Those of you with an eye on the news may have noticed that New England has been hit with a major spring storm with a lot of flooding. I live in Melrose, which is right in the middle of the rain, we've had nearly ten inches of rain over the weekend. People are saying there's been nothing like it since a hurricane in 1938, although it's a minor affair compared to what some other places in the world have suffered in the last few years.

This is Route 1 - the main artery between the North Shore and downtown Boston. Suffice to say that these aren't the usual traffic conditions at 6pm on a Tuesday.

We've lived at our house for eight years. A couple of years after we moved in Melrose suffered a "100 year flood", and we got a couple of inches of water in the basement. As a result we didn't worry too much about basement flooding. This storm was much worse, and we were steadily battling water in the basement for a couple of days.

Thanks to some generous neighbors, who gave us their pump from a garden water feature, we've been able to pump out the basement from a 12 inches high down to just over an inch. We didn't have anything particularly vulnerable in the basement, but the boilers got knocked out which meant no heat or hot water for a few days.

Often when something goes wrong at home, I've been on the road - at least this time I was around. Not that I'm much use - I'm hopeless with handyman tasks so Cindy wears the power tools in the marriage. This time I was particularly useless as a few days ago I had surgery to take the pins out of my arm from the accident last summer, and my arm is still stiff and sore. But at least I could make tea and keep the internet connection alive.