Flooding

So, yesterday we went down to Brooklyn to celebrate Kenn and Giselle's birthdays (one early, one late). Kenny and I cooked three different kind of chiles rellenos (1. anchos stuff with meat and topped with a sour cream sauce, 2. poblanos stuffed with cheese and baked with a red chile sauce and 3. poblanos and anchos stuff withed beans, topped with cheese, and baked with a little cream) and they were all delicious!!! The meat filled ones were my favorite, but there really wasn't a bad one in the bunch. I also made a tres leches cake which I wasn't wild about, but which was very sweet and milky. Chester and Jay joined us too and it was an excellent visit despite the oppressive humidity. Kenny brought one of our childhood books from home and the kids LOVED hearing "The Terrible Troll-Bird" and Zion spent much of the visit fighting off troll birds and insisting that everyone come hunting with him. Good times.

The humidity does come back into the story, however. It wasn't just there for whining complaintfulness! As we were leaving it got dark. Really dark. And there was thunder, very deep and loud. The rain started as I got into the car, and by the time we were at 3rd Ave (that's 2 blocks for those of you who aren't regular visitors to the Brooklyn house) it was coming down crazy hard and the gutters were overflowing with raging water (ah, good old Raging Waters...). We drove along under the BQE overpass for a mile or two, and sheets of water were pouring off it at intervals, making it impossible to see for a second or two- not that it was easy to see anyway with the rain coming down so hard. When we turned off of 3rd Ave to get to the Battery Tunnel the fun really started. First there was a big deep puddle, about a car length long and more than half way up the wheels. And we were still under the overpass, so lots of extra water coming from above. Finally we turned off for the tunnel toll booths and all seemed well. We were in a tunnel of sorts already and there wasn't any rain falling on us. But there was a long line of slowly moving cars, which was most annoying, esp since the driver in front of us didn't seem to be paying a lot of attention, or didn't want to move forward much. Then we saw The Puddle. This one took us a good 5-10 seconds to drive through, and was so deep it covered the exhaust pipe of the car in front of us. Not good! I held my breath the whole time, it really was kinda scary. And keep in mind- it had only been raining for about 10 minutes. New York does not have the best water diversion system for its roads.

We made it home safely, but our flooding troubles were not over.

Liel recently discovered she can turn on the faucet of the bathroom sink, and she delights in washing her hands 80 times a day, at the slightest excuse. Unfortunately, she doesn't (or can't, I'm not sure which) turn the water OFF. She also opens the faucet all the way, so water is pouring out. So far this hasn't been a problem because you can hear it from any room in our tiny house and one of us always comes to turn it off pretty quickly. Today however, Miss Liel managed to fill the sink and have it pouring onto the floor before we even got there. Better still, the pipes under our sink are not, it turns out, caulked! So we had a flood on the floor and in the cabinet under the sink as well.

Let's hope we've reached the end of our summer floods. They don't begin to compare to those in the Midwest, but they are quite enough for me!