Yes, I live in California so many of you are probably scoffing now when I ask about the weather…

Most of the country is frozen.

Not here.  In Northern CA, we are liquid.

…See what happens when all the people pray for rain?

We get it!

Yup, it is raining.  It hasn’t stopped for a few days.

My barn is ready to float away.

MY BARN FLOODS

I love my barn.

But, the person that built it didn’t consider considerable rain.

All the possible reservoirs and tributaries on the property flow exactly and directly to the barn.

The barn is like a water magnet.

Ugh.

It didn’t bother me too much in previous years, but now that MT is in the barn – AND that the pony pasture also floods and I feel better if the elder ponies are in the barn on awful nights – I really need the barn to be dry.

So, we’ve tried a French Drain, we’ve dug swales, we’ve installed a pump… Hubby even rented a bobcat this summer and he dug drains and put in a truckload of rock.

Yup.  We’ve tried to tame Mother Nature.  And we thought we had.

But today when I came home, the water was creeping into the barn.

ARRRRGH!

Mama Tess was in there and I had planned on bringing in the ponies/Norma.

SO, I SPENT 3 HOURS…

Digging.

I’m guessing that many of you can relate…

I put on my best water-engineer hat and tried to persuade Mother Nature to flow out towards the pasture instead of the barn.

The back of the barn was easier for me.  I could see where the water wanted to flow… and I could see how I should reroute the water (or encourage the water) to go in a different direction.

I dug and dug and kicked and slid and used my muck boot… anything to create a new path.

But, the front of the barn… I was lost how to engineer that part.

I felt like a little, waterlogged monkey as I contemplated a way to release the water.  I ended up scratching my head and throwing up my hands.

Instead of engineering something miraculous (tongue firmly placed in cheek), I opened a fresh bag of shavings and dumped it at the entrance of the barn – I hope a pile of shavings is good enough until Hubby can fix it all tomorrow.

DRENCHED

Lots of times I’ve used the term “drenched”.

“Gee, I got drenched out there.”

or

“Be careful or you’ll get drenched.”

You know what I mean?

I sometimes casually used that term “drenched”; throwing it around willy nilly.

Well, today I actually learned the true meaning of drenched.

I’ll never misuse it again.

(I went through 3 sets of clothes while I was trying to reroute the monsoon.  My coat weighed about 40lbs.)

AFTER I WAS DONE, WE HAD A MINI ROUNDUP!

Not only is the barn in the wrong place… The pony pasture’s shelter is backwards.

Instead of having its back to the rain so that the animals could be toasty dry inside, it is reversed to it catches all the rain and creates a huge, nasty shelter puddle for them to wade through.

The two Shetlands (Slick and Dodger) and Norma live there.  Usually, it only rains torrentially a couple of times a year.  But during those times, I cannot leave them out there, especially now that they are advanced in age… so, I bring them into the barn.  They know the drill.

Here is a quick video of me rounding them up very ungracefully.

The best part about this video is Mama Tess’ face when she realized that the ponies were going to be her overnight guests!  Ha!