Well it's been an interesting 2 months so far to say the least. I think today makes it my 2 month anniversary here and it almost feels like a lifetime. I've been learning so much about myself and obviously living out in the country introduces you to its own, unique 'adventures'. And in the end, it's all good. Our 4 day rain has slowed for a bit and it was time to venture outside and look around. We had our share of flooding and I wanted to look around the property to see what, if anything needed attention. While I was out driving the other day, forging rivers in the road, Denise and Wayne had gone out to the pond to see how it was faring. During previous heavy rains it would over flow its banks a little, but not damage anything really because it would just flow into the lower wetlands. And when I got out there, I got to see the aftermath of it all. I can only imagine what it looked like when they saw it with all the water running down. It is amazing... the power of nature.
After being cooped up in the barn, the fella's make time for a mud bath... What draws them to the muddiest water on the farm I don't know, but they were having a ball. Later in the day, all eight of them were splashing around in the mud pit by the compost pile where the 'dirtiest' water is, but they could care less... So could I, I guess... I'm not sleeping with them ;-)
Spa life on the farm. Maybe there's something to it... 
Now to show you the aftermath of the flooding we just had, I don't have a lot of pic's of the pond the way it used to look. So you'll have to trust me when I say that all the rock debris that's in the upcoming pic's was not there before. So here's one I took a while ago... 
And here's the beginning of the series I took yesterday... Now from here, the 'deluge' came down from the right hand side and just spilled into the pond. It's about 100 feet wide and just came down from the woods. Viewing the pic below... the damage extends to the left another 50 feet and at this time, and there's a second stream now that has been created.
This was that gentle, little stream where we were getting our water from for the past few weeks... You can see the water pails in the very background. Most of the rock on the right & left wasn't there. Actually the pond was probably at least 3-5 deep here before... now I'm standing on it taking this picture... And if you look back into the tree line, you can see the exspance of the damage... You can see that rock covers the landscape in the entire back of this picture. It's unreal.
This picture actually gives you a pretty good before & after sequence... This small, lone tree in the middle and the water behind it gives a good reference point... 
You can see that everything in front of the tree has been washed away, the stream has changed and the waterline behind it has been replaced with rubble. Notice here how you can now walk out to the island without the need for the bridge...
I was like a kid walking around, looking for 'artifacts'... I figured something interesting must have been washed up or uncovered. I did find an old, pull tab, commemorative, Bi-Centennial Pepsi can. So it's feasible that it was laid to rest some where around here in 1976... Kinda cool. I also kept finding small pieces of wire every where. Really thin strand wire... like the kind me and my friends used to play with and make stuff out of when I was in Germany... and now it was all over the place. 
Then I started to walk back up into the woods to investigate some more... It was a jungle before, but now it was like a 'water' fire came through and cleared it all out. In fact, the 'path' of the damage extended well over 60 feet wide. Everything was just stripped to bare stone. And as I continued to follow the 'stream' back up the hill, I kept on seeing the same little pieces of wire everywhere... and I was determined to find out where and/or why it was scattered over hundreds of feet. 
That big horizontal tree was standing a couple of days ago.... At the time I was hiking through this natural 'transformation', I couldn't fathom the how's associated with what I was witnessing... How much water did it take to move all these rocks, or even just wash away every bit of topsoil... I mean these picture's don't capture the magnitude of what happened... But a few hundred feet up the hillside and I found the source of it all... 
A 'small' landslide was the cause for all the debris that had washed itself all the way down the hill... Now it was made sense. And again, it's hard to see in the pic's how big this thing was but as a point of reference... the big tree here is the same one from the previous pic... So that kind of gives you an idea on how wide the cave in is/was. 
And this picture is taken from the top, looking down into where it began. Again the perspective is sort of lost, but to give you another idea... that big fallen tree is on the left there, and you can make out where the original surface was if you follow the ridges around the pic. This now explains that loud 'cracking' explosion I had heard earlier from my place. Life is never dull in the country...
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