Well, we've survived another nasty storm! Even though Irene didn't unleash her full power on us, she was still impressive, and brought with her massive amounts of rain. Here in East Riverton, we got 6.6 inches of rain. Which segues to: I love my new weather station! The pressure here hit 28.79 or 974.94 millibars at its lowest. I have to figure out how to mount the anenometer (wind gauge) up higher - it basically only measure wind speed close to the ground, which was much different than what was happening up higher in the tree tops. Down here we peaked at about 12mph, but up higher, according to the Beaufort Wind Scale, looked to be about 25-31mph.
Anyway, back to the rain - I had lowered the water level in my pool on Friday, and then had to do it again on Saturday! Check out the pix!
I drove around to a couple of places on Sunday, checking out the drainage (or lack thereof) in the area - Cinnaminson Harbour was probably the wettest, although Bannard Street came in a pretty close second. S. Pompess was about as bad as we had anticipated. We're still pumping water out of the basement (and probably will be for weeks!), and we have to put the railroad ties from our parking area back, after we retrieve them from my neighbor's yard.
I had moved all of the turtles indoors, and lowered the water level in the ponds. I'm glad the turtles were inside, since all of the ponds overflowed, and they would have floated away! The tortoises ventured out early Sunday, and then turned around and went right back inside.
There have been a number of reports of confused looking turtles wandering around. One of them turned up on my doorstep, another slider of course, so he's currently in quarantine before he joins the others outside.
So now the cleanup can start. I am deathly allergic to sumac, so it follows that every leaf and branch that fell in my yard, pool and turtle ponds was sumac. I either have to get my friends to help or wear a hazmat suit to pick the stuff up - and that's the fun referred to in the title of this post.
All in all, it was an interesting weekend - I'm glad it wasn't as bad as I had anticpated, but I'm even more glad that I took the precautions I did!
