Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Life

As usual it's been a while. Life always seems to happen just when you start enjoying yourself.

At the moment, there are two things going on in my life. The first is I now live in a flood plain.... WTF?!? how could I go from not living in a flood plain to living in one? It's called the Howard-Hansen Dam. Seems this Dam was built in the 1950's to keep the area where I live from flooding..... which caused it to no longer be classified as a flood zone. Now fast forward 50 years later and with climate change hitting the Pacific Northwest pretty hard (we now get rain like the East Coast gets, large, hard and lots of it, were before we got drizzle), instead of 90 days of drizzle, we get 90 days of OMG CATS and DOGS flowing from the sky.

So last year (2008) was a record year for the Dam. The Dam normally fills to 75% capacity. Last year it was 90%.... then the operators/care takers noticed "depressions" in the Dam... not a good thing. They drained it and discovered that it is no longer viable to hold massive amounts of water and it will take 8-10 years to fix..... whoops... so all of my inquiries into "Do I live in a flood plain" and being told "No" was a bunch of crap. There is a single point of failure in the logic that a flood plain is no longer a flood plain just because some Humans built a Dam and said so.

This brings me to point number two. In our strive to not have everything we own ruined by said coming flood... we have started to raise items in the Townhouse. So all the books/video's that are normally downstairs, are now upstairs... all the fun stuff in the Garage / Workshop is being moved to shelving I have put into the ceiling. This creates a much more open workspace. And that is awesome because I've been wanting more workspace. Of course that euphoria won't last long as all that extra space will be in 6-10' of water when the rains come.

With all the new workspace and hoping that the rains do not come or are not as bad as trending has shown it should be, I'll be working on a massive amount of stuff. The display boards I have not finished will finally get finished and photo's taken and posted.

Too bad that the "right now" is taken up by flood prep. But hopefully it will all work out in the end and I will have a cool workspace that won't flood.