Rain, Rain, Go Away

Image of a street in Charlotte this morning. 

In case you can't tell, that is an almost completely submerged car that you are seeing...

I am actually quite thankful for the rain, we have been in a drought for some time, so several days of rain is much needed.

However, this morning, we woke up to having big puddles on our dining room floor where the rain had made its way through the window. It evidently rained so hard last night that it found a way in. So before leaving for work, we were frantically mopping up water and laying fresh towels out in case it rains some more. Now we question whether we need to go ahead and replace our windows (which we don't have time to do right now) or just wait and hope more big storms don't come through.

Then on the way to work this morning, we heard on the traffic report that 2 of the major roads (Monroe and Independence) we use to come into town were closed due to flooding. So we wandered as far as we could through neighborhoods to avoid most of Randolph (which we figured would be pretty bottle necked).

There was one section of neighborhood road closed due to flooding, but we found a way around it. Then we wandered through Grier Heights before coming out at Randolph right where there was a creek. Amazingly the creek was not yet flooded over the road, but it was significantly above its banks and flooding the areas next to it.

If we get any more major rain, I wonder if we will be stuck downtown since all major roads leaving downtown seem to cross creeks.

We received 2 phone calls on the way in, one from one of Daniel's co-workers who had gotten lost trying to find a way through neighborhoods and another from Daniel's dad who said that the news was reporting that we received 10 inches of rain last night!

Our meandering through neighborhoods was a good choice because it only took us 35 minutes to get to work and so far, I am the only person who is here from my department and there didn't seem to be a lot of people at LandDesign when I dropped Daniel off.

Update: It took most of my co-workers who lived in a similar area of town as me close to 2 hours to get to work this morning due to all of the road closures because of flooding.

It's Raining!

I am so excited about the rain. Rain is one of my favorite things and we have had way too little of it over the past year and a half. This rain was an all-out, hit save repeatedly on your computer, kind of thunderstorm. I love hearing a hard rain pound on the roof at work, interspersed with loud claps of thunder. If it had not been lightening so much when I left work, I might have taken my time getting to the car and enjoyed the soaking downpour... I will have to save that for another time.

This past weekend, we had a really good visit to Arkansas. The drive makes it hard - 12+ hours in a car is not the most pleasant experience. The only thing that could have made the trip better would have been for Mark to be there.

While there, we did an early celebration of my dad's 60th birthday. Angela and I also took the opportunity to take mom out for pedicures as a belated birthday present to her. It was nice just visiting and hanging out. Of course we also managed to play some scrabble and dominoes - Robert and Daniel were good sports in playing with the family (at least we didn't make them play pinochle).