Driving through Hell and a eureka moment

Around 12:30 this morning, I was pulling off the ferry after a particularly exciting sailing across the Puget Sound, and as we charged up the hill from Clinton ferry dock the lights in Clinton went out, recovered, then off again. This cycle was repeated several times. There's few things quite as surreal as driving through a town where the lights are flickering on and off. By the time I got to the first darkened light at the Langley turn off, it was decidedly a blackout. Not a single light was on, including the traffic lights. Sadly, Whidbey Island doesn't have reflectors on traffic lights and so on dark nights without power its almost impossible to see the traffic lights through the rain. Not fun. People were slamming on their brakes as they drove through intersections, which fortunately wasn't so bad at 1 am in the morning, as there was no opposing traffic. Between the rain, the debris flying at us sideways and the darkness - it was a pretty memorable experience all things concerned.

However, that said: There's five traffic lights in the 35 mile journey from the ferry to our home. Five. And they are almost ALL located at towns so why is it so hard for folks to remember where they are? 1st Langley turnoff, 2nd Langley turnoff, Freeland, Useless Bay turnoff, Coupeville. No matter how dark and thick the rain is - how does one somehow miss that the trees are suddenly gone and the road is surrounded by buildings???

I'm clutching the steering wheel, Josh has his face pressed almost against the van's windshield and I'm rambling on about the above. And that's when my hubby floors me: "Tris, its your OCD. You remember every detail because you're always noticing details others don't. You know you have five lights ahead because you've counted them, you probably do it every time we drive home from the ferry. You've got all this information stored in your head and you've got to use it, especially under stress. But other people don't memorize things like that, they just don't think that way. If I was driving, I'd have been so distracted by the storm and all, I would have gone through the lights, too."

This is about when my head exploded. Woah.

Postcards from the edge

Not to be too dramatic, but the fence just fell down. This is the same fence that long-standing flisters will recall we had to move due to the property line being 8 feet on the other side of it this year.

Part of the problem was us. When the men moved the fence, they didn't ensure that it was level across the top or properly adjusted for the topography of our yard. This put a LOT of pressure on the rain-saturated ground to hold up the fence and stressed the connections, which were already battered and bloody from being ripped out and re-used (which they shouldn't have been). Something had to give and it did.

Josh is on his cell phone calling in favors, I'm about ready to throw on some outdoor clothes and go wrangle up the fallen branches and bonfire the whole sorry mess, but meanwhile I'm just about ready to tear my hair out in frustration. Its going to take at least a week of work to break down the fence and re-install it along 262 linear feet of property. Not really what Josh wanted to do with his last week of leave, but there you go - the joys of home ownership. We talked about submitting a home insurance claim (if we even can, which we're not sure of) and even of getting rid of the damn thing all together and using the ancient, shorter pig-wire fence. He never got around to pulling the old fence down (after all, it was on the other side of the fence and we couldn't see it), and there are some pro's to that idea as pig-wire seems to withstand winter storms better than the solid wood plank fencing, and holds the dogs inside our yard. At least temporarily until he can get a team over here to re-install it properly.

But at the end of the day, its vanity that prevails overall. Our neighbors have a hideous yard, filled with piles of various crap, multiple cars that probably don't all run and a teenage son who likes to throw their trash into our yard. A good tall fence that blocked visibility of their yard is a must have.