Ye gods!

I mentioned in my last post that we’d had a storm the night before but that it was a weak affair with a little bit of thunder and not much rain. Well, it seems that the gods have been reading my blog and were rather unimpressed by my comments, so last night they set out to rectify the matter.

It started during the evening when thick grey cloud rolled in and we started to get general thunder all around, but no lightening that you could see and no rain at all. This lulled us into a fall sense of security as it seemed like we were in for a re-run of the night before, but even so, I was glad that I’d finished the X-Air’s tail cover off in case some rain was to follow. In fact this was just the orchestra tuning up for the main event! It continued for the whole of the evening with rumbles and crashes of thunder from every direction and large flashes of sheet lightening lighting up the landscape from behind the veil of clouds. Toddie wasn’t at all concerned because he can’t hear much nowadays but when I went off for an early night at 11.00 pm I thought that I’d have difficulty getting off to sleep with the noise and the lightening flashing outside my window.

I was just dozing off about ten minutes later when I heard the sound of rushing water through my bedroom window that I’d left ajar to let some fresh air into the room and I knew immediately that the heavens had opened. I thought it was a good time to get up and see how the X-Air was faring in the what by now sounded like quite hefty wind gusts and it was lucky that I did! I found that the wind was forcing the downpour against my back door and that rain was flooding in underneath it onto the tiled floor of my lounge. The water was being channelled along the joints between the tiles and already a fair size pool was forming in front of my fireplace, so I dashed into the bathroom to grab a mop and bucket. In the meantime it looked as though all hell had broken loose outside, with lightening flashes eerily illuminating the X-Air which was being lashed with rain and rocking in the wildly gusting wind. I was very concerned that it might be able to blow over as I’d never thought that it might be necessary to tie it down on my own front garden, but there wasn’t much that I could do except keep my fingers crossed and wait.

In the meantime, I had to deal with the flood coming into my lounge. I’d turned the lights on when I came down and these kept flashing on and off as the storm became more fierce. I thought that it was lucky that this hadn’t happened earlier, when I’d had the computer on, because I’m sure it would have been damaged by the electrical conditions, but all I could do was just keep on mopping. I kept glancing out at the X-Air but I was pretty certain that it would survive unscathed because although the trees around the garden were waving backwards and forwards in the wind, they provided enough shelter on all sides for it to be not too much affected by the gusts.

Then within half an hour or so, the rain began to subside and it all began to quieten down again. I’d moved furniture around in my lounge and had more or less got the floor dry again and although there was still the odd rumble of thunder outside, it was obvious that the main storm had passed. So I gave it another few minutes and went off back to bed. This morning it is much cooler and almost calm outside. I was shocked to see two large tree branches on the front lawn which both luckily missed the X-Air. One was old and dead but the other was over three inches in diameter at its largest and covered in leaves, so it showed how strong the wind must have been when it was blowing at its fiercest. But I’m glad to say that the X-Air is otherwise unscathed and that the covers passed their initial test with flying colours 😉