Tuesday. It was bright and sunny this morning. I got to start the day outside with some coffee. The atrium is getting so much use now that we have the new furniture, lights, and astroturf. Being able to go outside in socks makes a huge difference for me. I rarely want to take the time to put on shoes to go a couple of steps to sit out and have my coffee.
Jim was over this morning fixing the siding that I was unable to reach last week. So the house appears to be all buttoned up now. Paul tried hosing down the parts that seemed to leak the most to see if we got any moisture inside of the bar area. So far, nothing. Jim couldn’t stay very long, but thankfully he got the important bits done. He also fixed a few shingles that were problematic up there, but a new roof is in our future one way or another. He’s considering doing the house painting for us, or at least the high portions of it. We have the paint and it is time to repaint the entire house. We want to do it before summer for sure, the paint will help to seal up some of the tiny cracks and we are moving from a very dark colour to a very light one, light cream with white trim. So the house is going to look completely different and be way more economical to cool in the summer months when we are on continuous air conditioning and fighting off the brutal sunlight all day.
Work was work today, busy but normal. Nothing of note there. What was interesting today was the storm that rolled in this evening. Paul had his Tuesday night pool league, so Dominica went with him. The girls were in a mood to do their own thing, mostly. So I spent the evening in the office working on a Windows 2003 R2 to CentOS 7 migration, taking MS SQL Server from 2005 to 2017. Went really well and was a bit fun. The kind of work that I enjoy.
While I was working, an epic thunderstorm rolled in. One of those storms where you get the thunder storm, then the rain storm, then the thunderstorm and back and forth, but not together. Both were crazy. Thunder so loud it was totally shaking the house. And then the rain came.
This might have been the heaviest rain that I have experienced since living in Texas. At least the heaviest in Texas itself. I’ve seen heavier in Panama, for example. The sheer volume of water coming down, nearly eight inches we learned later, was just incredible. This was a great test of the new atrium work. With the new gutters and the atrium all cleaned out, the atrium was able to handle the water as it came down no problem at all, it never even started to back up in any way. Pheww. It used to be so bad. Had this been a year ago, the house would have been totally flooded, like never before.
Thank goodness Jim had worked on the siding today, too. Just a week ago in a fraction of this rain we had leaking in the bar again. But with the new stuff that Jim did today, we were bone dry even with this new level of rain!
There was so much rain that the front yard was effectively a small pound. Our entire sidewalk was underwater with a full inch of standing water right up against the step to the front door, two meters back under the roof line! I’ve never see it come up over the sidewalk like that. I made Liesl and Luciana both come out to look at it. With the front door open, two meters back from the edge of the roof, there was so much rain coming in, with some much force, that rain was hitting the wall behind the front door! And there is no open wind there either, we are under the roof, inside the house, with two meters of roof, plus the pillars to block the wind, plus the house next door not far away at all and there was still that much driving rain!
I tried to go to bed and more or less a good time tonight, but just as I was heading to bed, my phone rang in the office, at like one forty five in the morning, and it turned out that AT&T was trying to get me to work on the issues that they were supposed to have been working on all day but had not. So after waiting from eight in the morning until almost two in the morning with them doing absolutely nothing, suddenly they need me and are going to work?
Looks like no sleep for me tonight. We are pretty sure that they were scheduling the work in the hopes that I would be asleep and that they could report that they could not reach me and pass things off to the next shift like day and evening shift had already done, but I caught them and stayed in my office. So they didn’t get to pull that trick and were stuck working on the problem.