When it Rains, it Pours

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT: It started out like most other September Saturday nights for us - football playing on three screens and just puttering around the house.

However, things started getting crazy just before 9 p.m. There was lightning and thunder, which isn't too terribly unusual in and of itself, but it just kept coming and coming, with intensity and frequency I've never before seen in my 50 years in the Pacific Northwest.

The headlines about the freak storm tell it all. ... 
"2,200 lightning strikes recorded across Western Washington from Saturday’s storm,"  declared Fox Q13.

"Seattle area sees 200 lightning strikes in under an hour ..." trumpeted the Seattle Times.


Things were so bad, events all over the region were cancelled, and the University of Washington Huskies' game was delayed for hours. 

Along with the light show, rain was coming down in sheets. Naturally, in the midst of it all, the dogs wanted to go outside. Given the weather at the moment, my response to her was, "No way. We're not going outside. You're going out the doggie door," which is a little door in a back door downstairs, that leads out to a tiny covered spot the pups can do their duty when we're not at home.

I escorted Kirby down the stairs and before long, I found myself sloshing around. Water was everywhere.  My response was to start yelling things like "HELP!" and "FLOOD!" 

The next three hours or so, the four of us were in crisis mode, moving dozens and dozens of soggy items, furniture, and so on.  Once the wet stuff was out of the way, it was time for some serious  vac-ing. I eventually remembered that our floor cleaning machine has a 'dry' setting, so we got that going, too. At one point CJ ran upstairs and threw every town in the house down the laundry chute, and we used those to sop up water, as well (and then deposited them in our new downstairs shower).  

We got every fan we had going and put a space heater in the back storeroom, which took the worst of the water damage.

A little before midnight, the rain had subsided and we had mopped up as much as we could.

As you might imagine, I had dreams about water, and was afraid to go look downstairs Sunday morning.  Thankfully, the floors were still dry. But the whole basement looked like a disaster area, with things strewn all over. 

And lets talk towels. So. Many. Towels. Every towel in the house was used. Apparently we have a *lot* of towels. I did 9 loads of laundry on Sunday. 

So today, things are trending back toward normal. Today, the kids and I inspected all of the things (computer stuff, music stuff, photo stuff, craft stuff, so much more stuff). Fortunately, we didn't lose anything significant. So lucky. So a couple of days out, it still looks like a bomb went off in the basement. It's a major inconvenience and a lot of extra work, but it could have been so much worse. 

BIG BUMMER: Friday afternoon a notice popped up on my computer that India had a moon lander about to touch down. I called the kids into the room, of course. Moon landings don't happen every day. 

When we tuned in, Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, had reached a distance of 100km from moon's surface and was set to land. The moon lander and rover was aiming to land on the South Pole of the Moon, which would be a first. The moon’s south polar region is of particular interest because of water ice reserves and other resources that could be key for human settlement.

On board Chandrayaan-2 was a robotic rover named Pragyan (meaning "wisdom"). It was set to spend one lunar day (about 29 Earth days) collecting mineral and chemical samples from the moon's surface for remote scientific analysis.

In a press release prior to touchdown, Indian space agency Chairman K. Sivan said landing on the lunar surface involved numerous technical complexities and called the landing procedure "15 terrifying minutes."

We watched and waited, full of anticipation. The personnel in mission control were clearly so nervous and excited. The screen shot (below) was on our computer screen for way too long. The red line is toward the target. The green line was real time data.  Obviously Vikram's trajectory was off target.

For what seemed like forever, the graph above was on the screen, interspersed with screen shots of pained looking flight personnel. 

It was really just so sad to watch. (Video is below, if you're curious.)

Loss of signal, and more than a kilometer off the mark before the moon's surface, the lander's chances were looking slim. 

The lander was lost. ... At least for awhile.

Fortunately, there are a number of space probes in orbit around the moon, and images from those suggest the Vikram probe is still in one piece, albeit it tilted, on the moon surface. The ISRO team is working to establish communications with the lander. While the initial mission goals are out the window, hopefully they can make the most out of the current situation. We'll be staying tuned.