Unruly Weather

It's Monday morning and I need to get myself to school, but thinking about last Saturday night is more fun. We weren't at a party or dancing downtown - you don't go downtown while the Austin City Limits  Music Festival is going on unless you savor driving alongside the inebriated and the out-of-town inebriated - we were spending the night sleeping off and on, directly under a storm cell that dumped up to a foot of rain in our area. It's been a long, long time since we've had a wild storm like that, with the near-simultaneous lightning and thunder, and the windows rattling in their casements.

In the morning our rain gauge was topped out at five inches, but we felt a whole lot more than that had fallen. The photo above shows a trash can outside the garage. By late afternoon, there was official confirmation that just over twelve inches had fallen close to our neighborhood. Zowie.

The French drain we'd installed a couple of years ago had done its job shooting water away from the foundation -

but the front and side yards were still a bog. Looks like we could do a bit more work in the drainage department.

There's nothing like a saturated Sunday to inspire sheer laziness, and I'm almost ashamed to admit I didn't venture out to take pictures till very late in the afternoon. I would have walked with Floyd and Travis to the greenbelt, where the creek was, well, you can only imagine; but my bad foot doesn't like to wear my rain boots for that much of a hike. I should have gone anyway. This is how our nearest entry to the greenbelt was greeting visitors:

The rush of water down the storm drain was torrential even fifteen hours after the storm. Around town, the usual assortment of dumb moves and sad stories were taking place, with people driving into low water crossings and standing shin-deep in their living rooms. Considering how many visitors were in town, I believe there were far fewer tragedies than such weather has brought about in the past. Credit must go to a bombardment of "Turn Around, Don't Drown" PSA's reminding people that just a few inches of water can sweep even your great big SUV hurtling to a bad downstream end.

Across the street, Travis and I surveyed one of his favorite "fetch" areas, where just the day before we'd had a good game:

I was relieved that the neighborhood's retention ponds were doing their job. In the lowest part of the 'hood, the management offices and the grounds surrounding them sustained quite a bit of damage when the creek came hurling through.

The drought has been so horrible that none of us dare complain, although the fact that more rain is forecast through this coming week is a bit nervous-making. I don't mean to get all egocentric or anything, but I did sign us up for a roof replacement a few weeks ago. I told Floyd I am really going to put my foot down with the roofers and refuse to let them start until things have really dried out. No matter how okay they are likely to say it is, putting a layer of metal onto a damp roof is a recipe for disaster in my humble layperson's opinion.

Think we'll be having a new roof by Christmas?