I fully suspect, and expect, that this might become a common thing for me over the next few months. Being forced, effectively, to be offline. To leave my computers to cool, if you will.
Sunday was a productive day, and although nobody at work expects me to be submitting code, I did so, and I'm glad I did. Today, however, was a day where I left my laptop safely stored in a locked room, with dehumidifiers running non-stop.
To say that it rained today would be to say that January 6 was a high school field trip into the capital.
Around midnight, as I had just laid my head down to sleep, the water hitting the roof became so loud it was impossible to continue sleeping. Almost as if God himself wanted me to sprint into action, the loud cracking of lightning hitting a tree nearby sent our dogs into a panicked frenzy.
My wife, at this point, knew she had to go check on Mom. She took off into the night, taking her waterproof phone case with her. I sat at home with our dogs, who were now shaking in fear. At this point I knew sleep was not happening, and thus I just sat on the floor with the pups and held them tight as the cracking of thunder reminded us that we are, in fact, very small.
Maybe half an hour passed when my wife let me know the worst was happening.
The house where her mom, my mother-in-law, is living was taking in water, and it was happening fast.
The whole farm at this point was a lake.
You couldn't see the ground anymore, and it was best to stick to known paths, otherwise you risked tripping or falling into the newly dug trenches.
I got there knowing full well we were effectively signing up for boot camp.
I did not count the buckets of water, but I'm sure it was well above a hundred. Water kept seeping through the floors, from under the house, and it was happening faster than we could get it out.
Finally, after two hours of scooping water, the rain began to go away.
All of a sudden, we began to win the battle.
I could see a small patch of the floor that remained dry. I gave myself the silly goal of not allowing that one patch to get wet, and we actually won our little game.
After the shovels were no longer effective, we moved into mopping, and another hour went by before it felt like we could take a small break.
A small break, because the rain was coming back, and the water in the farm had not gone away just yet.
To add insult to injury, mosquitoes decided to join the fun.
Hundreds of these little demons, making sure we counted our blessings tomorrow.
As it so happens when this sort of downpour occurs, we lost power too.
Now we had no way of turning on a simple fan to cool us off.
I must have sweated the equivalent of a toddler.
With thunder still hitting us, our dogs, safely put away in our home, began screaming in fear. I felt the battle was somewhat won, so I went home to check on them, to make sure they did not stress more than they had to.
My wife came back to the house, cleaned herself up, and did the only reasonable thing she could do.
She tried to sleep a little.
It was more than likely that we would have to go back to the flooding house, and we needed to rest.
I embraced my Neanderthal genes and fell asleep on the floor, wrapping a questionably clean shirt I found into a makeshift pillow.
I may have gotten an hour of sleep, at most, when it was time for us to sprint back into action.
Our dogs needed to be walked, or swam in our case, and I had to run to get them food. We needed something as well, since cooking without power was not going to happen.
We decided to move my mother-in-law today.
Abandon ship, if you will.
According to all weather predictions, we are going to be dealing with another six months of this weather, and unless I want to age ten years in a few months, middle-of-the-night rescue missions have to stop happening.
Many trips later, lots of mud, lots of mosquitoes, and lots of frustration, she was in her provisional space.
She can stay there for three weeks, tops, while we make a more permanent solution happen.
To say I'm exhausted is like saying the politicians lie.
I mean, it's expected. It's obviously true. But it's being undersold by a metric ton.
That said, I think tonight I will be able to sleep without fail.
Not because it won't be another nasty night, or because we won't lose power. We have power right now.
But more so because these aging bones are running on fumes, and the reserve tank was uninstalled when I stepped into my forties.
MenO