Nor'easters Are a Pain

Not too long ago we had a little thing called a Nor'easter come through here. Now, being from the Chicago area, I'm not too used to what these storms can do or what they're about. I was here for the hurricane in 2003, but that one didn't effect me very much. This recent nor'easter however proved to be a real monster for us and dropped so much rain that we ended up with our own swimming pool (and to think Kara wants to pay someone to put a pool in for us... silly girl).

The rains really started on thursday, and were coming down all day. Kara was out of town on a business trip, and so when I woke up friday morning, I was amazed at how much water was out on the ground. I even took a few pictures. Little did I know, that all that water was nothing compared to what followed.

A few hours later, all our drainage ditches were full, and the water was creeping toward the house. Our backyard was so saturated that the entire lawn looked like a giant puddle. A little while after that, the yard was just water. In the front of the house, the water had come up to our house and in to our garage. I fought gallantly for over an hour trying to stem the rising waters, but being a nor'easter virgin, I was a little lost on what to do (fyi, if this ever happens again, I have the gameplan down and things will go a lot smoother than last time).

The water started climbing in the garage. Fortunately, I was able to move anything of value up out of the way, so nothing important got ruined. Then the water kept climbing up the side of the house. It spilled up on to our front porch and started approaching the door. If you looked out the back, it was just a giant lake. Kasia's plastic picnic table had up and floated away, and I was forced to rush out and get it. The water in our yard came up to my knee. Against the house it rose about eight inches. And the scare thing was that it was still raining.

Fortunately, the rain didn't last much longer, and the water never got close to coming in our house. Our garage got quite a bit of water, but nothing important was ruined. Unfortunately, some of my neighbors were not so lucky as some of their houses sit just a little lower to the ground than ours and suffered quite a bit of water damage.

For us, it was kind of a blessing, because it forced us to clean out our garage, and it was neater and more organized afterwards than it has been in years. Though, this is a blessing that I hope I never get again.