Good idea, bad idea.

[reynardo]

You pick up your husband from the station, and the rainclouds gathering are doing things like having rotating wall clouds, and almost black sections, and greenish light that means no good.

Good idea: Once home, you put the picnic rugs over the car because there's going to be some nasty weather and you don't want the car to get hail damage.

Bad idea: Holding those blankets down by shutting their edges in the car doors.

And why is that a bad idea?

Because when the rain buckets down in an almost-horizontal fasion, the water hits the blanket and then makes its way through the fabric.

And drips down...

Inside the car...

Puddling on the floor under the front passenger seat. An inch of water. Just sitting there.

Not to mention water on the seats, front and back.

Dammit.

So I've sopped up as much as I can, and removed the car mats, and now the car is sitting with a fan heater inside it and two windows open an inch to let out the damp air, and I'm hoping I can get that dried before it starts smelling.

Dammit.

Comments

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

Kitty litter.

Get a bag of old-fashioned non-clumping [*] clay kitty litter, scatter it on the damp floorboards, leave it overnight, vacuum up with a wet-dry vac, repeat every couple of days. Scented is okay if you can stand the perfume in it.

[*] Don't use the clumping kind, it absorbs too much liquid, gets soft, and then hardens into a concrete-like substance that will never come off of anything. Don't ask me how I know this.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Awesome! * Adds "Kitty Litter" to the top of the shopping list. *

[dogorcuton.livejournal.com]

I ended up with the stuff that smells like wood shavings. It's slathered in there right now.

[malada.livejournal.com]

For a while we called our old Nissan Sentra "The Pickle Car" because of a long forgotten jar of pickles under the driver's seat... that had a slightly loose lid... and got tipped over.

It's not the same as an inch of water but I thought you'd get a chuckle out of it.

-m

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

*snerk* Totally :-}

I booked out the College car one day in the Blue Mountains. As I backed it out, something rolled out from under the back seat.

It was a small carton of cream, bloated so that its cube had become almost spherical. It had been there apparently about a week. I was rather glad I discovered it before it exploded...

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

I had a cup of yogurt explode under the seat of the Goldsmobile once.
I got most of it out eventually, and after a couple of summers it stopped smelling strange in hot weather.

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

We've recently developed a leak in the car and if we don't remember to put towels in the right spot, we get quite a bit in the cabin - a while ago we had a rainstorm followed by a hot day and so instead of the water evaporating, it turned to mildew - and then I couldn't drive the car because it really affects me.

Solution was a thorough interior steam cleaning to kill all the spores and freshen it up. Not cheap but it worked a treat - something to file away, in case it gets hot before your car has dried out (although the forecast for this week suggests you'll be fine).

[moxie_man]

It could have been a lot worse. Instead of dealing with water in the car, you could be dealing with your possessions scattered over several kilometers of the landscape mixed with the remains of your house after that storm dropped a tornado on top of you.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I will admit I watched those bloody clouds carefully, but they were travelling due east, and to the north and south of me.

I was just rather stunned at being able to see the rotations so easily.

[moxie_man]

Been there done that...but a bit more nervously. Standing there in an open field with a small camper converted into a radiosonde launch/tracking trailer. Nearest building is about 300 meters away--a test building for the school's wind engineering department, whose dream is to have it demolished in a tornado 'cause of all the data the instruments in it would collect as it's destroyed.

Between me and said building is an instrument tower with various weather instruments including an "old fashion" cup anemometer. Large, very black, ominous supercell thunderstorm nearly overhead which very clear rotation.

Anemometer starts to slow down...then reverses it's spin for a while...starts to slow down and moves in correct direction...reverse...correct...reverse (twitch).

The three of us out there that day debated if it was worth trying to make a run for the building. We figured if something dropped on us we didn't have a chance anyway. Obviously, nothing did.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

I first read this and thought ... ohhh. Then I realised that the only way to get the Anemometer to run backwards would be to have something spinning right... on ... top...

Um, Moxie? I am very glad you're here now to be able to post that. I can see why you didn't run.

Would just lying flat on the ground with your hands over your head be any use if a funnel dropped?