A sunny day...chores to do

The sun is out.  We got another 1 3/4 inches of rain in the last 24 hours.  I've never seen anything like it in the 14 years I've lived here.  When I lived in the northwestern part of this state we received over 40 inches of rain a year but I haven't lived there in almost 20 years.  Here, we've received over half of our yearly rainfall in a week. 

It's time to assess any real damage caused by the rain.  We have a mud soaked barn.  Some of the young fruit trees are in several inches of standing water.  That's about all that I've found so far.  I need to walk the fence line to see if the posts are still all upright.  I  may need to pull some posts and pound them in straight. 

Today we will drain the water around those trees again.  The grand kids are carrying buckets of rock from the rock pile into the barn.  They are just adding to the short area between the barn door and where the buckets of chicken food are.  It's a 40X60 foot barn so we aren't going to be able to rock everything.  I do have some scrap wood that I can't use to build anything.  It's sitting in the wood pile to someday be cut up into firewood.  I think we will bring it into the barn to use as walking planks. 

I also need to think about keeping the barn dry in future years.  Perhaps putting rain gutters on and diverting the water into the pasture.  Remember for every inch of rain you get over a 1000 square foot surface (and the barn is 2400 square feet) it's equivalent to 600 gallons of water so the barn collects 1540 gallons of water for every inch of rain.  This means that about 10,000 gallons of water has been dumped over the sides of the barn over the past week.  No wonder it's a muddy mess. 

This afternoon I promised the kids we would set up the targets in the back yard and do some target shooting.  They have a daisy bb gun, some air gun pistols, and we will also shoot the .22.  It will be a fun afternoon.

Tonight we are going to have a fire drill.  After last nights discussion of the lights going out, and they didn't, I think we will turn off the circuits to the lights when we have the drill.  More house fires happen during the holidays, so it's an appropriate time to do this.