Always place your house on a local maximum.

When you're in a building kind of mood, just look for a spot where R dot grad(field) = 0, where R is a vector pointing from wherever you are to the center of the earth. Cheating by making a hill first and then putting a house on it is allowed.

I'm up on the high part of a plateau, but next to my yard is a pasture that's at a little higher elevation still. Before now, I'd never really noticed how the whole pasture is shapped like half of a funnel with the spout aimed at the edge of my yard. With the drought this year, the horses hadn't left much of anything that has roots and the recent heavy rainfall swept what seems like the entire surface of said pasture (including, mostly, material that had already pased through the hourses) down the spout and onto my yard.

Call it "free fertilizer"...maybe even a couple of feet thick in some areas. It might not look too decorative right now, but check back next spring. I'm not sure what'll sprout up just of its own accord next year, since it looks like somebody's vegetable garden also got swept up by the rain, carried who-knows-how-far, and wound up mixed in with the former surface layers of the horse pasture.

The waters did steer clear of my house, as it happens, but they did sweep through the south gardens. That's going to be interesting to clean up. Or, I suppose, the plants can all just grow a little taller next year. That's not too much to ask.