Water, water everywhere ...

I knew it was going to be tiresome when, after a whole night of rain, I opened the outer front door and a puddle slopped in from the top of the new steps outside. We knew the builder didn't get it when he was making them - the door has a carefully designed frame with a wee gutter to let water from the door drain away, and he's built up the front of it. We were away when he did it. Himself tried phoning to leave a message at the shop and instead got someone - they were already attending emergency work all over the place. Bah.

Other than that we were ok, despite being in the Amber warning zone. The house is on the hillside looking over the town, and though the back door is on a slightly lower level than the garden, the carefully designed drainage worked other than a couple of puddles on the grass. But the morning was full of Facebook photos - the water in the burn past Morrison's car park was inches from the top, and higher than the houses in the Glebe on the other side; the main road north, along Loch Eck, was completely inundated so that you couldn't tell loch from road; motorists stranded between two landslips in the Cairndow area had to be airlifted to safety as the entire hillside seemed to dissolve into mud.

Himself went off to practise the organ briefly in the dripping church; I did Italian and felt a bit trapped. A spot of Pilates helped a bit, but I don't do well when I can't identify something I actually want to do (as opposed, say, to vacuuming under the beds...)

And that, my children, is why we went for a walk in the afternoon, to see some rushing water. We found plenty in the Bishop's Glen, where the loch that was the lower reservoir was more completely brown than I've ever seen it, and the torrent over the dam at the old overflow was terrifying. The main photo in the collage and the top right are of that - the contrast between the powerful smoothness of the first bit and the frothing torrent it becomes always amazes me, and I stood in the centre of the bridge to get the whole feel of it. The third photo is of a piece of woodland that normally has a tiny burn through it; today there were no tiny burns, just foaming floods making their way downhill by whatever route presented itself, and the air was full of the roar of them.

The good bit about today was that I ate a banana, drank a glass of wine (not the posh stuff - my taste buds aren't a hundred percent recovered yet) and had a chocolate. I've waited a full 72 hours after my final antibiotic dose on Wednesday night, and boy, was I tired of only drinking water with my dinner! (Apparently chocolate and bananas contain substances which interact with the drug chemically - no-one told me, but there were warnings all over t'interweb.)

Point of information: the innocuous looking Skechers waterproof shoes that I bought in the hope that they would survive the odd shower actually are waterproof - I was wading in places today and came home with bone dry socks. Result!