Fun, fun, fun! Rain, leaves, mud and one foot.

Oh joy. The past three days of almost constant rain have brought so much fun and adventure to the Lair. It started out with a flooded basement, which I traced back to water that should have been diverted away by my gutters and a drainage ditch somehow getting to my walls and flowing in. So after spending a good bit of Saturday night and Sunday morning running the shop-vac to clean up the water inside, I took advantage of a break in the rainstorm on Sunday to try to inspect my gutters. Of course they were chock full of leaves and totally non-functional, so I cleaned them out, but I also had to go up on the roof to get all of the other leaves off it lest they wind up right back in the gutters with the next downpour. So this was a good test for the new foot--seeing how it handled on a sloping wet roof covered with wet leaves.
Fortunately for me, it worked well, and I had the gutters cleaned and the roof cleared of leaves in under an hour. But still the water came in, this time mostly due to the steep hill behind the house and the leaves clogging the drainage ditch that usually serves as a buffer. So Monday, after cleaning up the new water from the basement, I went out in the rain and mucked around in the mud and more wet slippery leaves to clean out the ditch, removing the leaves and sharpening up the channel as much as I could. Now the water runs off to the sides of the property as it should. Of course I got to be one mud-covered mess in the process, and wouldn't you know it? As soon as I finished, the rain stopped. This morning I cleaned up the rest of the water in the basement and made yet another mental note to shoot my former realtor on sight. Grrrr....