Don, do you have room and the slope to dig a French drain? Down here they're a popular way of moving water away from building and places where it collects and stands. Fill it with gravel and it can even grow turf over the top again. Sometimes there is bottom half-piece of PVC buried under the gravel. I've put a couple of small trenches in in my back yard to keep water from my back door.

Adjusting to this alternate day fasting means not tempting myself with too many favorite snacks around the house. I shopped today and did a good job of keeping it to meat and vegetables and materials needed for making pickles (since my cucumber crop is beginning to come in.) Admitting that you're eating too much sugar and getting off of it is always a challenge, but it feels good now to stick to healthier foods. Weight loss is minimal right now but the improving cooler weather and amount of yard work awaiting my attention guarantee a lot more exercise soon.

Meanwhile indoors the dog hair is forming drifts again so it's time to sweep and vacuum. And on the dog front, I spoke with my next door neighbor this morning - the dogs now quietly wait for him to go out into his back yard in the morning. Pepper has responded to the training collar and figured out that her barks are what cause the shock. The command she gets in the house (like when I'm going out the door and she barks at me) is "quiet" and if she still barks, the shock. So she knows what the shock means when she's out at the back fence watching for Cecil. Now we're working on stopping the jumping around at feeding time when I tell her "sit" and she doesn't stay still. She sets right down when the small shock is offered. After I'm satisfied that those commands are learned, Cookie will get a go at the collar for a couple of her problem behaviors. It was expensive, and I took time to read up about how using it correctly for training before I deployed it. I had to modify some of my behavior also, it wasn't just Pepper. We're all much happier without Pepper barking from the crack of dawn, and I think she is also. She's more relaxed when she waits for the morning treat from across the fence, it's like we turned off, or at least toned down, an anxiety thing in her brain that was there out of habit. My change to help with this is to get up very early to feed them, so if she was complaining because she was hungry, now she had turned that attention to me and she's at my bedroom door promptly at 6:30 when the alarm goes off. I hear a single "scratch" at the door telling me she's there waiting (not barking).