First Storm

It’s not really a seasonal rainstorm, but fragments of Typhoon Melor blown across the Pacific. Still, it’s giving me a good chance to take a look at what my outdoor kitchen and living room might be like for the rest of the rainy season. I know where the roof leaks (over my dish rack, my outdoor shoe rack, and in front of the bathroom) and what floods (my dry goods and my garden tools) and I have a better idea of what I’ll need to do to get prepared (get waterproof containers and put them up on bricks). My produce in hanging baskets doesn’t look like it’s getting splashed much, but I’d better cook it up fast.

I don’t think I’ve lost too much in the way of dry goods, either, as disastrous as that sounds; much of it needed to be replaced anyway, and I’d just bought more mung beans, so I can live on that while I restock. And my emergency food stores—the freeze dried stuff—are in my bedroom, which so far isn’t getting wet.

This is a really good opportunity to assess what I need to change about my living environment. Few of our seasonal storms should last this long or be this severe, but if I make adjustments assuming they will be, I should be prepared even for an El Niño winter.

I think it’ll help if we get our roof gutters cleaned out. I don’t know if they have been cleaned since last year, and if not, that could be exacerbating the leaks.

When I was a Floridian, this would have been absolutely silly. I probably would have been sitting out on the porch watching it come down. Of course, it would have been 78°F, too, and I never knew anyone with an outdoor kitchen in Florida. Now it’s funny to watch the local authorities going absolutely nuts about this approximately tropical storm strength weather, and me getting all in a tizzy with them. It just feels so much worse when it’s cold out and the days are shorter, for some reason.

No, this won’t be a weather blog all winter.