I made the best of things. I was able to mow and edge the whole lawn for the first time since I bought the new mower, and it made a huge difference. We went out for a truckload of mulch and some more soil, and while Jen started mulching the beds I transplanted six cukes to a separate container and transferred 3/4 of a rainbarrel to the one behind the greenhouse. I did a bunch of other errands and yardwork until about 5, and then we had our niece and nephew over for steaks and corn and beer.
Sunday was pretty much a bust; it started and stopped drizzling all day until about 3, when the heavens opened up completely. I was doing work at my desk for most of the afternoon but nobody was very motivated.
It looks like the forecast for camping weekend looks good so far; partly cloudy for Friday and sunny on Sunday. Fingers crossed…
This shot was taken about 4 hours before the rain started falling. It’s a beautiful afternoon in the yard, and I’d just dug through the basement to find my old Tonka trucks for Bear and Finn to play with in the sandbox. Jen had Ruby on a blanket next to them, and I left them to run out to Mariottsville for some tolls I was buying from Bennett. As I pulled out of the driveway, Jen was on her back lifting Ruby into the air, and a light sprinkle hit the windshield.
I took the day off today to finish up post-flood recovery. The basement is pretty clean. There’s still water around the edges of some low-laying tile, and the ice room still has a wet spot on the floor. It’s hard to dry out in 100% humidity. The Scout is loaded with a pile of trash waiting to go to the dump, and I could probably throw out more. I’ve got a bunch of stuff I’m going to Freecycle in the ice room and some stuff in the garage that needs to go, too. Maybe this weekend…
After I’d cleaned up as much as I could clean up in the house, I got to work on the greenhouse. I’d patched up some of the holes in the plastic a couple years ago, but time and weather did their thing and they all took a beating. I peeled the old stuff off, washed the plastic (it was filthy) and applied new patches to make it water tight again. I moved the old rickety water barrel platform to the back outside corner of the greenhouse and used my wort chiller pump (it’s still alive!) to transfer all the water in the barrel under the garage to a spare barrel up on the platform. Then I reconfigured some hoses to reach inside the greenhouse so there’s on-demand water available for the plants. We also moved them to the corner nearest the house to get maximum light. They all look pretty happy so far, although there really hasn’t been any sun since they were planted.
Then I started organizing my new toolbox. It’s a heavier-duty unit than the one I already had out there but a little smaller, so I got creative with organization. I inherited a ton of new crescent wrenches with the box, a lot of miscellaneous tools, and a bunch of crap socket sets. I’m going to give the old toolbox to Glenn, who doesn’t have one, for his garage.
The compressor I bought is a used Craftsman 25 gal. electric unit, in good shape, but with a ratty hose. When I get past the camping trip I’m going to pick up a cheapo Harbor Freight sandblasting kit and try cleaning up some of the spare parts I’ve got. It’s good to have air out there, though, because now I can get some air tools to make things go faster.
One of the things Bear did for me while he was here was inspect our tent, which turns out to be too small for three people. I found a Coleman 4-person tent with good reviews on Amazon, and put that in my shopping cart along with some glow sticks, flashlights for the kids, and a beginner’s tackle box among other items. There are two weeks to go for our camping trip, and I’m slowly assembling the stuff we’ll need.
Compared to some of our neighbors, we made it through the storm in really good shape. I was returning from Mariottsville in the CR-V packed with a full-size toolchest and a 25 gallon compressor I’d bought from Bennett when the first rain started to fall, around 3:30. By 4:15 I was in the driveway waiting for the rain to slack off so that I could run inside for an umbrella. The girls were over at Christi and Glen’s house waiting for me to pick them up, so I went back out in the Accord to get them. Getting to their house was a little dicey. The roads were beginning to flood, but there was enough road for me to share with oncoming traffic.
On the way home things were much worse. I took the higher route home, preferring to avoid the hills of Edmondson Road, and turned on to a side street to get to Frederick Road. By the time we were able to turn on to Main Street there was 3 feet of rushing water coming at us, with a narrow lane at the center the only thing between us and home. We waited a minute for an oncoming car to pass, I said a silent prayer, and then hit the gas. Wading through the water I felt the wheels slip here and there but we kept moving and made it to the other side where the hill started climbing again.
Image: Gregory Morgan, via ABC News
At home we ran inside with umbrellas and dried off, but it was when I peeked into the basement that I knew our plans for going to an evening party were sunk: we had 4″ of standing water in the basement. When I went out to the garage to get the Shop-Vac I noticed that the egress stairwell to the basement was flooded to the top, meaning we had 3′ of water pushing against the basement door.
Jen started vacuuming downstairs while I struggled with a shit Harbor Freight pump I use to chill wort; it failed and burned itself out. By this point I was soaking wet and the rain was only getting harder; there were rivers of water running past our house into a lake at the bottom corner of our property. I grabbed some scrap lumber from the garage and pounded a diversionary wall into the soil, directing water past the concrete lip of the basement stairs. Then I grabbed a five-gallon bucket, jumped in the pit, and started bailing it out.
Inside, Jen was suctioning up water and pouring it into the shop sink, praying that our drain wouldn’t clog and that sewage wouldn’t back up on us. I’d done some light cleaning on Saturday so we didn’t have a ton of stuff on the floor to get wet, but we did lose some boxes and a roll of paper and other assorted items. I did a bunch of waterproofing down there years ago, and since we replaced the back gutters, the basement has been relatively dry. But we’ve learned from years past that using plastic tubs on metal racks is the best way to store anything down there, especially on days like this.
Once I got the stairwell bailed out, I went inside and we spent the next two hours bailing and mopping. The rain slacked off at about 7PM, and the stairwell started draining faster than water was coming in, so we all took showers and had some warm dinner in front of the final Harry Potter movie.
The next morning we assessed the damage. I got our FIOS router reset and running but had to swap out our ethernet switch for a spare. Apparently it got fried along with our Airport Base Station, the HDMI switcher on our cable box, and maybe even our cable box itself. We enjoyed power and internet up until about 2PM when the transformer in the back of our lot blew, taking our power out and that of the block behind us. My neighbor wheeled over his generator and we hooked it up to the fridge, saving our food from certain ruin. That clattered in the backyard through the evening until about 1AM this morning when the power came back up.
So, lessons learned: I’ve been putting off the purchase of a generator for years, mostly because our once-twitchy transformer was replaced and our power has been relatively stable since about Finn’s birth. It’ll sit in the back corner of the garage and take up space, but it’s time I invested in one. I need to buy a submersible pool pump for those pleasant afternoons when water is trickling under the basement door. And I’m going to have to build a taller lip around the edge of the basement stairs to prevent the Patapsco River from sinking our house.
But weather radars notoriously underestimate rainfall. Automated rain gauges in and around Catonsville, at ground zero, recorded nearly 13 to 15 inches of rain. The National Weather Service received a gauge report of 8.4 inches in Ellicott City.
To put this 2018 storm in perspective, about 5 inches of radar-indicated rain fell in Ellicott City July 30, 2016, while gauges back then captured 8.22 inches. So in terms of rainfall magnitude, Sunday’s storm is a likely rival, if not even more intense.
Via: The Second 1000-Year Rainstorm Engulfed Ellicott City. Here’s How It Happened.
On Saturday, I dragged our lawnmower out of the garage, fired it up, and realized that it was Not Okay. The edges of the deck directly behind the rear wheels had finally rusted through so that the box surrounding the blade had lost its structural rigidity (think of a cardboard box where you’ve run a knife up two of the edges: it won’t stand up anymore). When I tried to turn it the box would warp and the blade would ping-PING-PING the side of the deck. Not exactly what I want happening 2 feet from my ankles. We’ve had the lawnmower for 15 years, so it doesn’t owe us anything, and considering I bought it for $150 I’d say we got our value out of it. The engine still runs fine, for fuck’s sake. Maybe I can make a go-kart out of it? Or a generator…
When I got through with that, I cleaned up the yard and then brought a socket set out to the back wall of the greenhouse. We haven’t used the greenhouse for years, and it’s really been bugging me lately. I’ve been trying to find a replacement door kit for it but just don’t know what I’m looking for, how it would install, or how much it might cost, so I finally figured the hell with it and unscrewed the panel edges to take the center section of polycarbonate twin wall down. That wasn’t so hard.
There. With an assist from a cheap Home Depot fan, that should get us enough airflow to keep the white mold from growing. I cleaned up the mess inside, threw a bunch of old crap out, leveled the tables and got them ready for some vegetables. My irrigation system still works but I need to get some larger mister heads for the near side and a new hose bib to replace the cracked one outside. I’ve got some plans drawn for two wood-frame chicken wire doors to cover the openings. They will get built this weekend. Then, I need five new rubbermaid bins, a pile of dirt, and some vegetables.