Teleidoscope

Mon, Jul 20, 2009

Cloudburst

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Weather

Man.

We are having an impressive cloudburst at the moment. I am seeing occasional flickers of lightning in the distance, but for a while I could not tell if there was any thinder because the noise of the rain and hail against my roof and windows was so loud.

I have no attic space -- there is only about 8 inches or so between my ceiling and the roof surface -- so there is not a lot of sound decoupling that can happen.

I hear the hail ping against the metal chimney of the woodstove and the vent cover of the range hood, too.

I suspect this is going to give me a reminder of what the next landscaing project needs to be. There is one side of the foundation that tends to leak water into the basement. I noticed this morning that even though the dirt has been mounded up against the house along there in the past, it has now sunk down. That's probably why the leaks have been more common lately.

I'm planning to have a small paved area added at the problem location at the foot of the steps from the back porch. The project should probably include a French drain there and along the rest of that side of the house, along with the regrading. At least I won't need to buy fill dirt for the regrading: there is a huge pile of dirt that came out of the hole where the ne retaining wall was built.

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Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Current Events

I remember watching the TV coverage with my parents and brothers. We got very little sleep because important information kept becoming available. It was handy that the landing happened on a Saturday: no one needed to get up early the next day.

It'ds a little sad that Walter Cronkite died just a few days before the anniversay, but it is hard to complain about a 92 year lie-span.

On Sunday I stayed glued to the TV while my parents (and brothers?) went to pick up our new puppy at the breeders'. We named him Buzz: it was pretty much unthinkable to get a dog that weekend and not give him a name that referred to the landing.

Looking back, I'm not sure why he didn't end up just named Apollo. Maybe that wouldn't have been specific enough. (His name on the official kennel club papers was Buzz of Apollo.)

Buzz was a pure-bred toy fox terrier (short-haired), but the genes had recombined oddly. When he was 3 months old he was already as big as his mother, and he ended up about midway in size between toy and standard fox terriers. Basically, he came out looking a lot like a Jack Russell terrier in his size and markings -- when I see Jack Russells, I always think they are fox terriers.

He had one ear that stood up like a chihahua ear, and the tip of the other ear flopped down, so he also looked a lot like the RCA dog, except his tail had been cropped.

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