Our First Visitors!

On September 7, my sister Elaine and her husband Kent arrived for a two-day visit. They had gone to Germany to visit friends, and they decided to drive to France to see us. It was so wonderful to see them! It was a long, lonely summer here without knowing anyone, so it was great to be able to see family for a couple of days.

The day Elaine and Kent arrived, two things happened: there were torrential rains, and there was a general strike in France. (I'll write about the strike in a separate entry.) The rain caused our garage to be badly flooded. There's a story behind that, and here it is. At the end of July there was a night of heavy rain, and our garage ended up with a little bit of water in it. There's a drainage gutter at the end of our driveway near the garage entrance, and I figured it was clogged up, and that's why rainwater had gotten into the garage. When I tried to lift up the heavy metal plates of the gutter, however, I wasn't able to do it. I called our landlord and told him we had water in our garage. He told me to tell the gardener (whom I had recently hired) to take a look at the rain gutter.

The gardener came to work on our yard a few weeks later, and I told him about the rain gutter being clogged. He said he'd take a look, but I believe he left without doing so. So when we had torrential rains all day September 7, our garage was badly flooded. I called our landlord on the afternoon of the 7th and said there was a pool of water collected in front of our garage, and that the garage was surely flooded. He said he'd come take a look that evening. He never showed up.

Meanwhile, Kent and Elaine arrived from Germany on the evening of the 7th. After dinner we all went to look at the garage situation. When we stepped through the pool of water leading to the garage and opened the door, we saw that the garage was badly flooded. At that point Kent started helping us move furniture around so that we could do some damage control. (We have some furniture in the garage because we're not using it as a garage per se. It's a nice, clean room, so we've been planning on using it as a recreation room. It has a small couch, TV, and old computer in it.) Kent spent a good part of that evening, as well as the next day, figuring out how to clean out the drainage gutter so that we wouldn't have this problem with flooding in the future.

In the end, the damage to the garage wasn't too bad. We had to throw out a big rug and a small rug, but luckily they weren't expensive. There was a lot of mud to muck out, but most of our belongings weren't particularly harmed. And now, since Kent cleaned out the gutter and got it flowing again, we hopefully won't have this problem in the future.

So our first visitors ended up helping us with house projects. (Kent also figured out how to fix our motion detector light.) At least we managed to spend a fun day looking at the sights of Lyon in between the house projects. Not only was it great to see Elaine and Kent, but they also brought us a bunch of brownie and pancake mixes, as well as syrup and other things I had requested that we missed and couldn't find in France. It was so nice that they came!

Two days after the rains ended, the landlord called me and said he hadn't been able to make it that one evening, but he could come this evening. I told him not to bother. My brother-in-law had come from the USA to fix our rain gutter.