March Showers brings... panic?

Yeah, I guess that's about right. Jen was home sick from church today, so she didn't hear the prayers over the pulpit for everyone to get their basements dried out and for the rivers to calm down. Seriously, there is flooding everywhere. Ian and I got to splash through puddles the whole way to church. We knew it was serious when we went on our normal route and there were cops directing traffic into a single file down the center of the road where the water depth was the shallowest. (Still several inches, of course). The Shawsheen River looked bound to overflow the bridge next to the Playground Museum (a sales office, I guess), and lots of folks were missing from church because they were holding vigils over their sump pumps.

I found this picture on Boston.com of the "Playground Museum," retrieved March 17, 2010.

For fun, Ian and I camped out Friday night. Not because we knew this was to be a rainy weekend, but because we had been hoping to camp with the scouts, but the Pregnant One needs loving watch-care from her in-town men. So Friday after dinner we retired to a chilly backyard, snuggled into our sleeping bags and watched Shark Tales on the netbook. (We were camping in the backyard, after all!) By 10:30, it was lights out and we went to bed. We got up at 5:30 cause the birds were chirping like crazy, took advantage of a reason to visit a nearby tree, then went back to bed until 8:30. Then it was BONFIRE time! (A March tradition for us). All this before the rains really started to come down.

But when it rained, it poured. We're looking at like 4 inches. We got most of the wood burnt by 10 am, then cooked our foil dinners and ate them by 11:30. Marshmellow s'mores through the drizzle until about 1, and we achieved the desired result! We smelled like smoke, burnt up a winter's worth of deadfall, and had some quality Father/Son time. Everytime I came inside to check on Jen, she was sawing logs upstairs. I guess that was another desired outcome.

For those of you interested, here's the chart for today (from a local hobbyist's backyard weatherstation) that continued to exacerbate the flooding around Boston. Note that the rates of rainfall are per hour, and the bars are each one hour wide. Therefore, we accumulated ALOT of rain. Normally round these parts, an entire rainstorm will only leave us with as much rain as ONE of those bars represents. And now we're getting it nonstop!

Don't worry about us. We rent. :) Everything in our basement is up off the floor, and the burbling brook downstairs comes in one corner and out the other. We're not accumulating any water.