“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 823 (Thursday) – downspouts and flowers

Another remote workday done. Another day closer to the weekend. And it is good.

It poured for a while in the morning, and I was glad to be working from home for two reasons. The first was not having to be out in the rain. The second reason was that, if not working from home, I would have missed the return of the gutter waterfall feature over the front door. After the gutters were cleaned last year, the problem seemed solved, but now it seemed to be back. 

A minute was taken to revive the memory of beloved book character and teenage sleuth Nancy Drew, which involved dashing upstairs and opening the second floor window and raising the screen. By hanging out the window a a bit, it is possible to look down on the top of the gutter. The gutter itself, from what I could see, was was full of clean looking water and not much else. This is quite unlike last year when it was full of black goo, decomposed leaves, and even a tennis ball. The unofficial, very amateur fictional detective conclusion is that the problem must be at the downspout at the corner. 

As it rained, there was effort required to convince Winston to go outside. The front door water flow had Winston refusing to pass through. To get him into the back yard, meant I also had to go outside to guide him out to the yard and check the gate. While outside in the rain I had been glad to avoid just minutes earlier, the downspout was observed to be dispensing barely a trickle of water. It was far from the streams of water pouring forth from the downspouts on the other corners of my house and even the house next door. 

Peony popping!

Now the question is, now what? The low-budget solution is to haul a ladder to the corner of the house for a removal action. Or I could call the gutter company that did the cleaning last year. And two postcards arrived by mail in the last week from Leaf Filter gutter protection. How timely. 

The rain stopped, the skies cleared, and the sun returned. After work, there was a sense of surprise at seeing the thermostat reading of 80 degrees in the house. I had been chilly most of the day despite wearing long pants and a long sleeve tee shirt and adding a long sleeve lightweight hoodie. Either the thermostat is broken or I am. It wasn’t until after supper and pulling weeds that I first felt the tiniest bit warm.

June can be such a spectacular month. Flowers are blooming everywhere, and the peonies are taking the stage now with blooms. The daylight is long, and the temperature is often comfortable. When the cool evening breezes blow, the windows are opened and the house feels refreshed. The BungaLowell benefits from nice airflow in the dry, cool mornings and evenings. Downstairs anyway. Upstairs is noticeably more stuffy with essentially no air flow and thank goodness for the ceiling fan in the bedroom. Once the humidity settles in, the A/C will have to be turned on, but for now, it’s all good. 

Dry, clear gutter.

The evening basement check revealed it to be dry and the follow-up gutter check showed the gutter water to be gone. The only thing to be seen in the gutter was a bountiful cluster of the tiny helicopter seed things way down in the corner near the downspout (Nancy Drew wannabe was right!). The seed things actually have a name that I just now learned, which is "samaras" and sounds a lot prettier but far less descriptive than "helicopter thingies." 

There was one windy day some weeks ago when the air was briefly filled with a squall of samaras as they swirled and fluttered down from the tree in a neighbor's yard. It was the first time I recall seeing a magical swirling cloud of helicopter thingies, and it was impressive.