Hole in our House

We had some excitement on Friday afternoon. Our elderly neighbor lost control of her car and ran into the corner of our apartment. Kate, Andy and I were all in the living room at the other end of the apartment when we heard the impact. I ran back into Kate's room and saw this:



I looked out the window and saw the car--I did not, at first, recognize it as our neighbor's, and the only thing I could think was, "!!!!! Somebody hit our house! There's a big crack in our house!"

I could hear someone hollering outside, and Kate was calling, "What was that?" I said, "Stay there!" and then she kept asking, "Why do I have to stay here, Mom? Why do I have to stay here?" The mailman was outside and saw it happen, so he ran to get the manager.



Here's what the outside of the building looked like. She wasn't going very fast when she hit (good thing!). She was parking, and couldn't get her foot up on the brake.

The license plate frame came off the car, and one of the rubber bumper things on the front. Other than that there was no damage to the car. It's one of those big old Fords with an all-metal body. (The license plate was facing inward, of course--someone turned it around before I took this picture. So I blanked out the number.)



After I got everything pulled away from the corner in Kate's room, I took another picture. I think they had already started taking things off from the other side, so the area around the electrical outlet was looking worse at this point (you can see daylight coming through).



The maintenance guys got started on it right away. They pulled out the whole section of wall. We were really fortunate that the window didn't break. That would have been a huge mess.



You can see how much this stud cracked. Yikes.



They got the whole section re-framed and buttoned back up pretty quickly. The accident happened around 1:30, and by 5:00-ish the wall was back up, with the wiring and insulation in place. We have bare wallboard on the inside and a sheet of plywood on the outside for now.

We're fine, and our neighbor's fine--the only casualty was the rhododendron bush that the car took out. (You may be able to spot the stump in that last photo.) I'm really glad that Kate wasn't in her room when it happened. That would have been severely traumatizing. The past couple of weeks she's been disturbed by noises at night. She'll be lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and then call, "Mo-om! I heard a weird noise outside!" Can you imagine what it would be like if she'd been sitting in her room when a car cracked the wall? Not good.

Because good fencers make good neighbors.

A couple of weeks ago Doug was cleaning his fencing blades out on the back porch, and some of the neighborhood kids came by and wanted to try it out, so he gave some impromptu lessons. And then did some more the next day. J.C. seems to have a natural knack for the blocks, though he does tend to wave the blade around a bit.



Kate tries on a mask.



We've had some fun evenings with all the kids outside playing. We broke some heat records already. Makes me wonder what the rest of the summer is going to be like.

Peepholes, hailstones, and the great sucking vortex

We've enjoyed getting to know the other kids in the complex. We spent many hours this summer playing on the grass, or having kids in and out of our apartment. We haven't seen much of them lately, though, since school started back up, and the weather's been kind of yucky. Today they were out playing, and Kate tagged along. She's quite a bit younger, but they treat her well, and she likes being around them.



There are so many interesting things to do outside in the fall!



We were playing peekaboo through this knothole, which kept Kate amused for quite a while. We'd peek through at each other and say, "I see you!" and then she'd say, "Let's do other side!" so we'd switch sides and do it again. And again. And again.

I was just thinking it'd been a while since I got some really good pictures of Kate. Aren't these just too cute?

We went inside when it started raining. It was just a sprinkle at first, but a few minutes later the heavens opened and dumped buckets upon us. It was a regular torrential downpour. Then as Kate and I were standing at the back door watching the rain, I noticed that come of the raindrops were bouncing on the porch. I opened the door and picked up a few hailstones for Kate, and told her they were "little pieces of ice that fall from the sky." She was very impressed and went to show them to Daddy. And then they melted.

After the rain cleared up, I looked out and noticed that there was quite a lot of standing water in the parking lot. It looked like the drain was clogged with leaves. So I got my boots and our back-door stick, and waded out into the puddle to clear the drain. (I figured it would be fun, and Doug could take cool pictures.)



The puddle turned out to be a bit deeper than it looked.



"My socks are getting wet!"



After a few ineffectual swipes at the grate, I managed to clear some leaves away, and water began to spiral down with an impressively loud sucking sound.



Oleg, coming home from piano practice, expressed the opinion that it would have been much cooler to leave the water there.



The last of the water swirled away, with a sound like King Kong finishing off the world's largest slurpee.


While Daddy took pictures from the back door, somebody got out and got her socks wet and made little footyprints all over the porch.




We both had to change our socks.