It’s day two of groundhog day err agility showing. More dogs, more jumping and a lot more sitting around. None the less, yesterday actually turned out fairly productive with each of our dogs going 4 for 4, made a blog post and even got some photo shoots in at Chain O Lakes and Lake of Geneva. Regarding the latter, it is now very obvious where the Chicago discretionary money is heading – straight to Wisconsin. Good lord those houses around that lake are HUGE. Also had an entertaining conversation with a Spring Grove Dairy Queen employee who thought the green Arctic Rush flavor jar was apple and not lemon lime. DQ probably owes me a free blizzard for training their staff.
While digging around the Internet for some details for this post I stumbled on this quote.
Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.. anonymous
This seemed a perfect intro to today’s post. This is actually a pretty popular quote on the net but none of the references attributed it to anyone in particular. A shame since it is a pretty insightful quote – ESPECIALLY if you own a bridge named Serenity. Note, I was really looking for relevant quotes from the movie Serenity when the one above came up. If you recall, Serenity was a project to give access to the back of our lot (link here). When it was designed consideration was given to how high to make it to account for the seasonal flooding that had occurred in the past. Since building it, our Springs were pretty tame and as far as recollection serves, the stream stayed in the banks. That was then.. this is now!
Welcome to the record flood of 2013. The shot above is actually a few days after the water started to recede. Still high, still displaying the awesome power associated with unbridled water. The weather heads were calling for flash flood warnings but based on their accuracy over the last couple of years there was not a lot of concern given. Well, at least until I headed off to work that morning and saw the massive flooding – Peoria was under attack by the Kracken. All I could think of is whether Serenity was going to survive or not. It was engineered for the worst… but maybe not for record amounts of waterfall.
Eventually Linda and I headed down to assess the situation. Apprehension abounds. Feelings were not getting any better at the first view of the stream. What you couldn’t tell from that shot is the missing trees that used to be along the banks (now middle of the water path). A quick look to the left revealed that my “debris” buffer was GONE. There was a tangle of trees that was serving as insurance if anything decided to break away upstream. It had already caught some large branches etc. during the smaller expansions. That area was now free of all tangles – hell, even the bank had eroded significantly.
One of the trees was found shortly after…
SAVED. the roots were tangled up in another bank tree which prevented it from harming Serenity. Hopes were building especially when a hesitant glance downstream revealed she still standing tall.
Hit the jump to see more details of Serenity’s battle
