Sunday, May 17, 2015

Weel 2.17: When it rains....

This week has been interesting.

The Coastal Bend has had some very interesting weather in the last week.  Monday and Tuesday nights were stormy enough that neither Dear Husband or I could sleep--it's hard to sleep, after all, when it's raining sideways, and I began to understand why our neighbor had put his hurricane shutters down.

Over two days, we got ten inches of rain.  Ten.  Naturally, this meant that the garage flooded again.  But it didn't just get some water in it, the way it has in the past--spreading over a quarter of the garage.  No, we had almost half an inch of water over most of the garage. 

And we still had boxes out there.  Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a trip to Walmart for a new mop and bucket, and sweeping water out with the rubber broom.  All well and good.

Wednesday morning, things were still pretty bad.  In fact, they'd gotten worse.  We couldn't make it out of our driveway to get to school on time--and I had a final exam to give at 8:00, but we very simply weren't going anywhere.  It didn't help that our electric went out about 5:15 that morning either.

We waited until some of the water drained off and headed into school.  Most of my students were there for their final--I'd told them all to wait, as I would be coming in a soon as I could, but I had some who were similarly flooded in to their houses--one student couldn't get out until well into the afternoon.  Campus was also flooded, and I have to admit, while I've had weeks of school cancelled for ice storms, even seen finals postponed....I've never had to wade to get to an exam before.  And wade I did, right across the parking lot, as the English building was pretty much surrounded by water. 

We'd let the landlord know what was going on, and he showed up at our house Wednesday evening, not long after we got home to find that we still had no electricity.  It finally came back on about nine, after AEP Texas dug up the lawn of one of our neighbors to get to something, and fortunately, thanks to a very well-insulated fridge, we lost nothing but the milk. (The same cannot be said for some of the boxes in the garage.)

The landlord came back out Thursday--I'd run to school to give the final makeup exam and to turn in my grades (yay!)--and did some other maintenance work around the house as well, like taking care of part of a fallen tree in the backyard that was too large for DH to get without a chain saw, as well as graciously changing out the chandelier in the front entryway for a light that doesn't hang down and upon which DH cannot continue to concuss himself.  He's dug a small ditch out by the side of the house, which come Friday, and more weather, served very well.

And here is where I would like to say how much I miss Bill Meck, the chief meteorologist from Lexington's WLEX-18.  DH was working graduation on Friday, down at the American Bank Center, and having headed down to the information center, he realized the weather was getting bad and called me, which was good, as I'd fallen asleep on the couch.  They'd issued a tornado watch, not that I would have known, because there was no alert that came through my phone (unlike the EAS flood alert that scared the crap out of me Wednesday morning), and because Corpus Christi apparently doesn't have storm sirens.  So I turned on the TV to one of our local channels and just wanted to bang my head against the wall.  Unlike other times, they didn't go back to regular programming--thank goodness---but still.

So I went and moved stuff around in the pantry so I had room to hide.  There'd already been a funnel cloud over my neighborhood earlier in the week--which again, we never knew about until afterward because there was no siren and, oh, yes, we had no power.   (The NWS office in Corpus Christi really needs to do a better job.)  There was a funnel cloud over the children's hospital downtown--which was right down the street from the arena where DH was, and then they had the hook echo on the radar over our neighborhood.  Two tornadoes were confirmed that day, though neither were in town, and eventually, it all went out to sea.  The street flooded again, but the garage did not!

But all of this has made us determined that we need to get out of this house as soon as possible, so we went to the bank Saturday morning and should be approved for a home loan later this week.  Now we can start looking in some kind of earnest.

I turned my final grades in on Thursday.  The emails about how my students "can't afford to have failed English" started promptly Friday morning.  (That's what happens when you don't complete one of the major assignments, imagine that.)  My grades were not stellar this semester--out of about a hundred students, I gave out five As, three of which were in my sophomore lit course. My composition students did not do well at all, and I was more than a little disappointed.  That said, DH says that the college graduated ~750 students with 900 degrees or certificates on Friday night, and that's not too shabby. 

Summer classes start the day after Memorial Day, so in just a little more than a week.  I'm teaching Mexican-American Literature during Summer I, and I'm more than a little apprehensive about it.  After all, my ethnicity can be described as Extremely Irish, but I can teach students how to read the literature, and that should be the most important thing, I think.

DH has just gotten in from mowing the lawn.  We finally broke down and bought a gas-powered lawnmower last week, which has made DH's life much easier, since he can use it to mow the backyard, which he couldn't before with the manual, since it kept getting stuck in the sand.  That meant he was spending every evening out in the backyard with the weed-eater until the charge ran out, trying to keep the grass down.  He doesn't have to do that anymore, thank goodness.  He's now attempting to cool off, as it's already oppressively hot (and humid) here, even though it's only May.  What August will look like doesn't bear thinking about.

So it has been an eventful week here, to say the least.  But I have the next week off, which I will partly spend prepping for my Summer I course, but also partly vegging out.  I see maternal-fetal medicine tomorrow morning, so I should have new pictures of the little one tomorrow, which I'm very much looking forward to, particularly as I've started to really be able to feel her move about and kick this week.  (She very much disliked the storms, by the way.  Takes after her mommy that way.)


No comments:

Post a Comment