When I was a kid my Dad told me "Never buy a house on the top of a hill or at the bottom of a valley". This came to mind because it's been raining. Continuously, maddeningly, eternally, raining. weeks and weeks of rain. The kind that just rattles on the roof all night, and all day, and all night and... We've had a few bands that have had a lot of wind and driving rain but mostly its been fairly heavy, incessant rain with a few periods of light rain. even the concrete is starting to feel soggy in places. Several times on the way to the Pacific Shores I've had to drive through temporary streams crossing the highway. (No worry though, they were only around half an inch, one centimetre, deep.)

The source of this is something called The Pineapple Express. The Pineapple Express is a seasonal thing that sets up a couple of times per year, but not usually for this long. If you look at a satellite picture there is a band of warm wet clouds a few hundred miles wide that is flowing onto the coast from the southwest. The southern edge is in northern Oregon, and the northern edge is just north of Vancouver Island. The other end of the band is somewhere near Hawaii, hence the name. Weather fronts slide along this band bringing the wind and rain. Now, this part of the world is used to rain, Yearly rainfall is measured in feet, OK in meters actually. But even the old timers have been commenting on how long this has been going on.

Red: "Boy, have you ever seen it rain this much, Harold?"
Harold: "Eh?"
Which brings up the question: If a Canadian is hard of hearing, how could you tell?

As I mentioned there have been bands of rougher weather mixed in with the rain. On Wednesday BC ferries cancelled most of their runs because of high winds. There was a fair amount of grumbling from the mainlanders. However, those of us on the island were divided into two camps. The first just figured that was the price we paid for living on an island. The other side was happy to see anything that keeps 'those darn mainlanders' off of 'our' island.

There have been sporadic power outages here. I was working at my desk Tuesday and I could hear Marsha and the TV in the other room. Suddenly it got really quiet and my table lamp shut off. For a few seconds I was confused as to what happened. It was dark and quiet, but the computers, laptops with batteries, were still running normally. Fairly quickly though I figured it out, especially when Marsha shouted "I think the power just went out". The next thing was to find a flashlight. We keep all of our flashlights in the garage on a shelf next to the window. Unfortunately to get there I had to walk through the laundry room which did not have a window. After the third @$*!# as I made my way through the room Marsha piped up with "Well, why don't you turn on a light", which I actually tried to do before I realized that she was kidding. Funny girl. Once armed with a couple of flashlights I returned to the family room. By now it was nearly 5:00 and a thick cloud cover filtered what little light the setting sun could provide so it was getting pretty dim in there. We set about finding candles and we managed to locate a half dozen. I even found some nice small wooden matches. I was just about to light the candles when the lights came back on. Literally I had the match in my hand touching the striker on the box. Another half of a second and I would have struck the match but with a blink, everything came back. Oh well now we know where the candles are.

You may remember our friend Agnes that we visited in Courtenay a couple weeks ago. Things have been a bit rougher up there. They've had a number of blackouts. More importantly the Puntledge river is, like a number of the rivers on the island nearing flood stage. The rain is just filling up the low lying areas. Now, Agnes lives on a hill overlooking the river so that even though some parts of Courtenay are flooded, she is high and dry. She did say though that she is taking her cat to work with her "just in case". The other thing the residents of Courtenay are dealing with is the river has cut the town in half. It may only be a five minute drive across town, but right now with the detours, crossing town takes nearly an hour.

Courtenay has been doing better than the people south of here in Duncan and the Cowichan Valley. They are dealing with some serious flooding. The last we heard a few hundred houses are flooded "up to the doorknobs". The trouble in that case was not just the rain. Two rivers come together in Duncan but even that would not have caused this much damage. What is making things so bad is that the tides have been extremely high this week and this has been backing up the rivers and making the flooding worse.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/11/20/bc-flooding-cowichan-valley-duncan.html

The rain has had one upside though. Whistler, where the skiing events for the Olympics will be held, is getting lots of snow.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/11/19/bc-whistler-record-snow.html

That's all for this week
Happy Thanksgiving!

Doug & Marsha
(Located high and dry halfway up Rutherford Hill)

Pix This week: More stormy weather at the beach.