We're Having a Fierce Blow

My dearly beloved just checked the weather website and told me, 'we are having a fierce blow'. I pretty much already knew that because it's storming something fierce outside. But he confirmed it officially.

He actually gave me a more indepth analysis of the weather system that is currently immediately over our house. He's an expert on weather amongst many other things. I defer to him on issues of weather.

Our relationship is like that. There are some things he knows and some things I know and we both pretty much know which is which. But we don't always agree on which one of us knows more about which things. If that's confusing to you, you might have an idea of how things are in our house sometimes.

Nights like this make me think about flooding.

A few years ago we bought a house on the side of a mountain. Our house is no where near the top of the mountain, it's on the side of the mountain closer to the bottom than the top. Our yard is pretty much angular. It looks pretty, but is more of a problem in terms of mowing and lawn maintenance than either of us realized when we bought the property. Some people actually get nervous driving down (literally) our driveway. A few yards behind our house is what we call 'the gully'. The gully is where the yards merges into a severe drop off that does go straight down.

So imagine my surprise when we moved into the house and my dearly beloved takes out flood insurance. 'FLOOD INSURANCE?', I said. Flood insurance on a mountain? In my feminine mind, I was wondering how on earth water would rise this high!

He gave me 'the look'. That being a look I've become accustomed to and understand to mean he's wondering how on earth I could be this dense. As he's giving me the look he also gives me his usual elaborate detailed explanation about why we need flood insurance. I'll quote him verbatim: 'We need flood insurance.' The end.

At times like this I know it's futile to argue with him about it. So I deferred to his greater knowledge on these matters and let it go. But I was still grumbling in my own head about how dumb it is to have flood insurance when you live on the side of the mountain and Noah himself would have been safe this high up, for crying out loud.

It wasn't long before I found out why you need flood insurance when you live on the side of a mountain towards the bottom.

Did you know, when it pours rain for several days that all the water raining at your house is also raining at every point higher than your house? In addition, as the ground becomes saturated, it starts running downhill, gathering with other water running downhill it becomes little streams, by the time the little streams get toward the bottom of the mountain {like to our house} it's like little torrential rivers.

All this water from up the mountain heads directly at our house. I'm sure of it.

It doesn't sit in the house like traditional flooding, it flows through the house, yard and everything around it. That also explained to me why we had to have such an elaborate system of underground pipes and landscaping around the house and yard. Another issue I balked at.

I'm a big enough person to admit he was right and I was wrong. This time.