Needless to say, it isn’t always a beautiful day in the neighborhood. (I love Mr. Rogers, but I’ll try to stop with the references now.) If you were anywhere in the Northeastern United States this past summer, you know that the rain rain rain came down down down. It truly was miserable. I had resolved to bike to work as often as possible during the summer months, to save money on gas. And to save my carbon footprint. I’m what you might call an environmentalist, but I do drive a 16 mile per gallon Chevy Blazer. You take what you can get, and it certainly gets me places. When it is sunny, it’s a nice 10 minute ride to work. But after one bike ride home during a thunderstorm/torrential downpour, I decided to drive whenever the forecast called for rain. Which it did, almost every day. And almost every day, it would start around 4:30 pm (when I would maybe start thinking about leaving work). Not conducive to commuting by bike.
The truly ironic thing about all this rain is that the research I was helping with the summer depended on base flow in the streams. Many of the streams in this area are heavily impacted by stormwater, so whenever it rains the water level goes way up. I experienced this first hand when I arrived on my first day of work, and had to jump into the Casperkill Creek to replace a water quality monitoring device. The stream is usually at about mid-thigh height, but with all the rain we got in June, the water was nearly at my waist. I do wear chest waders to stay dry, but managed to get a whole bunch of water inside them while reaching for the device at the bottom of the stream. I was very, very wet, and not very happy about it. I’m a small person (5′2″); meanwhile, my friend Cat is over six feet tall, and was much more successful in reaching the device at the bottom. (She asked me to do it instead of her, because she forgot her socks that day, and it’s pretty gross to wear the chest waders without socks. It’s also pretty gross to be covered in combined sewer overflow water and E. coli.)
The other research project I’m assisting with is, as I mentioned before, dependent on dry weather conditions. Those basically never came this summer, and we had to make do with not quite ideal circumstances. My own research this past year was on water quality in rain gardens, and depends on rain. I’m trying to continue to take samples for this project now that the school year has started and I have the chance. But since September arrived, we’ve had maybe one day of rain. The weather isn’t very cooperative for research projects these days. And when I say I need it to rain, people haven’t been very sympathetic.
In our house, we have a screened-in sun porch downstairs; my bedroom is adjacent to a similar room directly above it. The floor in the upstairs sun porch looked like there had been water damage. And we soon discovered why. The roof on that section of the house is flat, and whenever it rained, there was quite a bit of water that would drip through the roof, puddle on the floor of the upstairs sun porch, and drip down to the downstairs sun porch. We had a major leak problem. My allergies very sensitive, particularly to mold, so living next to all this wet wood was difficult. I’ve been wearing my glasses more these days than ever before, because my eyes have been so red and puffy. We told our landlord about the problem, and when she came back down from the roof she reported that the gutters had been clogged and that there had been a small lake on that flat part of the ceiling. I wasn’t surprised. Luckily she unclogged the gutters, and the problem improved quite a bit. But we still have wet wood and leaks when there’s a heavy rain. She once came by the house and told us that if we get a leak, we should get a bucket. So that’s been more or less our attitude towards the whole matter.
Speaking of not-so-beautiful days in the neighborhood, though, I feel the need to also mention here the car alarm that went off for three days straight last week. The car was parked on the street one or two houses down from ours. Not ok.
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