It’s a rainy morning here in Rhode Island, courtesy of Lee, the storm that was once a hurricane and is now a post-tropical cyclone. We weren’t expecting to be hit hard by the storm, but my interpretation of Murphy’s Law is that a failure to prepare for a bad situation is likely to bring on that situation. It’s a form of superstition, not far off from “knock on wood,” but I’d rather be overprepared than underprepared. So, before I went to bed last night, I filled up several bottles and pots with water, just to be safe.
Speaking of water, that’s something we’ve had in abundance lately. This week we had four consecutive days of thunderstorms, one of which brought tornadoes to the area, and all of which brought heavy rain. To my surprise, my phone has started giving me audio alerts, so every time there’s an emergency situation, a woman’s voice suddenly starts coming from the direction of my purse, booming out the details of the alert. It makes the tornado warnings seem even more surreal. The rain killed our nascent crop of grass in the front yard and washed away the top layer of soil, which was heartbreaking given how much we’d paid to get the lawn redone. The back yard became a rapidly expanding lake. I joked that it was God’s way of giving us the swimming pool that we’ve been wishing for, but thank God the rain stopped before the edges of the lake reached the house.
But there was a small bright side to getting all that rain. Our house is on a slab, and a lot of moisture comes into the house through the floors. We often have to run a dehumidifier, which isn’t great, and now that we’re refinishing the downstairs, we’ve decided to try to seal up the concrete floors to block out that moisture. But, whether or not you can effectively seal a concrete floor depends on how much water is actually coming up, and what better time to test that than when the ground is thoroughly saturated. That way you’re getting the “worse case scenario” number. My husband did the test. The results came back higher than expected, but not too high to proceed.