The Creek is Flowing (Plus Extra Footage)

This is the second week in a row that our area has been pummeled by bad weather. Last night, we lost power briefly and the storm lasted for over two hours. This morning, the creek was almost up to the top of the banks and I felt a compulsion to check our basement every few hours. We had a flood in the basement of this house several months prior to our move. All of my books and board games were stored in the basement. My husband, being super-organized, had already moved his books out of the boxes and on to the shelves when we had visited over spring break, but I had wanted to use the time to relax. Alas, I lost a box full of irreplaceable books; many of them had been purchased in England, several were antiques and one was a photo book of England which had been a treasured gift from special friends of mine. I also lost my British Monopoly, Stratego, Life and several small card games (each seemed to have some sentimental hold on me and I grieved their loss for quite a while).

So, the creek makes us nervous. It is pouring as I write and I will probably check the basement every time I get up tonight. But, I thought I would use this news as an excuse to try my hand at including video in my blog updates. My camera doesn't have a sound feature with the video, so you can expect silence.


I attempted to upload the video of our creek, but, alas, an error message came up. So, I went back in and tried to upload a different video (a very short one - of my YS meeting Santa for the first time - all of 6 seconds long). So now, here I have a Santa clip and no creek clip. Some day I'll master all this stuff. Until then, bear with me.





O.K., I'll try one more time.

Victory! Perhaps next time my videos will be more interesting. I'm leaving the extra one (of YS and Santa in) because Grandma will enjoy it and because, now that I look at the two videos, it is the more interesting of the two, despite its brevity.

Later on in the day, I looked out the window to see a long skinny brown animal crawling along the bank near the tree roots. Then, it splashed into the water and then back out again among the roots of the trees. By the time I got the boys to come look, it was gone. I was thinking it was a muskrat or mink - it was very thin and low to the ground. My hubby thinks it was perhaps an otter. One of the perks of living in the middle of nowhere is that we get rare glimpses at wildlife and birds. I'm astonished at how excited I get each time I see another animal here. The simple pleasures of life. Perhaps one day I will be able to snap a shot of the blue herron that used to come all the time last winter. One morning he perched on the frozen creek for almost an hour. I believe he was looking for fish under the ice.