the flood!

last night I went to bed before even the sun had set. I had thought that after eating some food I might go back out and rake some mulch but I was so exhausted. i slept from about 6pm to 8am the next day. We haven't been working that hard here lately, I have just been missing a few hours of sleep every night for too long and it finally caught up with me I suppose.
Anyway, I seem to remember falling to sleep with a question on my mind along the lines of "now that the tanks are full, should I divert some water down to the big pond and see if it is going to work out when it is full?"... When I woke up this morning Tim asked me if I had emptied the rain gauge yesterday. Sleepily I told him, "Yeah, at about 7:30am, like usual...", and he rsponded that this morning it was overflowing! I sort of didn't really believe him, as that would mean more than 6 inches in 24 hours. More than 5 and a 1/2 inches ovefrnight, as we got about 10 mm during the day yesterday...
So, I set off to have a look at the pond. On the way I found that the gravel we added to the driveway in several places had been cut out, and I ran into Malte who told me that his driveway had been severely gutted out where some straw mulch had blocked his drainways... I ran into Eve, our new tenant, who is in the process of moving into the Dollhouse so had her car down there overnight and almost didn't get it out!
Of course, the pond was full(!) but not exactly overflowing in the right place! I had built up the spillway in order to get more storage at the back of the pond, in the shallows, thinking we had enough room to play with. So, now the pond was flooding the anchor trench which could be bad... So we excavated the spillway a little and moved some more soil around and hopefully it will be cool. I came up here to get some sweet potato cuttings, and then it started bucketing again, so Lorinda asked me to take Lichen inside and dry her off. So, I think I'm going to go back now and see if it is still overflowing... If it stops raining long enough I'll try and get a pic or two...