Rain and floods

Hello everyone,
Last night we had the storm of all storms! I know we are in the rainy season, but I have not seen a storm like this since we have been here. It seemed like a hurricane, though I have never been in one of those, so I don’t really know if that’s a good comparison.

It all started as usual, with Kami pacing around, shaking, and panting, as she can detect the storms way before we hear the first sound of thunder. The sky had gotten dark, and I knew our daily storm was on its way. The kids and Bill had gone over to the office to make some copies, so it was just Kami and me. I was busy making the kids’ lunches for the next day, and didn’t think much about the storm. It started raining pretty hard, the wind was blowing hard, and I could hear thunder every few minutes (louder than usual), but I just went about my business, as this was really nothing too unusual. Kami was more agitated than usual, and would not leave my side, to the point of being a complete nuisance.

I came out of the kitchen, and saw glass all over the floor, in the entry way. I couldn’t figure out where it had come from. It appeared to be from a light bulb, which must have completely blown out from the vibration of the thunder. At first I thought perhaps we had been hit by lightning, but aside from the broken light bulb, I could find no evidence of that.

I went to get the vacuum to clean up the glass, and as I passed our office, I saw standing water all over the floor, and more water pouring in from the closed windows. I know I’ve written before that we have a problem with our windows leaking, but we have never had a problem with it in this particular room, and never has there been this much water.

I didn’t know what to do first—vacuum up the glass or stop the flooding water. As I went to grab a few towels, I saw that we had water pouring out of just about every window in the house! I had floods in nearly every room—rooms that we had never had a problem with in the past. I quickly grabbed every available towel (forgot about the broken glass), and started trying to mop up the mess. I was fighting a losing battle. It was still pouring outside, and water continued to stream through the windows inside. As fast as I could get towels down, they were soaked almost instantly. I put towels on the window sills to try to stop the water from coming in, but it just soaked through the towels, and continued to stream down the walls onto the floor. I just kept going from room to room, trying to clean up the best I could.

Kami was no help at all. In fact, she kept making things worse because she wanted to be as close to me as possible, which meant she was standing in all the water and on all the soaked towels. Then, she would walk away, and leave little, muddy footprints everywhere. And when I finally got around to cleaning up the broken light bulb glass, she kept walking through all of it so she could be close to me. She did not appear to get any glass in her paws though, so that was good.

By the time Bill and the kids got home, the storm had died down, and was mostly over. It had hailed over at the office, where they had been, which is just a couple of miles from our house. Bill was funny because he said, “Did you get much rain here?” I laughed as I took him around the house and showed him all the floods. I ended up using 20 towels to clean up all the mess. And these were all big, full sized towels or bath sheets. Some were beach/pool towels. Every one of them was completely soaked, to the point of dripping water all over the floor as I picked them up. I am still washing them as I write this. I had to get some washed quickly yesterday, so that we would have clean towels for our showers today!

Well, this blog entry was supposed to be about a field trip that I took with the kids, but I thought the storm and floods would be fun to read about. I’ll write the entry about the field trip in the next few days. Hope everyone is dry over there! Although, AZ could really use rain like this! Bye for now!

Laurie