Summer strikes with a vengeance

We've been lucky so far this year that the weather has been comparatively mild, with low humidity and temperatures in the 70s. That is, until this week. This week it's been in the mid- to upper-80s, humid, and storming most evenings. Our habit of taking walks after dinner has been curtailed because I don't like getting Liza all sweaty right before bed, and getting my father to help out with some of the yard work has made us both sweat off a couple of pounds. Not that we can't both use a little weight loss, but there has to be a more pleasant way of doing it than trimming bushes in the summer sun.

My father is always really good about helping out around the house when he comes to visit, and I always try to have a list of things I need help with at the ready when he walks in the door. Not that we ever accomplish much on the list, mind you, because my father has his own ideas about which projects are important. The first time he and my mother came to visit after we moved to this house, we had tons of painting and fixing up to do. What did Dad decide was the best way to use his time? He went around cleaning windows.

Yes, the windows needed to be cleaned. Yes, the house looked much better when he was done. But window cleaning is something I can do on my own, and some of the things on my list were things I couldn't take care of by myself. I'm sure if I had put my foot down, he would have done what I asked, but that's not terribly polite to do to a guest, even if he is your father. So I smiled and thanked him, and some of the items on my original list are STILL on my "to-do" list today, more than two years later.

This trip my father decided to trim our front bushes, which admittedly were starting to look a bit shaggy. They look great now, but geez, did we have to work in the yard yesterday, when Kentucky somehow ended up with Florida's weather by accident?

While my father gleefully wielded the electric hedge trimmer, I climbed a ladder and tried to clean the mess out of the gutter over our office. It's one of the original box gutters, where the water is chanelled into an open metal-lined gutter that's built into the wooden trim surrounding the roof. We had the gutter repaired a few months ago because the seal had failed and the leaking water had rotted out part of the trim. Part of the repair involved adding a screen to the downspout so it wouldn't fill up with leaves, which is good in theory, but wasn't working so well in practice. Every time it rained, the screen would get clogged, leaving an inch of water sitting in the gutter. Hello, mosquitos!

I think the road to riches will involve someone inventing a self-cleaning screen for gutters and drains, because I spent way too much time yesterday picking leaves out of clogged downspouts of various types. First I had to shovel - no, not kidding - stuff out of the office gutter. I had thought it would be mostly leaves, but I realized that a lot of the gutter debris was actually gravel that had come off of the shingles on the roof. I guess when the repair guys were wallking on the roof they knocked a lot of stuff loose, and it's been filtering down over the past few storms. I got at least three or four measuring cups full of this coffee-grind like stuff out, one 1/4 teaspoon at a time, while picking leaves out of the gutter screen and blasting water down the length of the gutter. All while balanced on the step on the stepladder that says "don't stand here, idiot, you'll fall over and brain yourself on the brick patio below you." I think I probably spent at least 45 minutes getting that gutter clean, and by the time I was done, it was pristine. So you can imagine how happy I was this morning when I woke up after a heavy rainstorm, looked out the window, and the gutter was ... empty. No water. No shingle debris. Just dry metal gutter, shining in the morning sun. Hurray!

After I cleaned out the gutter, I took some time to clean out the drain that runs in front of our garage door. This is important because our entire driveway and parking area is sloped to drain toward the house, so if the drain backs up, the water has nowhere to go but into the garage/basement and down the drain in there. Luckily, the basement drain is near the door, but I still don't like to have it happen. Unluckily, the drain in front of the garage door is the worst-designed piece of useless garbage in the world, and it clogs up if a piece of leaf the size of a pinhead gets in there. Our entire back yard is surrounded by trees, which are constantly dropping leaves and seeds and flowers and all manner of other junk onto our driveway, and all of it eventually tries to go down that drain. No matter how often we sweep up or blow away the stuff on the driveway, new stuff always finds a way back.

In order to keep our basement from turning into a wading pool, every week or two we have to pull up the grate and fish all the debris out of the drain. This wouldn't be so bad if the drain was sloped properly, but it isn't, so water stagnates in it and rots out the debris in the low spots. Nothing like the smell of anaerobic bacteria on your hands to open up the sinuses and make you remember to schedule your tetanus booster shot, I'll tell you that. And there's no quick way to fix it, short of ripping out the entire driveway/parking area, regrading it, and repaving it to slope someplace else with a properly installed drain.

Yesterday afternoon I fished out the week's collection of leaves and debris and goop. Then last night it rained. While I was brushing my teeth I peeked out the window to see if the drain was working, and of course, it wasn't, and I could see the lake-sized puddle that was creeping under the garage door. So at 12:45 this morning I grabbed an umbrella and my clogs and waded out to fish out more debris, flashlight held in my mouth and pajama bottoms getting soaked as I fished scoop after scoop of stuff out of the drain.

The first few scoops aren't so bad - they're the big pieces that blocked up the drain in the first place. But once the water starts flowing faster, it scoops up all the muck that settled upstream earlier, and that's the smelly, nasty stuff with half-decomposed bugs and such in it. Yep, that's really the way to get in the mood to sleep, all right - scoop smelly stuff out of your driveway during a thunderstorm. I'm hoping to be able to scrape the stuff out from under my fingernails someday soon, which should help with the smell.

In the meantime, though, it's time to go scoop out whatever else was deposited in the garage drain after I scooped it last night. See, and you thought stay-at-home moms had all the fun!