The Nap Part Was Good

Brooke is always good about unpacking right after we get back from being out of town. Me? It usually takes me a day or two. I knew after church today I was going to need to clean up my office because all of my trip stuff was spread out all over the place in my office, but it started to rain. If you read my A Few of My Favorite Things post, you know my favorite thing to do on a rainy day is take a nap, so the clean up had to wait.

While napping, I got a call saying that the Altar for tonight (prayer/praise service) was cancelled because more severe thunderstorms were moving in...and by the way, the sanctuary is flooding, too! Now, by flooding, I merely mean that the carpet is soaked (from the back door half was up to the platform on the one side of the sanctuary), not that stuff is beginning to float or anything like that. And this did not really come as a surprise because this happens when we get a lot of rain in a short period of time. Until we get some landscaping work done, this means the carpet has to be wet vac'd and the ditch outside has to be cleared out and dug a little deeper/wider (the ditch is a stop gap to reduce the flow of water into the sanctuary).

Since we were going to be getting more rain, I knew I had to get over there and get started. While I dug out our "overflow ditch", another guy started vacuuming up water in the sanctuary. I had dug out the ditch when it began to rain again, so I went inside to help with the vacuuming. It was raining hard, so I opened the back door to see how the overflow ditch was holding up. The ditch was holding up great, but water was gushing in the back door. The gutters were full of junk so the water was pouring off the roof onto the concrete right in front of the back door...and under the door into the sanctuary. I grabbed a ladder and ran out into the rain to clear the drain. A good friend came out with me (also getting soaked) to help. I got the drain cleared by the time the really hard rain stopped and the problem seemed to be fixed. We dug out and drained (as best we could) the ditch one more time in hopes of keeping the rest of the rain out for the night.

So tomorrow, I'll do some more wet vacuuming, maybe some more ditch digging and maybe call the carpet cleaning people. I haven't been that wet out in the rain in a while. Amanda probably would have thought it was fun. Anyway, thanks Steve and Brad for your help today. At least the nap part was good!

- Rob