The Old Folks Home

Isn't Florida just a river pretending to be land anyway? Or is that just the southern part? :idunno

Yesterday was the 22-year anniversary of Hurricane Fran making landfall in Wilmington - we were without power for almost two weeks that time. Three years later, Hurricane Floyd turned us into a virtual island for a few weeks before the rivers retreated back within their banks and roads became driveable again.

I hear you, @getaclue. We have had a very wet year too, and up until a couple of weeks ago, the constant refrain was, "what if we get a hurricane on top of all this? It'll be Floyd all over again."

So here we all go again; watching the forecasts, doing our prep, and praying it'll be unnecessary.:fl
 
Rained most of the night here. Not heavy just the type of rain the farmers love to have in the spring. But it's too late for this growing season. They are calling for the heavy rain to hit here tonight with a flash flood watch through Saturday night.

We are pretty much safe from any flooding directly as we sit on top of a ridge, but there is a creek at the bottom of the ridge to our east that has a bridge going over it that floods regularly, another to the west and the road that goes to the north usually turns into a hog wallow that only the bravest travel. I've seen mud to the hubcaps on it so we are just going to sit tight and hunker down. Sometimes if there is no lightening or thunder we will brave going out in the rain to look at our pond and hike back to the timber to see how the creek is doing as a branch of the creek to our east runs through our timber.

The interesting thing is that we are going into an extended sun spot minimum. There have been no sun spots for at least 138 days this year. HAM operators keep an eye on the sunspot activity, no pun intended, because they affect the bandwidths and radio signals. The higher the sunspot activity, the better it is to getting radio signals out. The lack of sunspots is also why they are now predicting a very cold very wet winter this year into 2019. If you want to read something scary interesting, read about the Maunder Minimum here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum that caused a 30 year ice age back in the 1700s.

We get daily sun spot reports and the last week they were talking about going into this new minimum which was going to stretch into 2020 and beyond. It does not bode well for the weather at all.

The good news is that solar activity occurs in 11 year cycles and we are going towards the end of the minimum. The bad news is that we have to endure crazy weather till then and hold on until it ramps back up again.
 
Well,the rains have started here. S'posed to have heavy rain through the weekend. Something like 5+ inches.

We spent the last two days battening down the hatches.I put fresh straw down for the chickens, fixed inside food and water holder for the big birds so they don't stand there staring out at their food and water containers outside.

Think we have touched all the bases.
That is a lot of rain!

It will be sunny here but there is a new fire North of Redding
 
5+ inches of rain is what we've been getting at least weekly, and sometimes every 3 days, for 4 months now. We went a day without rain on the 1st. Rained lightly on the 2nd., but we've got heavy tropical storms moving in tonight with heavy rainfall until at least Monday. We'll get a minimum of 6 inches of rain from that. Roads are flooding, yards are flooding, ditches are overflowing, the riverbanks are overflowing in some areas, and more rain headed our way. Yay......NOT!
We do not have drainage here for that much rain!

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