Da Blahs

I came down with a cold on Saturday, and am still fighting it off. I am one of those people who is completely unable to function when they're sick, so I basically spent the whole weekend acting helpless (although I somehow found the energy to grill up some ribs on Sunday). My backyard still looks like the photo in the first post, below. Not good.

Watched the Seahawks-Chargers pre-season game last night. Excellent game with some really terrific play (and some mistakes) on both sides. I think Charlie Frye made an excellent case for moving up Seattle's QB depth chart. For a pre-season game, it was very entertaining.

An exciting 24 hours is about to begin. Tonight I have my first fantasy football draft of the season. Tomorrow I am doing a presentation to a number of important people from aaa University regarding the use of Web 2.0 technologies for learning, and a proposed solution that I have been working on. Both of these events require hours of preparation. I'm much more prepared for the presentation than I am for the draft, as it should be.

I would like to post about the Web 2.0 thing in greater detail, and if I weren't feeling so crappy I would have done so over the weekend. Look for that in the next couple of days... I have much to say.

EDR and VT! Woo!

At work we are developing a small course on emotional responses to disasters for our casualty and catastrophe teams. We lovingly call it Emotional Disaster Response. It has to do with how to talk to Insureds who have just been affected by a catastrophe (house burning down, severe car wreck with major trauma or a fatality, etc.) and help them to focus on their insurance claim and getting their lives back together. I've been reading through a lot of papers on vicarious trauma looking for tools that our claims adjusters can use to prevent themselves from becoming too emotionally overwhelmed by what they see and hear when working with these Insureds. Fascinating stuff if you're into psychology, which I am not.

Digging Ditches

Long about two weeks ago, we had a severe thunderstorm roll through. During the first 20-30 minutes of the storm we experienced what could only be described as a deluge of rain. That may not be a strong enough term to describe it, but that's beside the point. The point is that one of the window wells outside our basement began to flood. We're talking 8 inches or so of water filling the window well here. Naturally, this began seeping through the window and into the basement.

Now, since the basement is unfinished and the seepage was relatively slow, this wasn't such a big deal. We cleared anything out of the way that might get damaged, and put down some towels to stop the spread of the water. Meanwhile, I spent 15 minutes outside in the pouring rain trying to bail out the window well. Fun.

The next day I discovered the source of the problem: water from the downspout had dug a small hole in the ground and tunneled its way down (and back toward the house) to come up under the well. Since the soil under the window well has a very high clay content, the easiest way for the water to go was up. Clearly, I have a drainage problem.

So I have been working off and on for the past couple weeks on a French drain. We have had a lot of rainy days since that storm, so I don't get to work on it very often. But this weekend I was able to dig the trench and drop some Corex pipe into it. I ran the trench from the downspout to the fence (only about 3 feet), and then from there all the way to the edge of our property and under the fence. In all, it's about 50 feet of trench. I happened to be outside the other day during a heavy rain and noticed that a lot of runoff was also coming down from the front yard and the downspout there. It happens to run right into the line of the trench I had already dug, so I just extended it a little further toward the front of the house to catch some of that runoff. Even though the drain isn't technically finished (haven't put in the gravel or fill dirt yet), I have been able to see that it works. Looks like we might be in for another storm this evening, so hopefully I'll get a more definitive test soon.

This is a pic of the work in progress.