Unnatural Disaster

We here in DC managed to go relatively unscathed from Sandy.  Instead of the expected power outages and tree damage we ended up with two extra days of play tacked onto the weekend.

Just in case, we spent Friday through Sunday over in West Virginia, trying to do what we could to prepare Camp Davis for what was surely a lot of rain yesterday and today.  I cleaned the gutters (let’s just say it’s been a while), swept leaves and branches off the roof, and even added a pair of downspouts.  Of course, despite double and triple checking I managed to install one of them completely wrong.  I still can’t figure that out.  Hopefully they did their job anyway.

If you were curious what Loren looks like through 10 feet of downspout, here it is:

While I was up on the ladder I finally remembered to get a shot of the roof my dad and I installed on the studio a few weeks back.

My guess is that the wind and the rain put our handy work to the test.  I’ll report back next week on whether it survived.

It still feels great knowing that the Studio is finally covered properly.  We’ve got (a lot) more work to do on the siding, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the inside renovations, but I’m ready for it knowing the roof is good.

Happy that we prepared the place as well as we could, we drove home to DC Sunday – well, almost.  We managed to get to Bethesda when suddenly we noticed a strong maple syrup odor.  We found this humorous at first, then noticed smoke coming from our engine.  On inspection I found that the engine was running dangerously hot and our coolant was empty.  We couldn’t drive very far without over-heating, so, just 20 minutes from home we had to call a tow truck.

Thankfully we had just signed up for AAA before heading on our Minnesota trip.  Within 25 minutes the tow truck arrived, and our friend Kirk was ready with the getaway car for us and the kids.  The whole process was painless (we now expect to be life-long AAA members).  Well, painless if you don’t count the 1,400 dollar bill we’ll be paying to replace our busted fan and radiator.  Yeah.  I was hoping there was just a hole in the coolant hose or something, maybe a little something containable with the cunning use of duct tape.  No such luck.

One natural disaster averted.  One unnatural disaster a direct hit to the wallet.

You win some, you lose some I guess.

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Here’s a few other random shots from the weekend: