Rain, rain go away...

First it was Gustav and then it was Ike. But don't forget about the little ones between.

I live no where near an ocean or even large body of water, but don't you doubt that I have seen these storms up close and person. Ok, well maybe not in the full force that they hit down South, but they sure have brought A LOT of rain to Central Illinois. In the last 9 days, I believe it has rained 7 of them. Sometimes its heavy rain, sometimes light. There have been days when its 63 and raining and then days when it hits near 80. AND the weather last night said it was 104% humidity. Didn't know it was possible, but if you walked outside you sure could feel it.

Now, I don't really mind rain. I generally enjoy a rainy day...ideally spent at home with coffee, good movies and a good book thrown in for good measure. Seven days of it has been a little much. I sympathize with Seattle-ians.

Anyway, we've been lucky and had no rain water in the house for quite some time, so I figured we had fixed whatever the major problem was. NOPE! I was wrong. Last night we stood out on the porch watching it rain and watching the water run down the drive way and flow directly into the basement door. Its a bit odd to stand there knowing what is going to happen and realize there is not a damn thing you can do at the moment to stop it. Here are some pics and a video of the event. The video actually shows up better...

And the video of it happening...

Thankfully, we've learned (the hard way) to keep everything off the floor so not much of anything got wet or ruined. We also watched the water enter, so we were able to pull up those few things did make it to the floor. The floor, for the most part, slopes to the drain, so the water pretty much clears itself, but it does have a tendency to leave a lovely muddy residue. So this afternoon I'll go down there and start cleaning up a bit.

I'm thinking of taking the pictures and video to the city to see if they can come dig the ditches a little deeper. The one on the right side of our house is barely there...that doesn't help! I know the other part of it is needing to fix the grade of the drive way though too. Ugh. This is when owning a house sucks...