Tag: rain

Life

Damn Weather

Karen

Oh. My. Freakin’. Gosh.

What the hell is going on with our weather? Excuse my profanity (trust me, I’m holding myself back here), but seriously, WTH? We received three more inches of rain last night. I’ve heard thunder rumbling the heavens for 48-straight hours now. If you watch our radar? Ugly little green blobs keep REFORMING, just one on top of each other and right over Springfield.

HELLO?! *knocks on heaven* It’s now officially summer. Could we please have some summer-type weather? I mean seriously, what is up with this cool, moist air? Do you NOT realize that I just paid $50 on swim coupons and that I only have until August 17th to use them? That works out to 10 swims for me and the kids – 10. And if this stupid weather continues it’s spring-like behavior, I’ll be lucky to MAKE three trips, let alone 10. Which means I won’t be able to cash in those coupons … and that money will be wasted because the coupons are only good for this summer only …

And we all know how CRANKY I get when I pay for something and then don’t get my money’s worth. *major, scary growl*

I seriously need to stop watching radar because it’s seriously pissing me off. Want to know what I’m talking about? Go to Accuweather.com or weather.com, plug in Springfield Missouri and just WATCH the radar – you’ll see what I mean! It’s maddening to get my hopes up because things LOOK like they are clearing away, only to check it ten minutes later and WTH, where did that angry green and red blob come from?!? And … and … is that *gasp* THUNDER I hear in the distance … AGAIN?!

AARGH!

And yet … and yet … I sort of HAVE to watch the weather right now. Why? Because we’re leaving for Washington D.C. tomorrow and I have a schedule, a touring strategy, that MUST be adhered to because God forbid I have to rearrange our sight-seeing schedule.

Here’s our TENTATIVE touring schedule:

Saturday: Arrive in late afternoon (to isolated t-storms – OF COURSE!). Settle into hotel room, hunt down a grocery store and stock up on breakfast and lunch foods to put into our kitchenette. Get our bearings, recoup from traveling all day.

Sunday: Go to Arlington Cemetery at 8:00 a.m. (the earlier we arrive at these places, the less likely we’ll have to wade through a sea of touring bodies). Tour the cemetery for about two hours. Cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge (and this is assuming pedestrians can cross the bridge, if not, we’ll take the Metro) to the Lincoln Memorial, then the Vietnam Veteran Memorial, then stop somewhere for lunch (hopefully we’ll find someplace cheap), see the Washington Memorial and the White House, head back to our hotel room. Notice that Sunday will be spent all day outside – there is a 40% chance of rain Sunday, so I’m thinking I may have to shuffle some days around here.

Monday: Get in line at 8:00 a.m. at the Bureau of Engraving and nab tickets for a tour between 5 – 7 p.m. (The Bureau of Engraving only holds tours in the morning and evenings and if you don’t grab a time ticket, you don’t get in). After we get our tickets, head over to the National Air & Space Museum and spend a few hours there. Go back to hotel room, have lunch, rest up and go back to Bureau of Engraving for our evening tour.

Tuesday: Sleep in. Go to National Museum of Natural History at 10:00 a.m. Spend a few hours touring the place and then go to the Old Poll Office Tower to see the tower and have lunch. After lunch, to go the International Spy Museum (because I will most likely reserve some 3:35 tickets and we’ll need to go at that time).

Wednesday: Sleep in. Go back to the National Air and Space Museum (because apparently this place is huge and this is the ONE place my husband really wants to spend time at so I want to make sure we see everything) and spend a few more hours. Then head out to the National Geographic place because I think the boys would really enjoy walking through the exhibits.

Thursday: Is open. We only have the morning to do something as our flight takes off in the afternoon. So we might not really get to do anything other than check out and head to the airport, but we’ll see how it works out.

Friday: Unpack, do laundry, catch up on email/blog/sleep.

We actually have quite a few gaps between exhibits that we can probably squeeze in some other stuff, but I don’t want to make this trip TOO taxing so we might just head back to our hotel and veg by the pool. We’ll see.

This is a tentative schedule, of course. I’m not as rigid as I make myself out to be. But I do like to have some sort of tentative plan so we’re not running around, bumping into each other, like the three four stooges and saying, “What should we do now? Where should we go now?”

I hate that. It’s such a waste of time.

I’ll be spending the majority of today cleaning house, running errands (must remember to take movies back to Blockbuster – hate late fees), doing laundry, emptying camera cards and making sure all cameras (we’re taking FOUR! Our Canon, Powershot, Pentax [I use that one to shoot short videos] and our video camera) are fully charged and have extra batteries, and of course, packing. I used to get so carried away with the clothes but HELLO, most places have a washer and dryer somewhere and it’s just so much easier to throw a load of laundry in as opposed to lugging around extra clothing. As long as I remember something nice to wear to dinner and our swimsuits, we can wear the same pairs of shorts and t-shirts all week (that sounds gross, but you know what I mean).

Uh oh, I just checked our hotel’s amenities – it doesn’t list laundry options. This could be bad. Oh well, I can’t worry about that right now *makes a dismissive gesture*.

I plan on blogging our adventures. I have a few blog entries set to pre-post, but I’m apologizing in advance now because posts might be a bit sporadic this week and will most likely not appear until the evening when we’ve stumbled gotten back to our hotel room for the night.

I’m really looking forward to our trip! I’m NOT looking forward to our flight. Though I’m not exactly afraid of flying, it’s not something I would choose to do on a regular basis. We’re flying out of Springfield, which is always sort of an iffy venture because we’re a small airport and things inevitably get delayed (mostly due to equipment problems, but we won’t dwell on that).

Oh look, it’s pouring rain again.

Damn weather. We’re going on vacation, PLAY NICE, will ya?

______________________________

null

Monday Stuff

Weekend Snapshot(s) – Flooded

Karen

null
Share your weekend snapshot.

When it rains, it pours …

And how true that was for us this past Friday.

We had a low develop right over Springfield so that we had a line of storms continously pass over us for nearly 24 straight hours. Just when the storms looked like they were going to dissipate, they gathered strength and reformed and it continued to pummel us all day. As a result? Our city flooded, including us.

I had to battle the storms to pick up my nephews. I had promised them they could come over and spend the night, come rain and high water.

I had no idea the heavens would take me quite so literally.

The boys and I set out around 10:30. We had to go all the way to Willard, which is about a thirty minute drive from our house. I drove almost the entire way with my windshield wipers at full blast and still couldn’t see that well.

The rain let up a bit as we drew closer to their house, but we saw a wicked streak of lightening directly in front of us and it was within a mile – a bit too close for comfort.

The thunder rocked my car.

As we drove into the driveway and I got out to help my nephews put their stuff in my car, another bout of lightening zapped so close to me, I heard the sizzle/crackle as it made contact. Split seconds later, I remember thinking, “Shit. I’m standing under a tree with an umbrella. I’m a human lightning rod.”

The thunder was so loud I couldn’t hear for thirty minutes afterward. And my heart was pumping so hard I felt light-headed. It was that scary.

We all made it back to our house safely, but the rain continued to fall in heavy sheets. I began to get nervous when I noticed standing water, about six inches deep, all around our house. Even though my husband had had the foresight to dig out vent wells, I was afraid there was so much water it would go over those vent wells.

It did.

When the worst of the storm finally moved past us, I went outside to take some pictures. I was SHOCKED to see the amount of water gushing down our streets.

This was our neighbor’s driveway.

Neighbor's driveway

It’s a good thing they didn’t try to come home during this time period or they might have been swept from their own driveway.

The water traveled around the corner and entered a huge pipe. The pipe goes under our street and exits in this large drainage system.

Water Drainage 1

This drainage system is about four feet deep. As you can see, we got VERY CLOSE to flooding our ditch, which would have been BAD NEWS for the houses lining that ditch. In fact, you can tell it was already starting to saturate another one of our neighbor’s yard.

Water Drainage 2

I actually took a video of this and will post that tomorrow. While filming, another streak of lightening zipped right over me and you can hear the deafening clap of thunder on the tape. I nearly had a heart attack and high-tailed it back to my house shortly after that.

It began raining pretty hard as soon as I reached my house. After discarding damp shoes and making sure the cameras were still dry, I walked to our bedroom to look out of our window to see how much rain we had gotten up to that point:

5 Inches of Rain

In case you can’t read that? It was FIVE INCHES. Of rain. In less than 12 hours.

I thought we had broken a record, but after talking to my parents yesterday, they told me that back in 1999 we had gotten EIGHT INCHES of rain. Their backyard and storage shed flooded and they had just moved to town and a lot of their belongings had gotten soaked. We must not have gotten as much rain over here or I would have remembered it but I can guarantee I’ll remember June 13, 2008 when we received five inches of rain and had to put fans in our crawl space to dry it out.

Getting this much rain this fast is pretty unusual for this area. I was pretty stressed about water making it under our house (and washing away the new driveway we just had REPAVED the day before – luckily, it held up pretty well and we’ve packed some dirt around it to try and prevent any more water getting underneath it), but any damage we sustained was NOTHING compared to some areas of our city.

You can see photos here, if you wish.