Crazy Times

Okay, so I promise to do a full beach recap soon (not that you care terribly, but I just can't wait to brag about the cutest nephew ever), but I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the night we had last night.

The forecasters had been calling for rain all day, and there was a good chance that some of the storms would be severe. Not really a big deal, I actually quite like thunderstorms, so when the storm started around ten Darrell and I stayed up for a little bit to watch it. We even got to watch our street turn into a river from the volume of water that fell in a super short period of time. Kinda cool in theory, but not cool when you realize that all that water has to go somewhere, and usually it's either into people's basements (thankfully not ours; having a split-level has been awesome for that), or downriver to communities that are already battling massive flooding issues. After confirming that we weren't at much of a risk for any tornadoes, we headed to bed. Ten minutes later, we lost power. Again, not a huge deal. We both use our cell phones for alarms, we don't have anything "crucial" that was plugged in, and since the whole neighborhood was out we figured the crews would be working on it and we'd have power back up in no time. So, we settled in to go to sleep (in, I might add, the quietest house ever). Half an hour later, Darrell gets an auto-text from his office. Because he's a supervisor, he's instantly alerted anytime that a weather warning goes out for the county where he works (which, unfortunately, is not the county we live in, but they're super close). The text? Code black. Awesome. Granted, the area where the Code Black was coming from was probably a good twenty miles north of us, so we probably weren't in any direct tornado risk, but still. It was enough to rattle our nerves--and since the power was still out we couldn't turn the radio or computer on or anything to see what our risk was (I do have a laptop, but the battery lasts for 6.2 minutes before crapping out when it's not plugged in. The thing is ancient). Since we have all of our un-needed furniture in storage in our unfinished basement, including a twin bed mattress set, we decided to be overly cautious and pull the mattress under the stairs and sleep there, at least for awhile. Thankfully, about an hour later, I heard the power come back on, so I decided to flip on my computer and see where the storm was at. I really wish that I had had the foresight to take a picture, because when I pulled up the radar, it was solid red and yellow, with green to fill in all the gaps. Thankfully, the bulk of the storm had moved past us, and our only remaining threat was for flash flooding, which we certainly weren't going to worry about at midnight, especially since the power was back on and our sump pump would run if it needed to. So I roused Darrell and back into bed we went--thankfully to stay.

The official verdict this morning was that we got around two inches of rain last night--and the bulk of it fell in a thirty-minute time period. And to make the water situation worse, we have another 80% chance of severe storms again today, with the possibility of another two inches of rain. Kinda the last thing some people in this area need--but the stuff people in Arizona are praying desperately for. Let's hope Mother Nature gets her stuff figured out soon.