Mydangblog and the Blustery Day

For most of this week, I’ve had a song stuck in my head. I get that a lot and sometimes for more than a week, thanks to my particular brand of OCD, where a random song will start to loop and I can’t stop it, to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s still playing. I wrote about this previously (check out It’s Toxic for more), and it usually happens when I’m very stressed. And what is the song, you ask? It’s The Rain, Rain, Rain, Came Down, Down, Down from the Disney feature Winnie The Pooh and the Blustery Day. In the story, it rains so much that Piglet and Pooh are flooded out of their homes, and I don’t know why anyone would think that was adorable and totally appropriate for small children. I remember watching it as a small child myself and being very afraid for Piglet. Of course, back then I couldn’t swim, so I assumed anyone surrounded by water would just drown.

And why do you have that particular song stuck in your head, you ask? Because last week, I was beset—nay, besieged, by torrential rain wherever I went. It started last Sunday when I did a book fair at a town not far from here. It was an outdoor event, so Ken and I loaded up the table, chairs, and the canopy/tent we’d gotten cheap off Facebook Marketplace. It was a sweltering day and we were both exhausted by the time we got the tent up, having forgotten how it all went together and taking extra long in the full sun for the debacle. No sooner had the event started, and people arrived, when the skies took an ominous turn. Ken had left by this point, wanting to go home and mow the lawn, and he called me to say that he was halfway home and it was teeming down. Then the thunder started. Then the downpour came. I threw tarps over everything then spent the next hour hanging on to my cheap-ass tent for dear life as the wind threatened to turn it into a parasail. I got soaked to the skin and only sold one book the entire afternoon.

Then, on Monday, as we kept getting shower after shower, I got worried about the basement. It’s a partial basement and crawlspace and it’s always a little damp but we have a dehumidifier that keeps things under control. On Tuesday morning though, the skies opened and we got rain like we’ve never seen rain before. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the sump pump running endlessly. So I opened the basement door to take a peek. There was a small river running across the basement floor, and I just about lost my mind:

Me: Ken! There’s water everywhere!
Ken: It’ll be ok. The sump pump isn’t broken this time.
Me: What if the power goes off?!
Ken: Then we’re screwed.
Me: OMG, the house is going to collapse!
Ken: The house has been standing for almost 120 years. It will be fine. We just need to—

And that’s when the song started. It’s been playing in my head as we mopped, as we shopvac’d, as I fretted, and as Ken put down hydraulic cement.

Luckily, the hydraulic cement seems to have done the trick for the time being, until we can get someone in to take a proper look. But they’re all busy right now because a lot of other people got a lot more water in than we did and sustained a heck of a lot more damage, one of the advantages of us having a creepy basement that I’m pretty sure is haunted so we don’t keep anything down there that a ghost would like. And the upside? I’ve been singing the rain song wrong all these years, as I found out when I watched the YouTube video just now, so now my brain can do it right. And the rain, rain, rain, came down, down, down…

35 thoughts on “Mydangblog and the Blustery Day”

  1. Nothing will ever compare to my time as a Paramedic and Firefighter, especially during the two consecutive weeks of nonstop work amid Hurricane Irene in Upstate New York. The historic flooding reached heights that submerged cars, inundated everything in its path, and swept away anything not firmly anchored.

    That year, one of the most memorable and amusing incidents involved a local fair the town had organized. We had planned to land a medical helicopter nearby for a demonstration. At the last minute, someone decided it would be a splendid idea to place an inflatable bounce castle in the field designated for the helicopter landing. Despite my warnings about the potential hazards, the event proceeded as planned, and we landed the helicopter perilously close to the bounce castle.

    The compromise was to evacuate everyone from the area, including the bounce castle, ten minutes before the helicopter’s arrival. My concerns were validated when the helicopter’s powerful downdraft sent the bounce castle soaring unexpectedly high into the air before it blew away. Initially, the children watched in awe and amusement, but their excitement turned to dismay as they realized the bounce castle wasn’t coming back.

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  2. That’s been our theme the last two Tuesdays. The remnants of Beryl dumped about five inches on us two weeks ago, and then this past Tuesday a cold front parked on top of us and dumped rain again all day long. At least since that front came through, it killed the heat and the weather has been more September-like. I’m glad I don’t have a basement to flood, but my new cheap (and cheaply installed) gutters sure got a workout…

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  3. “Tut, tut, it looks like rain.”
    The atmosphere is a great sponge, made greater with global heating, being wrung out with dire consequences.
    The Kardashev scale, as you know, measures a civilization’s energy mastery. I wonder if there is such a system for grading the management, ney, the domination of the weather and climate? If there is, humanity will no doubt get an “F”. What’s worse than failure? Exacerbation? Willful destruction?
    Maybe you better buy a boat.

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    • Luckily we have a couple of kayaks. Looks like we’ll need them, the way things are going. This was the tail-end of yet another hurricane. I’ve lost track of which one it was this time. And us with 80 foot tall black walnut trees all over our property too—if one of those came down…

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  4. We got a sump pump after our basement flooded. The company that installed it has been in business for fifty years and they were so proud of their work and their guarantee they had “If you’d called us fifty years ago you wouldn’t be calling us today!” printed on all their stuff. A few years later we had a 500-year flood and it was too much for the pump. We got some water, but it would have been worse without the pump.
    Meanwhile we’ve had a drought here and I was glad we got a downpour last night. Weather is always a wild thing.

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      • I love the Eurythimics! And you increased my knowledge-I had to look up hydraulic cement! So see? Still teaching😂. I live in an apartment complex building on first floor. Only flooded once in winter when people above me locked their two big dogs in the bathroom and somehow they turned the faucet on. I heard what I thought was rain and went into my bathroom underneath theirs, to see a flood, coming from the vent in the ceiling, like a waterfall and down the walls in the living room. And because my door faces an outside hallway that has stairs up to their apartment, which, of course it was winter and icy, and this blue salt was everywhere, that all flooded out their door down the stairs into my door into my living room floor and the floor was never the same. After that you couldn’t get rid of that blue ice residue, no matter how much you scrubbed. Oh, and of course I lived in Houston when there were two big floods. That’s when I learned what hydroplaning was😂

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  6. Oh my goodness, the fact you dealt with a rain storm at an outdoor book fair, is worry some enough. But basement flooding is a nightmare, any kind of flooding is a nightmare, ugh. Glad to know your alright, I mean except for the constant song in your head that is.

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  8. Here’s to hoping that Mother Nature provides sufficient a break from the incessant rains that your brain can take a break from its focus on what the rains might do. I’m sure Ken is right about the house having stood as long as it has, but stress doesn’t listen to those kinds of details! I have a different rain-themed song in my head now after reading your post, but I always have songs stuck in my head, so this song provides an unexpected change of pace!

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  11. Commiserations! No flood here as we’re on a ridge, but lots of cold and rain. Utterly miserable.

    I’m glad the flood didn’t do too much damage, but that song…? I guess listening to something else doesn’t work?

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  12. Catherine's avatar Catherine says:

    It’s been raining like crazy here too in Minnesota. My new place is on the 4th flour. AND the lightening and thunder hit the front of the building right next to where I was sitting reading a book.That blast took out the electronic entry stuff. Next day, not realizing that, I went out and when I came back well someone had left a stick in the back door to keep the door from locking tenants out, like me. It took two days to get everything fixed.

    The sheets of rain is what’s happening during the storms that are coming through here. I can’t imagine going through what you guys went through with the tent at the book sale and the house.

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